The night air wasn't so cool...

...It burned. There was a foul odor in the air; the miasma of stale clothes and old compote.

The moonlight- if there was still a moon- could not be seen through the smog, buildings and living corpses of those who wandered the streets at night- unable to sleep... which was most everybody. This was, after all, the city.

The city of crime.

The city of the lost.

The city of debauchery and the ill gotten.

The city of hope...just the hope that there has got to be a better place out there- that this was in fact the worst that it gets.

Hope that somebody somewhere else is happy.

It was this hope that kept the sun from abandoning the people of this place... her rays shine only to remind the world of where it could end up.

Its people waking up each day closer to death and never aging.

Rumor has it that an urban planner hung himself the day he realized he'd designed the layout for the world's largest morgue. Little did he know that his morbid simile was far more than the guilty conscience of a balding man with broken glasses...

The city was marked for death... it had only three days left to live.