Part 1

He used to be the type of man who saw every pair of sunburned buttcheeks on the beach as a missed opporunity. The missed opportunity was that he didn’t get to kneed his lotion soaked hands on the posterior of a potentially primo pretty lady who could help him spend time the way he wanted to on this god-forsaken planet. Like everyone else, Chad had to adapt to survive. 

After the towers fell and the oceans rose, there was almost nothing left of what life used to be like for the survivors of planet Earth in the Year of Our Dead Lord 2050. Less had changed in the department of technological advancements than had been previously predicted. The robots to act as sex bots and the reclining chairs that massaged your muscles while intravenously dripping dopamine and serotonin into your body had been a bust. Nature had played a role in throwing a tire spike in front of the vehicle of modern man’s rage-filled raping of all things natural in the pursuit of a single hedonistic goal: ease. The oceans rose after the icebergs melted and the release of the new pair of sheepskin lined boots that walked for you while sending your physical location and your emotional state, in the form of an emoticon, out to your network of friends via bluetooth had to be put on indefinite hold. Humankind had played a role by some hardcore self-sabatoging, of course. As most humans on the planet began to pick up their lives and lifestyles and turn them over and examine them with the curious, objective, and inspired precision of a young geologist, things began to change. It seemed that everyone was examining the cold why of why we do things the way we do things on planet Earth, and then things began to change by the very method that changes all things: perspective. Finally, the concept of borders to countries themselves were under the collective microscope of humanity. Why the river marks a different way of living for the humans on the other side began being examined with very fervent passion. The concept of potential one-worldism had been met with open arms by most, but the secret groups who were full of fear of their fellow man had stockpiled weapons while being silent until they could strike. Their contribution to the collective group of humanity had been various acts of what the money heavy media designated as terrorism. Cyanide in cities’ water systems. Viruses in banks’ mainframes. EMPs set up and deployed coasts to coasts. Sugar in gas tanks. Salt in the earth. Their message had been clear and final when they finally made a move. They were simply not interested in living on planet Earth if there was going to be other people on the planet with them. So then nobody had nice things. 

She was a nihilist, not because she had to be, but because she had thought her way to beninality by reading for so much of her life that it had become the only obvious option for her life. Her time worshipping the works of Marcus Aurelius after being forced to worship Jesus Christ had left its mark, and she was done changing herself to make the other dumb fucking humans more comfortable. Luckily for her, there weren’t very many humans left on planet Earth at that time. She was sunbathing with only her bikini bottoms on when a shadow came between her eyes and the light from above. That shadow was cast by Chad.

“Why’d you come to the last beach on Earth, rosebuds?” Chad asked, his hands on his hips.

“Why you care, old jock turned survivalist?” Fran said, leaving Chad speechless and impressed.

“Lonely,” he replied.

The look in his eyes conflicted with the bare broad chest and the abdominals that literally created a muscled arrow pointing to his dick. She was bored. But, she was also interested. A plan for the next second wasn’t popular at that point in human history.

“What’s your plan, stranger?” Fran asked, adjusting her large sunglasses at him.

“Survival, with a little bit of happiness,” Chad responded.

She laughed.

He laughed.

She’d never gambled with her sense of personal safety, but the chances of her personal survival were getting lower and lower with every new member of the Gloriattors that signed up to side with the darkness and violence of the planet that she had been born into. Her chest had been baking in the sun for longer than she intended, and the sand that refused to stop peppering her entire body had become more than she wanted to bear while bare. Mostly, she noticed that the Chad man’s eyes had not darted down to her chest and the rest of her body like she would have expected from a human man who had most likely not seen a human woman about his age who wasn’t about to kill him for god knows how long. At any rate, she decided against her better judgement and chose to trust whatever he had going on.

“I know I could tell you that I can guarantee your safety,” he said, hands still on his hips but not looking her directly in her eyes, “I know I could tell you I can make sure you will never go hungry. I know I could promise you the world.”

She half giggled. She didn’t know that she still had giggles inside of her. She began the process of putting back on her bikini top, her hooded smock, and her backpack full of her only earthly possessions. 

He looked her in her eyes, “but I can tell you that I’d like to go on an adventure with you until I die or you die.”

She stood up with all of her earthly possessions attached to her body. Similar to him, she had military style cargo pants, a very worn but tactical vest, gear strapped to her belt, and of course her shemagh to top it all off. His commando boots were bigger than hers, but other than that, they were practically the same humans on the outside.

“I will leave you to die if the Gloriattors get you,” she said.

“And I will leave you, too,” he said.

They didn’t look at each other, but they started walking in the same direction. For no reason at all, she reached out for his hand somewhere along the way.  As they walked along the red sunset bathed beach, Fran knew she might be holding the hand of a manchild that she would have to take care of before he finally understood that he was just another child to be sacrificed to the hard lifestyle that they had both become accustomed to because of when they had been born. Making their way to an abandoned library in the dilapidated city of Accornia nearby, they laid down to sleep for the night. He chose the fictional section, and she chose the biography collection. Wrapped in each of their wool blankets, they slept. 

Even though she hated it, Fran slept with the last words of Chad swimming in her head:

“The Gloriattors can’t smell the color red.”

It was benign but interesting. She knew that the human’s turned half robot in order to survive used a sort of sonar nasal way of detecting objects and motion, but the piece of information he had dropped before he walked past the pile of dusty books around them still seemed stupid and ill-timed. For his part, he had given the most important thing he had learned in his modern life to a woman he had just met, but he was ready to give up anything before dying. He understood that it didn’t seem to mean anything at all at the time that he had delivered the information.

The next morning, a parade of Gloriattors woke them both up with their robotic legs making the unmistakable grind and squeak that was typical of their kind. She woke up and wrapped the wool blanket from her backpack around herself as she approached the broken glass window of the seventh story level of the old library in the middle of the coastal city that she had woken up into that morning. Chad joined her shortly afterward, having been woken up by the same catterwompus that had woken her. They were both tired. They both had stray hairs dangling in their eyes as they gazed down on the battalion of used-to-be-humans marching in the dirty streets below. They gazed in silence down at the force of destruction below before he quietly pointed up at the red painted sign he had put up directly above them at the eighth level of the library. 

“We humans R here.”

The sign read red and large. Yet nothing happened to them, and none of the Gloriattors hunted them down. 

“How did you make that?”  Fran asked.

“Out of their blood.”