Greg woke up to a beam of sunlight in his eyes. Cursing, he laboriously pushed himself up and shuffled along the edge of his bed to his walker. Leaning on it more than he liked, he shuffled to the window and closed the blinds.

As the effort of getting up had chased sleep away, Greg got ready for the day. It took him longer than usual, since he struggled with his shower chair, but he managed to finish dressing before the first wakeup call.

As he clumped down the hallway as quietly as he could on the faded, worn out linoleum, he nodded to a few other early risers. Mostly old folks like himself, but there were a couple younger folks awake already, all of them eager to give him help he didn’t need.

He greeted everyone with the same familiarity. They’d all moved into the home around the same time, and there’d been little change to the home since then. There was plenty of change outside it, but that didn’t really impact them anymore. They were here now. Not exactly cut off from the outside world, but definitely not participants any more.

Greg stopped by the kitchens for breakfast, setting the tray and half-filled cup of coffee on his walker’s seat as he chatted with Max, one of the youngest, and then made his way outside to his favorite bench.

As he settled down, he took in the heavy forest covering most of the horizon and the grey, blasted-out city skyline that made up the rest of it. It had been two decades since the last cities had been bombed, but at least he had a comfortable place to call home. This really wasn’t he’d imagined when he thought he’d be spending his twilight years in a retirement home.