Received the book last year. I am just now trying to embark on a year of writing daily. I am only giving myself 30-45 minutes to spend writing each day, not expecting polished work at the beginning.
As the sun set over the harbour, the lights of the city came on, one by one.
Not the electric lights of years past, the power grid was destroyed early in the war. No, the lights were from fires, small ones in the top floors where it was still safe to live. Gathering burnable material had become an arduous task not for the faint of heart. The city had been picked clean over the last decade and of those willing to brave the wooded areas beyond the city, many did not return. And so, the number of survivors shrank each day. Those who stayed within the city were constantly faced with extinction; people dying every day from starvation, exposure from lack of heat, once curable diseases, and attacks from rabid animals; both the four-legged ones and the two legged that turned savage, cruel, and cannibalistic.
The city lost hope before the war had even finished, cut off and abandoned by a government that no longer existed. Despair soaked in the bones of all who dwelt within the city, just going through the motions, waiting to die.