After the End

There were so many of them we didn’t know what to do. Since the End Times they had gone feral, breeding uncontrollably, despite all their chants of ethical responsibility and sustainability as they held progress meetings around their camp-fires at night, sheltering amongst the ruins of what had once been the local council offices.

Some of them would hunt at night too, taking their hand-carved clipboards out into the darkness to catch one of us unawares.

When we were out scavenging or hunting, we always had to be on our guard in case the feral council officials had set one of their traps. They caught three of our tribe once as we were scavenging in the remnants of a supermarket, searching for canned goods to supplement our meagre diet.

The trap had been set in the tinned vegetable aisle, a net suspended from the remnants of the suspended ceiling, hidden under a spread of desiccated supermarket loyalty-card application leaflets. We heard the yell as the trap was sprung, then realising there was nothing we could do for our comrades as we heard the council workers emerging from their hiding places and the fearsome clicking of their pens and the tell-tale sound of compliance forms being snapped into place on the crudely-carved clipboards.

In my nightmares, I can still hear the desperate screams of our comrades as the compliance surveys began.