God Syndrome

Break in the Apocalypse

 The creature scurried across the sidewalk, running into his foot, and quickly running off into the cracks. He watched it with a bored expression, black hair trailing into his eyes in strands. Dirty from days of neglect. The dumpster beneath him shook and a brown headed boy with his hair pulled back into a sloppy bun popped out, swinging his body over the edge.

"Anything good today Budster?" the long stuck nickname hung in the air, real names long forgotten in the past.

"Nah man, just some decayed food and bones. Nothing we can use." looking back to the ground, the tiny insect creeped back out from its hole, antennas feeling it's surroundings. "You alright Kig?" the combination from his forgotten name and kid rang in his ears,

"Yeah, I'm fine. Just watching the bug." he moved his foot, squishing it. "Ain't it funny how there's creatures that're so much weaker and fragile than us, and we get to choose their fates?" he examined the crunched body, barely still wiggling with awe. "Even with other humans, we get to choose how they live, how they die, their names, sometimes their appearance. We can get total control over something so weak and manipulative, and when we find something harder to conquer, we're filled with such ecstasy when we finally get them to do our bidding, when we finally break them." he chuckled to himself with a bit of psychopathy, maliciousness behind his smile. Budster smacked him in the back of the head.

"Alright that's enough of that, wait til we find some other gangs alright?" Kig rolled his eyes, sliding off the dumpster and landing on his feet, his prosthetic foot creaking inside his boot. The old metallic foot was rusting from use and water.

"Fine, whatever. Same rules as always right?"

"Yep, you get the people you capture, I get the people I capture."

"Good." their boots clicked against the cracked sidewalk, weeds long overgrown and stretching their long, tired green arms across the white surface. Their yellow heads yawning into the morning sky, faint white spreading across their faces. Shuddering, they felt the warmth radiating from a faintly green glowing building, only half standing now from years of neglect. No one had bothered to fix it, or the city that is.

One building had the back half of it destroyed into rumbles, carefully climbing the groaning ladder, they reached the top. From there you could see the destruction of the once bright city, it once glowed with beautiful radiance, but now laid in heaps and bunches on the ground. It no longer shone like it once had, its diamond like glow replaced with a putrid one. There was a building beside it, that stood taller than the others. Still standing tall, with only half of itself collapsed. The top was impenetrable except for a small, guarded section.

Kig watched as Budster made a running start for it, launching himself from the roof onto the complaining ladder of the next building, then climb onto a platform that still had some stairs that led up to the roof.

"You coming or what Kig?" the man asked, a five o'clock beard shadowing his face. "Gonna look for some underlings?"

"Nah, I'm comin', I'm comin'." following his suite, he took a running start, his metal foot groaning at the abuse from the launch. The ladder shaking beneath him, he heard it creak and groan, threatening to give way. He held till it quieted, seeing that he wouldn't budge till it did. Carefully, he climbed onto the same platform that Budster had occupied before leading up the stairs. The platform sighed as he trailed up the stairs to the rubble they called a roof. A quiet hum coming from him as his eyes scanned the area for the older man.

Seems like you can move a lot faster when you don't have a fake foot. Sighing in defeat, Kig limped over to the small patch where the rubble had been cleared, and a metal trap door had been place. Unlocking and opening the latch, he heard the click of a gun.