I looked up to see the door of the craft and the runway at least thirty feet above my head. I ground my teeth and sat myself on the floor, pulling on my hair. You just ruined everything, you stupid bastard. I was rocking back and forth and grinding my teeth. I'd ruined my whole life, I'd destroyed my chance to ever see my wife grow old or my children graduate. It was all over, I was out of time. Nothing mattered anymore. Not that I thought that it was going to help, but I just sat there on my knees, bashing my head and my fists into the floor over and over again. There were countdowns occurring in the background that barely registered. I didn't care. I felt completely ripped apart. If I got caught in the exhaust or the flame or whatever it was that would come out of this spacecraft, at least I'd be dead. There'd be no ambiguity to my family. They wouldn't be left to worry or wonder if I made it out of the building, if I was going to find another way to Élan.

The heat that was coming from the craft comforted me at first, made me feel less alone until I started to hear another voice in my head, one stronger than the others.

"Ackerman, if you don't pick yourself up you're throwing your life away. You think every mistake that you make is completely world ending, you don't care. Aren't you thinking about anyone else but yourself? Do you want Lara and your girls to see you dead through their own god damned window? Is that how you want them to remember you?" The voice belonged to Croft, there was no disputing that. I knew he wasn't there, but his words hit me just the same.

Just like that time when he'd told me those exact words, I looked at my hands, bloodied, bruised and balled up into white knuckled fists. I felt the anger in my chest fall out as I took a deep breath, held it in for as long as I could before my lungs began to burn, and let it go. I released the fists that my hands were folded into and set them palm first on the concrete. "Let's go, Shay." I thought I felt Croft's hand on my shoulder. I looked over my shoulder, there was an image of my last good friend that wavered and glitched every few seconds. "What're you waiting for you bird-headed bastard, you want to get burnt to a crisp?"
That sounded so much like Croft it hurt.

Slowly I rose to my feet again and looked up at the runway, there was a stairway about thirty feet from the end of the runway, thirty feet away from me. I took another deep breath and shoved my hands into my pockets. I pulled a cigarette out of the pack I had in my jacket and was about to light it before I was reminded of the jet fuel filling the room. I held my lighter in my hand and scuffed my feet toward the stairway. I didn't feel any better, everything that went through my head was filled with self loathing and negativity, but at the very least I was on my feet.

I reached the stairs and slowly ventured up, watching as the sheet in the ceiling folded open to show the sky above. When it opened all the way the jets in the craft started to whistle and scream as it prepared to take off. I quickened my pace and slipped out of the room, lingering in the doorway to watch my family leave me. The screaming continued to get louder, eventually the craft lifted two feet off the ground. Then ten. Twenty. Forty. Eighty. It was out of the building, my eyes were glued to it.

"I'm so sorry, Lara, Anwen, Ailsa... I really let you all down this time."

I closed my eyes, blinking back any potential display of emotion and turned away. In silence, completely deafening silence I retreated down the hall that led to the outside again. About twenty feet from the door a screen caught my eyes. On it I saw a list of names, some of which were stroked out and others that weren't. There were hundreds of names, big lines bolded out in text, the names beneath the strokes were almost impossible to read. But I found ours. Ackerman Ailsa, Ackerman, Anwen, Ackerman Lara all stroked out. After, not stroked out, Ackerman Shay and in the middle of my family's names was another unstroked name. Ackerman Damian.

What did Damian get himself into? Why isn't he... the worry that crashed down on my chest made me nauseous. I turned away from the screen and hurried down the halls to get outside the building. Damian's house was close, he was just in St. James's. It couldn't have been more than a twenty minute walk on a good day. But today wasn't a good day, and I couldn't wait twenty minutes. So I stayed in the building and searched for a Rover that I could ride out. The ones in a building like this one would have hovertech.

In an empty store closet I found a rover that looked like it was well on its way to being completely busted. I gave it a quick scan and looked for the engine switch. These newer models were awful, hiding the switches that kept moving every so often. Pain in the ass.

When I found the switch I flicked it on and the engine hummed to life. A sigh of relief escaped my lungs and I hopped onto the rover.The gas switch got pounded in and the front door forced open.

"Damian, you son of a bitch what happened?" I shook my head, not sure if I was angry or terrified or some combination of both.

The Rover was screaming down London's streets in dangerous zigzagging motions. Shell after shell filled my ears with dangerous noise but there we no snipers. I figured that they were either hiding or sleeping or packing up to leave their posts. They didn't have reason to be there anymore. Those people were criminals from other nations, if I had to guess, they were German. If I recalled correctly it was the Germans who were occupying London, likely in an attempt to destroy the craft or steal it. Why they were really there I had no clue, but I could always assume.
Once I'd decided that the snipers weren't around, I stuck to as consistent a path as I could. Instead of veering constantly I only veered around craters too large for the hovertech to glide over. At a reasonable distance I could see the housing of St. James's.

The closer I got to Damian's house the sicker I felt. Something felt wrong, horribly wrong and I couldn't place what it was. Silently I willed the Rover to move faster, just wanting to prove to myself that there was nothing to worry about. Damian was fine. I just had to believe it.

I whizzed down the abandoned streets of St. James seeing unfamiliar house after unfamiliar house. It felt like it had been so long since I'd been to London, at first I feared I was in the wrong place. My Intuition and every other sense told me otherwise. I was born and raised in London. I knew the city better than I knew myself, I just had to calm down.

I pulled down the street Damian lived on and counted the house numbers as I passed them. The road wasn't too gutted up here, but in the windows of some of the houses I could see activity. It wasn't civilians. It was militant officers foraging for anything, everything that the people had left. The glass had been knocked out of the windows, the siding was falling off. The shingles were torn off in some places and the grass was overgrown.

This St. James was nothing like the St. James I'd loved fifteen years ago. I came to a stop out front of Lara and I's old house. The willow trees really had stopped growing, just like she'd said they had before we moved. The flowerbeds were raided, probably for people's loved ones in a frenzy to get out of the open. The windows had been blown out and the drive was cracked. The shed had a car driven into it, the roof of both structures caving in. Our front door was kicked in and laying on the entry floor. The drapes had been ripped down and from what I could see the furniture looked like it had been burnt.
I shook my head and pulled my eyes away, looking back out onto the road. I was close to Damian's I couldn't get caught up pissing around outside a house I hadn't owned in fifteen years. Eyes glued to the asphalt I started moving again, bracing myself for whatever I found, good, bad or ugly. Whatever it was couldn't be worse than anything before this, it was my brother.

The houses continued to blur by and for a moment I thought I was lost. But my eyes fell on it, I knew the house without a single doubt in the world. Down the far side it was burnt as were most of the houses down that side of the street. I could still smell the smoke from the fire in the air.
I hopped off the Rover and ran up to the house. The lawn was feet overgrown, the fire escape was ripped off the wall and the upper-floor exit had no door or landing. The roof on the burnt side was falling in, ash was flying out of the crevice. There were no lower floor windows through the five foot grass, the upper floor windows were painted black from the inside. Graffiti covered the outside walls with threats and aggressive do not enter messages.
All that was left to really recognize the place was the evergreen tree that was knocked over and crushing in the middle of the roof of my brother's house and the beige paint which was chipping off in some places and keyed off in others. The black shingles were pretty much everywhere, I figured there were more on the lawn than there was left on the roof.

I didn't have even a shred of doubt in my mind. This was it, this was the right house. The one I'd left him in, the one I'd helped him buy. He was still there, I could feel it.

This house was Damian's and it didn't look promising.

My legs were shaking a bit. I couldn't tell if they were shaking because I was afraid, or if they were shaking because I was hungry. At the end of the day it didn't matter all that much because I'd be able to solve either issue once I opened up that front door.

But something was holding me back.

I couldn't bring myself to turn the hot metal knob in my hand and push open the door. Instead I just stood, staring at the door hoping that someone inside would answer. And part of me didn't believe this house was Damian's. A forty-three year old man wouldn't live somewhere like this. It was obscene.

"Dane?" I tried to call for my little brother but my voice came out silent. I bit my lower lip and took a deep breath. Eyes closed, I turned the doorknob and pushed open the door.

The smell of cat shit was the first thing I noticed. I couldn't remember Dane having a cat, I hadn't seen him since the war started, but I doubted he'd have gotten a cat for wartime company. Nervously, I opened my eyes. The entry room was clean. He had papers and binders stacked up on his coffee table, the couch looked vacuumed. The floor was scratched up, that I blamed on the cat wherever it was.

When my eyes flicked up to the wall I had to lean up against the door frame to keep myself on my feet. "Dane!" I hollered, unable to pry my eyes from that wall. "Damian Alexander Ackerman, what have you done."

Scribbled all over the walls were the same three words. So many times they overlapped, intersected and formed these massive clusters of indecipherable nonsense.
Dying. Death. Dead.
Dying. Death. Dead.
Dying. Death. Dead.
Dying. Death. Dead.
Dying. Death. Dead.
Dying. Death. Dead.
Dying. Death. Dead.
Dying. Death. Dead.
Dying. Death. Dead.
Dying. Death. Dead.
Dying. Death. Dead.
Dying. Death. Dead.
DYING. DEATH. DEAD.
DYING. DYING. DYING.
DEATH. DEATH. KILL.
DEATH. DEATH.
DEAD. DEAD. KILLING.
DEAD.

"Dane!" I shouted at loud as my lungs would permit. "Where are you?" I stepped into the house and slammed the door shut behind me. The first place I looked was the kitchen.

It didn't matter what situation he was in, I knew my brother and he was no chicken shit. Wasn't a hiding kind of person. If someone was out to kill him, he'd sit back somewhere in the house and wait. Knowing him, he was painting or working on a novel.

He wouldn't hide if there were hit men, he wouldn't hide from snipers.

I gave the kitchen a three-over. No signs of anyone. The dishes were done, no food was out. It was all clean. The only thing I noticed that was odd there was a coffeemaker with a cup in it still steaming. When I saw my brother, who I'd begun to think had stress cleaned and was now flopped on his side in a ball on the floor somewhere hyperventilating, I'd drink that coffee. But until then, I'd hold off.

So even though my legs were shaking I continued through the house. I checked every room in the place except his room. I'd stopped calling him. I felt sick. Something was wrong. But I didn't know what it was.

Half of me wanted to kick that door down and figure it out. Half of me wanted to wait it out, mourn my wife and children despite me being the dead one. All of me wasn't ready for what was behind the door.

I took a few extra seconds and collected myself. Assured myself that with Damian, I'd seen it all. The last time you saw him he was better. I grasped the handle like the hand of a newborn baby, like I'd break it if I moved too much. Carefully I turned the doorknob and pushed open the last door to the last room in the house.

The room was a mess. There were shards of glass all over the floor, all of which had blood on the edges. The carpet was stained with blood and sweat. There were papers thrown everywhere, smashed canvases. The sheets had been thrown off the bed and were stuffed in the windowsill, blocking out any natural light. The internal fan and heater were ripped out of the ceiling and busted up on the bed. There was also broken lightbulbs on the bed, small shards of glass poked up from the mattress. The wall behind the bed was dented, some places had smooth craters while others had fist-like craters. Around the bed was more writing but it had piled up, words on top of words what looked like four or five times. There was no way I could read it anywhere except for one word. Cleanse.

Cleanse what?

Finally I looked behind me. Hanging from a rope tied to an old style cane that had been shoved through the ceiling was Damian. His face was purple from suffocation, his late daughter's stepping stool was kicked out from under him. I hit the floor heaving, getting my hands and shins full of glass shards. I don't know how many times I threw up before I passed out.

When I came to I had glass in my hands. It was in my face and my arms and my chest. I stayed where I was for a minute, foggy about what had happened. I glanced around the room, only to be hit by another wave of nausea.

My brother... he'd... he'd I tried not to over think it. I was aware of what he'd done, putting it into any form of words wasn't going to do any good.

"Did you leave anything for me, you bastard? A clue?" I whispered, shifting into a position on my shins so that I could pick the glass out of my skin.

Without any particular care I plucked the pieces of glass out of my face. The ones stuck further in my skin made the other side of my face scrunch up a few times, but I can't say at any point did the glass actually hurt. I didn't care why I didn't care that I wasn't in pain. I was out of people left to justify anything or everything to.

Eventually I had picked out all the glass. I pushed myself onto my feet and scuffed over to my brother. It was only right to cut him down, so I did, catching his rigger mortise'd body and leaning it against my shoulder so that I could clear off enough of his bed to lay him on. Just like when he was a little bugger, I pulled back the sheets exactly even, fluffed his pillow three times and laid him down. I brushed my little brother's overgrown hair out of his eyes, closed in such a peaceful way that it almost tricked me into thinking I really was just putting him to bed.

"You're a shithead, little brother." I sighed, scruffing his hair as I pulled up the blankets over his chest. And just as I would've with Anwen or Ailsa I gently tucked the blanket around his body and pretended to 'staple' him to the bed. My hands were poised about a foot above his chest and I lightly brought them down, pressing on his body a bit and making a ch-ch noise like a staple gun. "Sleep well."

I turned away from him to the rest of the room, looking for a note. A clue or an explanation. Anything. The room seemed unrealistically devoid of evidence. But it wasn't like him to do anything and not explain it.

Finally, on my way out the door, I spied it. Scratched into the wood of the desk in the far corner of the room was a note. To my surprise the note was written in the silly little language that he and I invented when we were younger.

/Shay, I knew you'd come looking for me. Something wasn't right. I can't explain it. I just finished cleaning the house. Hope I remember to make you coffee.
-- Anyway, if I'm not here you know who to look for. It's a jaunt, but something is fishy about these crafts.
08/08/

That date was... I thought for a minute. That was the day the bunker crashed. Two weeks ago, he'd been waiting here for me for two whole weeks. If it had been that long, there had to be another one. He wouldn't wait for me for two weeks without something else.

I backtracked through the house, scouring everything. The next note was under the couch, burnt into the flooring by what looked like it would've been a red-hot clothes hanger.

/I'm thinking you're dead, Shay. There was an announcement that the bunker over in your district, where you'd said you were crashed. But I could be wrong.
The snipers are bad. I've killed six within the last week. Hard to keep up.
08/12/

A week and a half ago. I was really starting to wonder if it would kill the guy to get a pen and paper. His writing wasn't exactly cutesy-girl neat. It was more year-two-boy-with-dyslexia. Still, at least it was legible. And following the pattern I was looking for a hidden place near furniture or something he used a lot, and it would be from the 16th. There would probably be two more, and the last one would be the least pleasant.

The next place I checked was the false panel behind his TV. No dice. I sauntered into the kitchen and tried the inner wall of the dishwasher. Also a no. The cutlery drawer had the 20th's note so I left it open but I didn't read it. I'd decided that I wanted to read them in order of events.

Finally I found it written in marker on the garbage compactor hidden under the sink.

/I figure you forgot about me. That's alright. I have a spare minute now, so I'll take the time to write. Sorry for the lack of creativity.
I think someone's broken into the house, Shay. There's writing all over the walls. Looks like mine but I didn't write it. And the stuff doesn't make any sense. Except, well maybe I did? Maybe I did write it, I've been dissociating almost 3 times a day for hell knows how long anymore for the last week at least.
All I can say for sure is it's freaking me out a bit. My bedroom walls used to have letters on them. Like this. But there's so many letters on top of each other I can't interpret them.
All I can read is //cleanse// so that's what I did. Everything. It's all been cleansed.
08/16/

I was chewing on my lip like a bit of flavoured rubber. A part of me was worried about what the last note said. The rest of me knew I wouldn't forgive myself if I didn't know what it said. So I clenched my fists, took a few deep breaths and went back to the cutlery drawer to read the last note.

/I can feel it. You aren't dead, are you Shay? They evacuated my neighbourhood today, deemed it "unsafe" for civilized life.//My house got full of drones, I beat most of them to scrap metal with my hands since I put my last good bat to a sniper who tried to hole up in here.
I don't trust those crafts, Shay. You get on it and you owe them. The government, they destroyed one planet who's to say they won't destroy another, and we'll be left to pay the price. Whatever that price might be. But my guess? They still thinks of us as nothing but an expendable force for them to throw into petty mindless combat.
I'm not getting on that craft, even if those drones kill me. And with my luck they'll try.
08/20/

I sighed and rubbed my nose. Where were those drone parts? If I could find them I might make sense of what happened here. The first place I checked was a garbage compactor. The only thing left uncrushed was one red drone eye, staring up at my like it was still active. I shook my head and closed the compactor, rubbing my eyes.

"Twenty-five years ago what would you have done?" I asked myself quietly, rubbing my nose. Twenty-five years ago I'd have gone back in the notes and checked for a code. That wouldn't help, so instead I went to the walls. His dissociated self had to know something, have some kind of intuition.