FicWad

Gerard pulled off the helmet and chained the bike to the parking meter. He fished his keys out of his pocket and opened the multiple locks and chains on the back door of the townhouse, then entered. He locked the mechanized front door from the inside when he left for large amounts of time. It wasn’t really a townhouse; it was in the middle of a huge city, but it was small, and it looked like every single other house on the street, except for the thorough security and safety measures installed all over the premise. And the fact that it wasn’t completely torn down and ruined, as some were.
The street was similar to the hotel he had inhabited for two days back in Manhattan, his door opening to the space under a highway, but this street was wider, almost three normal streets across. There were trees growing underneath, but something ate at them over the months, making sure they didn’t overtake the city, like so many other towns had been consumed.
Gerard threw the helmet onto the sofa and his keys into the bowl at the door.
He hadn’t been back at his place for almost fifty years.
Gerard plodded wearily across the metal-grilled flooring, tugging off his gloves and leaving them on the coffee table.
The house was small, two stories, and mostly technology-depleted on the inside compared to most. The walls were a vibrant turquoise-blue color that was both bright and dark at the same time. It had been white at first, and the only paints he could afford in the stores were the intense colors; people were holding onto the hope that having money could still help them. Gerard had moved into the lot only ten years after Alyssa died. Most of people were gone or dying by the time he’d secured the ownership, so it was already quiet and desolate, the houses empty and free for Gerard to move in even after he had spent the unnecessary “valuable” cash. He fixed the lift to the second floor and bulletproofed the front door in case desperate humans tried a drive-by to capture his dwelling. The floor were previously covered in metal grilling, which was cleaned by strong, silent, vacuums in the space where the molding would be in older houses, and Gerard couldn’t do much about it in spite of how much he hated it, but he got used to it. Walls of other rooms, such as the bathroom and bedroom, had plastic puzzle-like interlocking panels over the drywall, mostly red, black, and white.
Gerard trailed his fingers over the thin metal doorways, and thumped through the hall.
Voice-like noises drifted from Gerard’s bedroom into the bathroom where Gerard was knocking stuff over to get to his first aid kit. It felt eerie. Gerard hadn’t heard other voices in his house for thousands of years.
“Get outta my house!” Gerard yelled, wrapping gauze untidily around his broken ribs, and then the brace he had thrown in the back of his closet, thinking he wouldn’t need it again. He grimaced and pulled his shirt back on. The noises continued, of course, but Gerard hadn’t expected them to leave. He was going crazy. Just like everyone else had on the planet. He was already insane.
Gerard exhaled in frustration and left the room.