Octavia Reynolds shivered in her sleeping bag. She could see the daylight glowing outside her tent and hear the sound of the wind whistling through the trees.

She sat up, pushing her messy braids out of her face. Maintaining any semblance of grooming had become just as hard as everything else in the months since the Mulgor had attacked Earth.

Octavia was one of the lucky few who had survived the bombing of New York City. Now, she lived in a refugee camp in Central Park.

She unzipped her sleeping bag, groaning and hoping that there was some coffee left for her to drink this morning. She crawled to the entrance of her tent and unzipped the flap. Outside was the muddy, snowy world of squalor that had become her life.

Snowflakes fell gently onto the tents, and she could smell the scent of breakfast from the communal food kitchen.

She rubbed her face, feeling gritty and gross. Nobody else got to shower either. Everyone smelled like BO. Even wealthy executives and the glitterati of New York City had been thrust into poverty like everyone else.

She pulled on her snow boots and crawled out of her tent, having slept in her big down jacket to keep warm. She zipped up the flap and made her way down to the communal kitchen for a cup of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal.

After the bombing, there were few resources left in the city. New York was an island. Getting on and off was just as difficult as staying.

There were places in the world that had not been destroyed like New York, but moving the thousands of refugees that remained to some other location had proven too difficult and ultimately a waste of time.

All the other cities in the region hadn’t fared much better. The best thing for the refugees to do was to stay and try to rebuild any way they could.

Octavia walked into the food tent, and the smell of oatmeal and coffee filled her nose. She never thought that such simple things would fill her with so much joy. Like so many other native New Yorkers, Octavia was well-educated and used to a certain standard of living that was far removed from how she lived now.

She entered the line with the rest of the groggy refugees and pulled a coffee cup and a bowl from stacks on a folding table, greeting the volunteer cooks with a smile.

“How’s it going this morning?” she asked the cook who dished up her oatmeal.

“As well as can be expected,” the woman said with a sniff. There had been colds and flus running rampant through the refugee camp, not to mention the infections that so many had come down with. Luckily, there were a few doctors left alive and a dwindling supply of medication.

“How are the food stores?” Octavia asked.

“I’d rather not say,” the cook said, frowning. “How are the plans for rebuilding the city coming?”

“We’re making progress,” Octavia said, lifting her bowl. She went to the end of the line and filled her coffee cup before going to sit down at a long folding table among the crowd of refugees.

Octavia had a master’s degree in urban planning, but that didn’t mean anything when the city had been flattened by bombs. So many had died. Luckily, the Mulgor hadn’t used toxic nuclear weapons. If they had, no one would be left alive.

She was on a committee tasked with planning the rebuilding process. The truth was, unless they cut down all the trees in Central Park to create log cabins, there wasn’t much to start with.

In the spring, they would assess the rubble to recycle as much as possible in order to begin building temporary homes for the refugees. But there was so much debris and waste throughout the city, and very little heavy equipment left, not to mention fuel to run it on. The rebuilding process would not be easy, no matter how well-planned it might be.

Octavia had to keep herself occupied somehow. After the refugees had set up camp and tried to celebrate the holidays, all that was left to do was wait out the winter. Perhaps in the spring they could find some comfort in the lives they now shared.

She ate her breakfast, thinking of the things that had brought about the destruction of her world. Six years ago, an alien race called the Draconians had arrived on Earth asking to mate with human females.

Apparently, the Draconians had been here five thousand years before and human women had willingly mated with them. The humans had worshiped the Draconians as gods back then. But when they had arrived six years ago, humanity had only seen them as a threat.

In order to prevent war, the Draconians had offered to exchange technology for the willing participation of human females in the Draconian mating lottery. They also gave any girl who was genetically matched with a Draconian five hundred thousand dollars to give to anyone she wanted.

Unfortunately, the introduction of new technologies into the human economic system had created a vast disparity of wealth between the rich and poor. It had thrown the entire world into a deep recession.

When the Draconians finally decided to clean up their mess, their ancient enemy, the Mulgor, had attacked the Earth.

Almost every major city on the planet had been attacked. New York had been hit by a massive bomb that leveled everything but Central Park. Most of humanity had been thrown back decades or even centuries.

The Draconians had beaten the Mulgor back from Earth, but humanity was in crisis and needed help more than ever. Over three billion people had died in the Mulgor attacks. Millions more died afterwards from infections and starvation.

She’d heard rumors that the Draconians planned to help humanity rebuild, but they had created so many problems so far that Octavia didn’t believe they could possibly help.

She chugged her coffee and finished her breakfast. There was a meeting later with the rebuilding committee. She was beginning to hate the meetings. Nothing ever really got accomplished. They ended up talking in circles. Half of the committee wasn’t speaking with the other half.

She brought her cup and bowl to a dish tub and trudged out of the food tent into the snow. It would be another long cold day with the smell of unwashed bodies and poor sanitation.

She tried to keep herself from crying all day every day. She’d done enough of that after the bomb had landed, killing her parents and everyone else she knew. Octavia didn’t think she had any more tears to shed.

Octavia went back to her tent and zipped herself inside, pulling her sleeping bag up around her shoulders. Sunlight was now streaming through the trees and illuminating her tent enough that she could read.

She should have been pouring over urban planning textbooks, but she was reading a trashy romance novel. It was one of the few things that helped her forget the tragedy of her world.

Huddled inside the sleeping bag in her tent, she was able to drift away into a fantasy world where the hero and heroine always found a happily ever after and everything turned out okay. No matter how ridiculous it was and how completely contrary it was to reality, Octavia needed a little bit of romance in her life. Just to keep herself going.

In the middle of a particularly steamy scene, someone tapped at the door to her tent.

“Octavia? Are you in there?” It was her best friend Ashley. She was an elementary school teacher and had been holding class for the refugee children for the past several weeks. It helped keep the kids occupied and gave some relief to the parents and adoptive parents who looked after them.

“I’m in here,” Octavia said, closing her book.

Ashley unzipped the tent and her blonde popped her head inside. Her light skin looked wan. Octavia knew that her own coca coloring was taking on the same kind of pallor.

“What are you doing in here?” Ashley asked.

“I’m reading this trashy novel,” she said. “Isn’t there any school today?”

“It’s a school holiday,” Ashley said, stomping off her boots and entering Octavia’s tent.

“Says who?” Octavia asked.

“Says me,” Ashley said, zipping the tent up behind her. “I’m the superintendent of the New York unified school district. Who knew that all I needed to get a major promotion was the apocalypse?”

“We’ve all gotten major career advancements since the Mulgor invasion,” Octavia said, rubbing her face. The pressure of being one of the few people who could understand what it took to rebuild the city was a tremendous amount of pressure for a woman in her mid-twenties who had just finished her education.

“Dan asked me to come over and remind you that there’s a planning committee meeting starting in fifteen minutes,” Ashley said.

“Do I have to?” Octavia said. The truth was, Octavia had the highest level of education of any of the New York refugees when it came to urban planning. Dan had been a construction contractor and a few other people had worked in utilities. But Octavia was the only one who understood how to put all the details together into the big picture. Since everyone disagreed so much of the time, it was a job that she really did not relish.

“There are a lot of people counting on you, Octavia.”

“I just don’t want to think about it right now. What made the superintendent of the New York unified school district decide to have a holiday today?”

“I haven’t had a day off in three weeks,” Ashley said. “There’s only three teachers for hundreds of kids of all different age ranges. Sometimes I think the parents send their kids to the school tents just to have someone else babysit them. I could really use some help. I’m going to spend the rest of the day looking for more volunteers.”

“I can help you with the kids,” Octavia said.

“Forget about it. You have an important job to do yourself.”

“I guess I better go to the meeting then,” she said, pulling herself out of her sleeping bag.

Ashley and Octavia climbed out of the tent and onto the muddy path between the rows of tents. It had stopped snowing and the clouds had broken, revealing a crystal blue sky and bright sunlight.

It was nice to see the sun for a change instead of the relentless snowstorms that had been hitting the camp for the last few weeks. Everyone was cold and everyone was sick. Life had become a constant misery that seemed to have no end.

She hoped that in the spring, what was left of the government would begin to send aid. But the resources and infrastructure simply weren’t there anymore. Communication was only available through short wave radio, and knowledge of the outside world was limited.

She said goodbye to Ashley and made her way to where the rebuilding committee met once a week to go over new developments. The last meeting had been a disaster, ending in several people threatening to quit.

They had everyone from sanitation workers to architects on the committee. It seemed everyone wanted to talk and no one wanted to listen. She could understand, in some ways, since everyone was traumatized. However, if they couldn’t get it together, they’d never be able to rebuild their first structure.

She walked into the tent and took a seat at the folding table as the rest of the committee filed into the room.

“Oh good,” Dan said. “You made it.”

“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t miss this party for the world,” she said sarcastically.

“I know this is hard for you, kid, but we need you.”

Dan sat down across from her and heaved a heavy sigh, rubbing his red beard. He winked at her, his crow’s feet deepening around his eyes.

“You’re right,” she said.

“I’ve got some news that could change everything.”