Ever since Decimation Day, nuclear smoke had charred the skies black. The world was cast into a perpetual darkness, and it wasn’t long before people lost track of the time. The survivors reset the clocks the best they could, but you simply couldn’t see through the clouds of smoke. It was four in the morning here, but for all I knew, the sun could have been shining bright in the sky.

It was my dad that taught me to paint; it was right here on the balcony actually. Though I’d been around his artistic creation my whole life, I became interested in painting only after he told me about the time he saw the sunrise. He said it was the most beautiful yellow he’d seen. I wanted more than anything to see it, so I stayed up every night … I still do.

Though civilization reset their clocks the best they could, the clear definition of day and night slipped from our knowing and Los Angeles became a place where people lived at their own pace and on their own schedule … a city that never slept. There was another city like that once, but it was one of the first to go in the war. People say it was hit so hard, and from every direction, that it was reduced to scolding ruble within seconds, and that it was completely swept off the map and into the Atlantic when the tsunamis hit the North-East shore. They say the steel wreckage from the super-high rise buildings alone destroyed surrounding cities.

Decimation Day happened sometime in 2012. It was the first and last nuclear world war the planet would experience, and it all lasted just under three minutes. Some would say that Nostradamus was right, others believe the Mayan’s called it in their calendar, but the fact is, they were wrong. Sure, the world pretty much came to an end as everyone knew it, but there was something the soothsayers didn’t foresee … survivors. Of the billions of casualties, time seemed to be one in particular that affected the planet for centuries to come.

It was like a never-ending foggy night. The only light you could really see in the sky was the light from the neon metropolis below.

Rain fell from the dark, blanketing clouds as I sat at my canvas. I’d been working on this particular piece for the past few months. I thought about it night and day. I dreamt about it every time my eyelids shut.

The canvas was still blank though.

I had ideas. They ran through my mind with the force of ten tsunamis, but ideas combined with talent proved to be dangerous in this world, and like many artists, I inherited my parents’ talent. This is why my ideas were dangerous. Though, it was also because they weren’t necessarily ideas of art at all … pretty much the opposite actually.

My parents were murdered. I saw who killed them; it was a friend that did it. There had always been rumors behind the deaths of represented artists in this city; most consisted of strange disappearances, sudden deaths from disease, or the most popular of all, Cloud Lung – a cancerous disease triggered by breathing too much of the unseen radioactive waste in the clouds. Though this was claimed to be the number one cause of death in the city, it was widely believed by the underground that the agencies were more dangerous than the clouds. The agencies, also known as bloodhounds, were the ones behind every sale, every promotion, and every professional artist in the city.