Disclaimer: This is different from the stuff I normally write, I know, but I wanted to get back into writing, so I made this. I mainly wanted to explore the implications of the whole android apocalypse from Future Trunks' timeline, how it would effect people psychologically.
It happened so fast, I could barely retain any of it.
I was dead to rights, as I knew I would be when the killer androids finally got around to my city. "Finally," now there's a word to describe it. From the very first massacre these mechanical devils perpetrated against humankind, everybody in every city in the world—even the smallest and remotest villages—became suddenly plagued with fear and paranoia that they would be next. On TV, they would track the androids the way one would track a hurricane, but the goddamn hurricane wouldn't end. You knew that, and you knew that one day it would swallow up you, too. You and everyone you ever cared about.
It must've been like that in the time thousands of years ago when they had nuclear weapons. Everybody woke up that day knowing that chances had increased that their number was finally up. It was a hangman's noose drawing tighter around their throat, the rough material teasing and tickling the skin until one day… like a bulb going out.
But long after I was certain I was dead, when the first air raid sirens sounded, he appeared. My first instinct was that he was just like them, the way he flew around. It was the hair I recognized. A long time ago, a few people tried to stop the monsters with the same powers the monsters also held. They failed one by one and eventually they stopped coming. Humanity collectively accepted its fate over the course of a few years, as city after town after village after outpost was reduced to rubble and dust. People were scared to stay home because the androids might show up that day. People were scared to leave because they might wind up in the path of the androids. Some people killed themselves, not wishing to give the androids the satisfaction, knowing it would happen one day.
My son wasn't like that, and his reward was to be killed by them too. It was the black-haired one. The boy. The girl was trying to keep him alive, if only for long enough to rape him. I know after what had been done to the rest of our family by the sick bastards, my son was ready to die if it meant no longer sharing a world with the demons, no longer living in the black shadow they cast over the earth as they picked away at its inhabitants. But as much as you think you're ready to see one more family member die at their hands… you aren't. Nothing gets you ready for that.
I wondered as I watched the last moments of the foul androids' lives how many people he, the boy savior, had lost to him. I could see he was a boy. Behind his muscles, his inhuman glow as he blew the androids both away, it was obvious that this was a boy no older than my son was. To push him to that kind of desperate strength, he must've lived year after year in misery, a life sentence with funerals for punctuation. There was more than justice on this boy's mind. There was rage of the most personal kind, controlled and focused but nonetheless burning.
Oh, that I could relive the moment, over and over again, when he killed the first one. A beam of some sort, the same kind the androids shot at towns to turn them into graveyards, shot from the boy's hand and she let out a final scream before exploding. That scream, of pain or fear or even of disbelief, could not begin to make up for years of torment inflicted upon life itself, but it was a damned good start. Then the boy android, the punk with the handgun, gave a look that I would have been fooled into believing human had I not lived so long and seen so much death. He was furious, but more than that, he was shocked. Someone had taught him the pain of seeing someone killed in front of him as he watched helplessly, and for the last few seconds of his life after that I hope he felt it right down to his goddamned core. If there's a God, and Hell exists, his punishment is to feel it for all eternity.
And the strangest thought occurred to me when the dust had settled and the androids were gone—not just dead, indeed, but completely erased from this mortal coil. The thought that… now people could go back to living their lives as if tomorrow could be depended on. Long term plans could exist again. The world would no longer have to function as one giant cancer ward, where everyone was gray and tired and waiting for their turn. People could stop qualifying every last future event with "if we're still here by then." It was a liberating feeling, but it was foreign, and filled me with something of a hollowness. Grave thoughts filled my head, thoughts of how we would even begin to rebuild, what we would talk about, think about, how long it would be before we ever felt normalcy again… if it was even possible to feel it again after all these horrible years.
The boy draped an arm around my back to comfort me, we talked for a while, and it hit me that I no longer had a family. I was—and am—ashamed to say it, but I almost wished the androids had taken me before the boy had arrived to kill them. I would never have said that out loud to the young hero to whom I all but owed the rest of my life to, but… what was left for me here? A wasteland to rummage through, filled with memories from a time before trauma and death turned life into a sick joke, a parody of what it was? Scouring the last of the underground cellars and the piles of bodies, still hot to the touch from the beams of hellish energy that had killed them, for answers to questions nobody had?
Eventually, the young man—whose name, he told me, was Trunks—flew away, and I dusted myself off and began to wander. Far in the distance, I heard voices coming out of one of the overturned cars about a block away.
"Are they gone? They're gone, right?"
"I don't think so." Then the voice turned into a harsh whisper. "Keep your fucking voice down, I hear footsteps."
I started to open my mouth to say something, but what came out instead was a cough, followed by a few more as my body seemed to be dusting off my insides. The people in the overturned car crawled out, one of them holding a gun.
"Hey, old man," one of them said, "what's good? The androids leave?"
"Yes, they certainly did," I replied in a rough voice I couldn't recognize at first. "And they won't be coming back."
"I don't know, man," the other one, a small guy with a baseball bat, said in a cautious, low tone. "I hear they like to come back around to pick at the bones."
I smiled. "The only bones left to be picked at are theirs."
They stared at me warily, looked at each other, and started to laugh. "Are you saying they're dead?"
I knew there was no point in telling them myself. I decided to just let them experience the revelation the same as everybody else, through the glow of a TV. Or maybe not. Maybe no one will ever know what had become of them. They were blown up without a trace. Maybe everyone's just going to have to pass warnings down to their children and their grandchildren, about the monsters who disappeared without a trace, and the pointless ways they can protect themselves in case they ever returned.