It was one hundred and five years in the future, the year 2235. Nearly three hundred years had passed since the fall of mankind in 2021. Rubble littered the landscape, a testament to these forgotten years, and the silence of a city consumed by time was broken only by the sounds of battle. And Tommy Tony was running through it.

His footsteps were clumsy and his breath ragged as he sought cover from his pursuers, Uzis always at the ready. He continued to ask himself the important questions, ones that may be the distinction between life and death. How many bullets did he have? How many were chasing him? How could he clean the grime from underneath his fingernails? He could see it caked in there every time he checked his guns. If he was lucky, he could find something on the ground to help.

There were more than a dozen after him, possibly even eight. Hearing their screams, he performed unnecessary acrobatics, landing behind a dilapidated mailbox and narrowly missing the scattershot that would have popped his face like an udder too full of milk. Continuing the momentum, he flew through an old grey door leading into a store full of old, tourist-themed junk.

Acting solely on battle-weary instincts, Tommy Tony ducked to his left, again just missing the spray aimed at his face. Shooting wildly into the shadows, his bullets slammed into the knees and shins of a brown and white guard llama. Its gargle-like screams muffled the voices of the other soldiers below. Stumbling backwards, the towering llama fell, leg first, into an open elevator shaft. Flailing wildly, it managed to dig its hooves into a solid part of the ledge, which is no small feat when you don’t have thumbs or fingers. Dangling with fatigue, the llama warrior watched as Tommy Tony approached, silhouetted in light, Uzis aimed for the kill.

“Going down?” exclaimed Tommy Tony just before bullets erupted from his guns.

“Three at best, mate.” The llama had chosen his last words well, letting the man know his pun was only sub-par.

The point-blank shots ripped the llama’s arms off at the shoulder, leaving two fuzzy appendages hanging off the ledge. The body fell down the shaft and became wrapped around a cable, severing its head from its lengthy neck. Continuing downward, the mangled corpse eventually slammed into the elevator car, separating its feet from its legs and its legs from its torso. Satisfied, Tommy Tony turned away as an explosion plumed fire up the shaft of the elevator. He immediately hurled himself to the ground and covered his face, shocked and confused as to why the creature blew up.

With one llama down and eight left, the chase was on again. He barely had time to catch his breath before he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Three llamas jutted out from behind vine covered ruins, then rushed to encircle him. The two smaller, grey llamas hurled rude comments about the way he ran, and their leader brandished an oxygen tank as a sort of blunt hammer.

Tommy Tony jumped high when he saw the flash of two muzzles. Missing their intended target, the projectiles continued through the air until they splattered into the eyes of the opposing grey llamas who fired them. Screaming in pain, their eyes erupted like grapes in a microwave, leaving rivers of gore streaming down their faces and into their mouths. The liquid leaked all the way down their necks and the creatures began choking to death.

Using the leader’s sudden horror against him, Tommy Tony put several shots into the oxygen tank, causing it to rupture. It began spewing white gas and whistling like an old lady’s tea pot. Four more llama warriors leapt into the fray, but their timing could not have been worse. For them, that is. The exploding tank ripped the leader apart, sending various body parts tearing through their various organs, a fractured pelvic bone smashing through one of the soldiers’ groin and separating his legs at the hip. The legless llama crawled towards Tommy Tony, a frail last attempt to harm his mortal foe. Tommy Tony strolled up and placed a boot on its head. Moments later a crunching skull echoed through the battlefield.

He had finished off ten of the soldiers, leaving him three of the original dozen to deal with. Dropping his arms to the side, he began to run again. He could have gotten farther away had he not stopped to pick up a jagged piece of plastic that looked perfect for getting under his nails.

Finally, having escaped the half dozen llamas, Tommy Tony collapsed under a long-forgotten bridge. By the look alone, it hadn’t been used in at least a thousand years, half the time that had passed since mankind’s fall.

Life hasn’t always been this way, the elders told him and his fellow orphans, stories from when he was a little boy twenty-nine years ago. Now, at the age of manhood, twenty-eight, Tommy Tony recalled the tales shared about the fall of man. This wasn’t the best place to reminisce, but the memories came regardless. He also had to focus on something to keep from falling asleep. There wasn’t only the worry over being found. Often when he took naps without adequate pillow height, he would wake grumpy.

It had been so long since the last written record that no one truly knew what caused the great calamity. To be fair, it’s hard to find paper to write on when your species has run out of toilet tissue. Yet each story always seemed to begin the same - a middle-aged woman writing an angry letter to the manufacturers of her now second pair of broken knitting needles. It was hard to follow her logic but after a more than poor response from their customer service, she had become the owner of a llama farm, using the beasts to make her own yarn.

Tommy Tony was certain some other events must have occurred in-between, but it mattered little when he knew the outcome - famine, war, and genocide. All the markers of a horrifying apocalypse. He had never known a world without strife, and he had never experienced a life that wasn’t littered with the death of the people he loved at the hands of a well-armed llama army. 

Humans were reduced to nothing more than a few pockets of resistance, a species desperately trying to carve out a life despite constant attacks by the xenophobic llamas, led by their radical leader SpitFire. An albino llama who stood three meters in height, nearly eight feet or three-hundred and five inches, his reign was ruthless, brutal, and carnage driven, and his plan to end humanity seemed moments away from succeeding.