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I walked slowly through the ruins of the old city, marveling at the towering sky scrapers now slanted and vine covered in the gold glow of dusk.  Their windows were shattered, filthy and ribs of wrought iron and steel jutted out from their decaying husks.  Scraps of rusted metal lined the broken asphalt streets, the remnants of cars and planes and rockets all rotted away and eaten to dust.  Wind echoed through the cavernous city-scape and spoke in one low, growling syllable the story of mankind.  It was a cold wind that stung my cheeks as I strolled bare faced through a vacant world.

There was a small pile of rubble ahead of me, gray concrete with a fine fuzz of green grass growing through the cracks.  I'd named it the Mole Hill, not that it had ever seen a mole in its lifetime.  It was most likely the entrance to a subway station or a kiosk.  I made a right and followed another nameless road into the oblivion that had been the city.  It was like the other streets, broken pavement and crumbling buildings with a fine powder of ash and rust blowing through the tall weeds and vines that had consumed everything.  Something crunched under my foot and made me cringe.  I looked down at the powder white femur under my heel, all that remained of its owner.  I whispered a short prayer, offered an apology to the nothingness and moved on.

The buildings in this part of town were the oldest and made a steady, painful moaning as the bolts and steel that held them erect slowly warped and gave way to the harsh demands of gravity.  An alarm began to beep on my wrist, the timer I'd set to keep me on track.  It chirped like an ancient cricket and roared through the old city like a crack of thunder.

Thunder.

It reminded me to check the weather.  I could have looked at any of the equipment I was carrying but looking over my shoulder at the black clouds rolling in over the far horizon opposite the sunset seemed better.  The storm was moving quickly, winds licking out like fingers groping violently at the old town and the memories trapped forever in its rotting walls.  It would be the end of this place.

I picked up my step and headed for the Cross.  It had been a pair of skyscrapers once, towering over the world like a lighthouse on the ocean.  They'd collapsed at the same time, falling in on one another from the base and meeting in the middle in a freak accident that had pushed them together like a cross.  Underneath them in the middle they had formed an arch and inside that arch was a green patch of grass where water from their ancient pipes had continued for years to feed and nurture the life within.

And there she was, red and blooming in the gold haze of dusk that swirled around the garden oasis.  A single rose kept alive for ages by one series of accidents and improbabilities after another.  I took the pruning shears from the pouch on my left hip and knelt beside the flower like a man in prayer.  I stared at it for a long time, or what seemed like a long time, amazed at the spectacle.  It was a holy relic left on an altar in a temple, meant to be revered and admired and even worshipped for the magnificent anomaly that it was.  The water leaked from green tinged copper pipes bent down in a smile and broken open in the center to let a sliver of crystal flow into the lush green earth.  I brought the shears up to the base of the rose and carefully snipped it from the dying bush.  It fell gently onto the lush grass.

I scooped it into a container, labeled it and slowly stood.

"Thirty-three to retrieval," I called over the radio.  "Target acquired.  Standing by for pick up."

"Affirmative," a synthetic voice replied over the static.  "Sample acquired.  Ready for pick up.  Storms approaching from the south.  Retrieval in five."

I stepped into an open courtyard away from the dead city and waited.  I had mixed emotions about this.  Not the mission as it were. Collecting and preserving life like the rose was all I had ever wanted to do.  But now, with the last living organism on earth safely tucked away in a compartment of my uniform, I wondered if anyone would remember this place.  Not the city.  Even I didn't know its name if it had even had a name.  I wondered if anyone would remember the people, the things we had done and the civilization we had forged on one tiny spinning ball in the farthest reaches of the universe.

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