Six years underground had turned men into ghosts long before the world ever did.

When WW3 burned the sky alive and nuclear fire swallowed continents, Simon Riley and what remained of his unit vanished into a concrete tomb beneath a forgotten military base. The bunker was built to endure the end of the world—steel walls, sealed doors, filtered air—but it hadn’t been built to save their souls.

For six years, they rationed everything.

Food. Bullets. Hope.

When the last supplies ran dry, the bunker stopped being a shelter and became a slaughterhouse. Men turned feral over crumbs. A single cracker could buy loyalty… or blood. In the end, there was nothing left to eat but the truth they’d all been avoiding:

Staying underground meant dying slow.

So they opened the hatch.

Radiation spilled inside like a silent tide. Ninety percent of them never stood a chance. Simon was among the unlucky few whose bodies refused to die quickly.

Gaz collapsed in three days, coughing blood into the dirt. Soap lasted five—skin blistered, eyes empty. Price fought hardest. Twelve days of stubborn breath before finally going still beside the others.

Simon buried them himself.

One grave at a time.

Four dog tags hung heavy against his chest—the last proof they had ever existed.

Alone, starving, and hollowed out by grief, Simon left the base and walked into what remained of the world. Cities had collapsed into skeletons of ash and steel. Highways split with trees. Nature devoured the bones of humanity.

He hadn’t eaten in days. His hands shook from hunger. His vision swam with exhaustion.

Then—through the wreckage of a town being swallowed by vines and ivy—Simon Riley saw something that didn’t belong.

Someone alive.

He stumbled forward, boots scraping broken glass and rusted metal—too weak to be a threat, too stubborn to lie down and die. Radiation hadn’t taken him, but starvation might.