The world had ended.
Well…
There was still land.
And water.
And some animals. The ugly ones nobody liked much.
And a lot of the tougher and more fiendish plants.
There were people, too. Just fewer of them.
The world had ended, but luckily nothing mattered.
Jackie was running, running across a desolate hellscape scorched with radiation burns and pursued by cannibal fiends. However, nothing mattered, and so instead she was being chased across a relatively boring overgrown meadow, and both she and her pursuers – all of them distressingly average-but-fit people in battered clothes and calloused skins – kept tripping and stumbling over vegetative hummocks.
“Hmmf. Shit,” said someone.
Something rustled at the treeline, and with the reflexes of a snake Jackie whipped out her scrap crossbow and sent a shredder-bolt straight into the heart of a drooling mutant. Nothing mattered however, and so instead she missed the normal if somewhat scrawny white-tailed deer by a yard with her distressingly plain arrow.
“Fuck!” she yelled.
The animal took off.
“Missed?”
“Missed.”
“Shit.”
That night they returned in shame to the pit-palace of Big Uncle, the murder-king of the slaughterpalz, in his circle of carnage.
“TRIAL BY COMBAT REDEEMS,” hollered the ten-foot tower of steel and meaty leather, as the ceremonial murderstickers were thrown into the blood-stained sand at their feet.
Except none of that mattered and actually her name was Belinda and she was more or less in charge of just the farm. Because she knew how to run the farm. They all went over to her firepit and ate some vegetables.
“Well, shit” they said. And they sat there like mooks.
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Shit.”
Tomorrow was another day. Tomorrow was another chance to find themselves, to face their own inner demons, to learn to live for more than just staying alive in the highly metaphorical teeth of the extremely literal apocalypse. They would venture deep inside the rusting hulks of the Old Dead Age, to bring back offerings of teknowlegend. The fire-speakers, the thunder-makers, and maybe even find a functional wheel-dragon to fend off the Darklanders when the season of blood began in its storm-clouded earnest.
That could’ve happened, but nothing mattered and instead they went looking for deer again through the old suburban sprawl, where they spooked one that was resting in the remnants of what could’ve been someone’s deck years ago.
This time Jackie was paying closer attention and her shot hit the deer. Unfortunately, it missed anything useful and it scarpered uphill onto the freeway.
“Up?”
“Up.”
“Shit.”
They were hunting for their dinner. The deer was hunting for a way to live. The motivations just didn’t match, and so it was that Jackie and her comrades spent a good three hours following a tiny blood trail over increasingly large obstacles until at last they found where it had gone to ground: an old world tomb-vault, the bunkers where the big moneymen had lived out their final days in purest decadent splendor before their supplies ran low and their tempers ran hot.
Nothing mattered, so it was basically a big estate with some defunct fencing. Pretty overgrown.
Panting atop the perimeter wall lay the deer, stuck in the effort of leaping it, lathered and exhausted.
“I’ll shoot it.”
“You’ll shoot it?”
Jackie shot at it, and her shot sunk straight and true into its head, killing it instantly and dropping it over the other side of the wall and into a half-eroded culvert which whisked it away.
“Shit!”
They ran down the old river, knives between their teeth. This was Cackler territory, and they had to be out by sundown if they wanted to leave with their tongues and teeth. Neo-crocs squirmed under the water – the bloated giant newts of the far past resurrected into the future. The sun was setting, and the deadwinds were starting to roar up from the Burned South.
Nothing mattered, however, and instead of any of that at all they trudged downstream for an hour until they found the deer being hauled out of the culvert towards an abandoned gas station by a large feral dog.
“Gun?”
“Gun.”
“Shit.”
The emergency pistol was possessed of one virtue and that was sturdiness and Jackie pulled it from her pack and aimed it and – possibly still compensating for her poor bowshots earlier – successfully put three shots all to the dog’s immediate right, directly into a large and colourfully red-hued gas tank.
Mercifully (as nothing mattered) the old canister dented under the bullets and refused to explode. Instead the force of the gunshots triggered a small avalanche of distressingly heavy yet dull chunks of cement which toppled directly at Jackie. She dodged under the hail of debris with lightning speed but nothing mattered and instead she found herself still standing bolt upright and letting it bounce off her face.
“AH! OW! FUCK!” she yelled. “JESUSSHIT AUGH owoowww.”
They dug her out and brought her home, where she stayed in bed for a week with a bad headache.
A few days after that she died from bizarre complications of an undetected internal hemorrhage.
Two years later the rains never came. Half the community starved and the other half wandered north in search of somewhere less sunny.
None of it mattered.