Cremation

The city was dying, and I was the one filling out the paperwork.

My name was Arthur Vance. I was an associate claims adjuster for Pan-Continental Assurance, specializing in parahuman-related incidents. It was a growth industry. My desk was a small island of beige steel in a sea of identical desks, under the ceaseless, humming glare of fluorescent lights that made everyone look ill. I processed reports. A rogue Brute had used a city bus as a cudgel to fight a cape from the Protectorate. I would calculate the depreciation of the bus, the cost of municipal cleanup, the estimated damages to the asphalt, and the projected payouts for the twenty-three injured civilians. I would then stamp the folder with a red block of ink: Clause 17-B: Acts of Unsanctioned Parahuman Aggression.

Claim denied.

My life was a ledger of controlled chaos. I woke at 6:30 AM. I showered, dressed in a grey suit, and ate two pieces of toast with no butter. I took the 7:15 AM train to the downtown office. I worked for eight hours, quantifying catastrophe. Assigning value to the loss of life and property. I took the 5:45 PM train home. I ate a microwaveable meal. I read a book or watched the news. I went to sleep. The next day, I did it again. The routine was a bulwark against the insanity I documented. My job was to look into the abyss, tally up the cost, and then file it away in a manila folder. The abyss, in turn, did not look back. It had bigger things to worry about.

The city, however, was not as well-insulated as I was. The villains grew bolder. The heroes seemed to be fighting a losing war of attrition. Every week, a new name appeared on the incident reports. I began losing track of which were major contributors to the decay, and which were simply taking advantage of it. Every month, a business in my portfolio would file for bankruptcy, citing unmanageable security and insurance costs. My workload increased. The stack of folders in my 'in' tray grew into a precarious, leaning tower. The red ink of my 'DENIED' stamp seemed to be on everything. We were no longer insuring a city; we were documenting its foreclosure.

One Tuesday, Mr. Abernathy called us into the main conference room. He was a man whose jowls sagged with the gravity of quarterly reports. He told us Pan-Continental was ceasing all operations within the city, effective in sixty days. It was no longer a viable market. He called it a "strategic reallocation of assets." He meant they were cutting us loose before the whole ship went under. They gave us a severance package, a handshake, and a platitude about future opportunities. I packed the contents of my desk—a stapler, a pen holder, a framed photo of a beach I'd never visited—into a small cardboard box. I did not feel angry, or sad. I felt a sense of quiet neutrality.

The ledger had simply been closed.

The city's decay accelerated. The Protectorate officially withdrew, citing an untenable strategic position. They left behind a skeleton crew of local heroes and a promise to "monitor the situation." It was a death sentence delivered by press release. Riots became a common occurrence, something the atrophied police department couldn't imagine suppressing. The news spoke of "no-go zones," entire districts surrendered to villains and gangs. My severance pay began to dwindle. The 'future opportunities' Mr. Abernathy had mentioned were non-existent in a city that was actively cannibalizing itself.

I needed work. The only place hiring was the industrial sector by the old shipping canals. I took a job at the Sterling Automotive plant. Night shift. My job was to stand at a conveyor belt for ten hours and ensure that newly forged engine manifolds were properly aligned for the robotic welders. The work was simple, repetitive. Loud. The thunder of the presses, the scream of metal on metal, the hiss of hydraulics—it was a symphony of brute force. The men and women I worked with were ghosts, their faces slick with sweat and grime, their eyes vacant. We didn't talk. There was no point. We were just components in the machine, as interchangeable as the parts we handled.

My new routine was an inversion of the old. I slept during the day, the sounds of distant sirens and shouting my lullaby. I woke as the sun set. I ate canned soup, standing over the sink. I walked to the factory, through streets littered with debris and watched by shadowy figures in alleyways. I worked. I walked home under the sickly orange glow of the streetlights that still functioned. I was no longer Arthur Vance, the adjuster. I was a pair of hands. A set of eyes. My identity had been stripped down to its most basic, functional elements.

I did not mind. I must make this clear. There was a certain purity to it. In the factory, there was no ambiguity. The manifold was either aligned or it was not. It passed or it was rejected. There were no clauses to interpret, no grieving families to placate with bureaucratic jargon. There was only the work.

Then came the Quarantine.

It was announced on a Thursday. The federal government, in an act of unprecedented desperation, declared the city a total loss. They were building a wall. No one in, no one out. It was for the "greater good," they said. To contain the "infection" of crime and parahuman violence. There was no evacuation attempt for the human civilians. My shift was cancelled. The factory gates were chained shut. The foreman, a man with a face like a slab of granite, stood on a crate and told us the parent company had written the plant off. There would be no final paychecks. We were, like the city itself, a non-viable asset.

I walked home. The streets were in chaos. People were screaming, fighting, trying to get out before the walls were sealed. I simply walked through it. It was like watching a film. The sounds were muffled, the colors muted. I was an observer, detached from the panic around me. I had lost one job, then another. I had lost my name and identity. Now I had lost my freedom. Each loss was a layer of myself stripped away, leaving...

I don't know what was left, if I am being honest with you.

I reached my small apartment. It was on the twelfth floor of a decaying tower block that overlooked the factory district. From my window, I could see the flashing lights of government vehicles and the first prefabricated sections of the containment wall being lowered into place by heavy-lift helicopters. The sky was turning a strange, bruised purple as the sun set.

I pulled open the soot-covered window. It took two attempts - I had never opened it since I moved here, after all. I gently raised my legs over the frame until I was in a sitting position. I could see the rioters and fires below. Like ants and embers.

The wind rushing past my face as I fell was exhilarating. I closed my eyes as I approached the ground.

...I, of course, did not expect to open them. I maneuvered my body to land head first, an attempt to end my life with minimal suffering. You can imagine my surprise when I hit the ground and barely noticed.

I opened my eyes as I laid on the cracked pavement. I felt light. As if a weight had been taken off of my body after years. The stained sky above me stared down at what should have been my shattered body. But I felt no pain, no injury.

I hadn't felt anything in a long time. Now it was physical too.

It was only then that I noticed the ash began to fall.

It wasn't like snow. It was fine and black, like soot, and it clung to everything. It coated the windows, dusted the streets, and settled on the shoulders of the rioters. It didn't have a smell. I reached out to it, only to see my arm was the same smokey texture.

Ah. That made sense. That's why I didn't die.

I moved the limb absentmindedly, noting the slight delay as the particulates composing me dragged through the air. Like moving your arm through water.

I closed my 'eyes' once again. I should have been disturbed, I knew that on a rational level. How would I eat? How was I breathing? I could never find another job like this, not one of gainful employment at least. I had lost my job, my identity - now I even lost that body, that interchangeable cog of the machine.

Why didn't I care? Why?

I pulled myself up. It was an act of will rather than of biomechanics. There was no bending or contortion to bring myself upright. The ash merely floated in defiance of gravity, a vague outline of a person.

Was I still a person?

I didn't know. My memories were the same, even if my body was different. But I could never have my old life again. Arthur was dead. I was just... a presence. A cloud. And despite all logic or reason, it gave me a a feeling. Something akin to peace. The city was a prison, but I no longer had a body to contain.

I was as free as the falling ash.

Elias let the documentary play. He knew it by heart, but sometimes he liked the noise. In the dark of his office, the only real sounds were the low, electric hum of expensive hardware and the slick, cinematic narration spilling from the massive screen on the wall. Ashfall Autopsy. Christ. You’d think after a decade they’d come up with a less ghoulish title.

On the screen, the city was tearing itself apart in grainy, bouncing footage. Mobs swarmed a government truck. Elias remembered the air that week, the taste of it. A chemical sharpness that caught in the back of your throat. He knew logically it wasn't the 'ash' - it was the constant fires, the weapons, the fear and paranoia. The narrator droned on about a looted chemical plant, on burning manufacturing facilities, but the talking heads couldn't capture the real flavor of the moment—the frantic, contagious paranoia that felt like a fever you caught just by breathing.

A woman with tired eyes and a professional frown appeared. Dr. Aria Jensen, Former PRT Sociologist. Elias almost smiled. She was always their go-to for this stuff.

"The fear was formless," she said, her voice earnest, "and because it was formless, it could become anything."

Formless, Elias thought. That was a nice, clean word for it. It didn't smell like burning tires or sound like a mother screaming for her kid in a panicked crowd. It didn't feel like the certainty that the world was ending right outside your door.

The footage jumped to the PRT line holding back a wave of thrown rocks and bottles. Day two. The city was still screaming at the walls then, at the government that had locked them in. Then came the shot he was waiting for. The view switched to a high-altitude drone, silent and steady. Below, whole city blocks lay still. Bodies were scattered across the asphalt like discarded dolls, sleeping in the middle of the chaos while black ash dusted them like a final benediction. The outline of Disney World could be seen in the distance, burning with the rest of the city.

"'The Sandman's Truce,'" the narrator said, his voice hushed with theatrical reverence.

Elias let out a quiet, breathy scoff. That's what the papers had called it. Cute. He watched the screen, saw the talk of euphoric dreams, of peace and escape. Dr. Jensen came back on, her expression grave.

"It wasn't a solution; it was a primer," she insisted. "A reward. And when that reward was withdrawn, the subsequent punishment was all the more terrifying."

And there it was. The wake-up call. The footage devolved back into jerky, street-level chaos. But this time, it was different. Uglier. It wasn't rioters against cops anymore. It was neighbors. Friends. The violence was intimate, frenzied. Elias leaned forward just slightly, his eyes tracing the frantic movements. In the background of one shot, almost lost in the visual noise, a smudge on the lens seemed to move. A flicker of impossible black against the grey, ashen air. A tall, ill-defined shape, just watching.

"They began to call it the Nightmare," the narrator concluded, as if revealing a killer in a mystery novel.

He’d seen enough. The remote felt cool and smooth in his hand as he thumbed the power button. The screen died, and the office was plunged into a thick, profound darkness. The silence that rushed in to replace the sound was heavier than any noise.

Elias let his head rest against the back of the leather chair, staring into the black.

"They never get it right," he murmured to the empty room. "All that talk. 'Societal demolition.' 'Psychological primer.' They make it sound like it was all part of some grand, evil plan."

He shifted his gaze, peering into the far corner of the office, a space so dark it was nearly invisible.

"They missed the point entirely, didn't they?"

The darkness in the corner moved. It wasn't a trick of his eyes adjusting. A piece of the shadow peeled away from the wall, flowing forward without a sound. It coalesced into a man-shaped void, a column of swirling, animate smoke that seemed to have no true surface. Two faint, ember-red motes of light kindled in the space where a head should be, fixing on him.

"All that fuss about the ash," Elias continued, his voice casual, familiar. "The poison in the air. Was that really what you thought it was about?"

A voice whispered out, seeming to leak from the air around the shape itself. Dry and layered, like autumn leaves.

"The ash was just weather," Nightmare said. "They were tired. I gave them a place to sleep."