What Still Works When Nothing Does

Most of the lights go out at once, but not every object stops working. Some of the most important things in The Severed City are old, mechanical, and slightly out of fashion. I wanted to find what a real New York apartment building would hold that could survive a blackout, and then make those things matter.

The Stove

The gas still works. The stove lights with a match, so Kimberly can boil water, heat food, or warm a pot to wash with and pretend for five minutes that life is normal. She doesn’t know why it works. Her guess is that the gas lines in the city are old enough to outlive everything else. She also knows it won’t last forever, and she tries not to think about the day it stops.

I won’t tell you how long it lasts.

The Roof

Rain is water. The people in Kimberly’s building build a collection system on the roof out of angled pans, gravel, sand and old fabric used as a filter, all patched together from whatever they can find. An engineer from the fifth floor named David makes it work. Everyone in the building gets a share, and everyone takes only their share. Kimberly writes in her diary that this surprises her. It’s the one thing left that still feels fair.

The Door

Someone smashes the glass panel in the front door trying to get in. David organizes the repair. A few neighbors carry a sheet of scrap steel back from a construction dumpster two blocks away and bolt it over the inside of the frame. Between the steel and the old deadbolt, nobody gets in again.

It also blocks every bit of daylight from the stairwell. Kimberly learns to walk down in the dark, one hand on the wall and the other on the railing, by memory.

The Radio

A hand crank radio stores energy in a set of gears. Kimberly turns the crank for about thirty seconds and flips the switch. Most of the dial gives you static, frequency after frequency of empty noise from a city where every transmitter has gone quiet. I’ll let you find out what’s hiding underneath it.

The Watch

Luis wears a wind up watch from the 1980s. It has no battery and nothing electronic to fail, which he says is the whole point. He hasn’t taken it off in forty years. In a world where every screen is dead, his watch is one of the few things still keeping time.

Why These Details

Survival fiction works when the details feel earned. Every object here follows one rule. It has to be something a real building would plausibly contain, and it has to fail slowly or not at all. The people who last in this city aren’t the strongest. They’re the ones who notice what still works and take care of it.

The Severed City is out now on Amazon. To meet the neighbors in the hallway, visit The Characters page, or start with the prologue.