Chapter 52

• The city was gray.
• Everything, from the crumbling skyscrapers to the abandoned cars, was covered in a fine, uniform layer of ash. It was a soft, silent blanket of death that muffled every sound and muted every color. The buildings were gray, skeletal structures, their windows like a thousand hollow, vacant eyes staring into nothing.
• We moved through the dead city in a slow, silent procession, our heavy, clumsy hazmat suits the only splash of color in a monochrome world. The only sounds were the constant, mechanical hiss of our air filters and the soft, crunching sound of our boots in the ankle-deep ash.