[ WP ] You wear a watch that does not work .

When he woke up that cold, grey morning and looked at his watch, it was one of the first times in 10 years that he truly panicked. He thought that the scratched and crazed plastic of the face cover might have been obscuring his vision so he kept staring at it, blinking the blurriness out of his eyes. But no, it had stopped. Tilting his head back, he looked out of the upper story scorched window at the dead city before him. Grey skyscrapers seemed to list in the blowing ash and mist, as if in their cups, and tumbled apartment blocks squatted squarely down the avenues flooded with oily black water. He wasn ’ t exactly sure why at first, but at the sight of his stilled watch he moaned into that bleak scene and wondered unconsciously if that was the last moan of the civilized man. 
 
 When their bunker was compromised, and the raving scavengers torched the sterile corridors and smashed the mostly dormant equipment with their stinking torches and wrought iron clubs, he was afraid but composed. They had experienced setbacks over the years, but would regroup, so he told himself. Enough had escaped and there were other hidden refuges. That was two years ago though, and over the weeks and months and years, he sank into further despair as one by one he discovered the remnants of his team as piles of viscera near cold fires, as mewling, broken slaves, or as psychotic as those that had run them out. The other refuges had fared little better, either no longer paying heed to the imagined bonds of kinship implied by governance and duty, or existing as mutely devastated ruins, blasted holes gaping right before his increasingly crazed eyes. Some new warlord amongst the cannibals… he would think in those hollow moments before exhaustion took him. He knew it didn ’ t matter what or who it was picking off the last of his colleagues. Dead was dead. 
 
 But the dead watch, that got to him. It had seemed a link, fragile yet persistent, to the ideas and values of their doomed cause. With this last, final severing, he could think of no way to re-forge it, no way to get back to where they were. Of course, he could root amongst the detritus of the funereal spires, the toppled statues of his dead gods, sift through the vast drifts of consumerist ejecta… find a finely toothed cog or a miraculously preserved battery... But he knew that was futile, as futile as it was to have clung to the watch in the first place when the world started turning down. No, the time of the clock, the time of his civilization, and him along with it, was over. But with this realization, came some vague relief. Relief at the realization that his people were not worthy, and they would consume themselves in a few last paroxysms such as he was witnessing now, and then the galaxy would continue to spin on, a clock all on its own. Humanity would disappear into that void of dust. The fact that their downfall had been their own doing was no great shame to this man, as he realized that with his death, no one would be around to record or care. He looked at his watch, and threw it past the jagged glass shards of the window frame, and went out to witness what more he could. 

