when you die your voice gets added to the Gangster’s Paradise choir
The year is 2040. It’s been ten years since the bombs fell, turning cities to ash. Most of the survivors have died from now, either from radiation poisoning or from starvation. You haven’t seen another human being in two years. Part of you fears you’re the last left.
You come across an old farmhouse, fallen apart from years of disrepair. You don’t pay attention to the dead parents lying in the bed, you have more pressing concerns. You don’t even spend more than a second thinking about their son who they killed in his sleep to save him from the torture of an empty belly.
You grab what you can. Medicine, bottles of water, a few rounds for your rifle. And, on a whim, you grab the old Walkman buried in a drawer. It works, if only barely. That night, you sit under the stars and you listen to music for the first time since the world died.
The song on the tape is “Gangsta’s Paradise”, by Coolio. At first, it sounds like you remember. You feel like a person again as he sings about the valley of the shadow of death. But then, the chorus starts, and it is the stuff of nightmares. It is loud, so loud it makes your eardrums bleed, the sound of eight billions souls screaming for mercy. Somehow, through the noise, you hear voices you recognize. The voice of your wife who was incinerated in the blast. The voice of your son, whose body gave out two weeks later. The voice of the farmers and their son that they spared. And you know that, very soon, someone will listen to this tape and hear your voice.