Nathan was a bit of a slob. He was a boor and he cheated at anything you could possibly cheat at. But I have to give him one thing: when he said he was going to do something, he did it.

That's why when the alarms sounded and it became clear that it wasn't a drill this time, I wasn't surprised at all to see him hauling his recliner out to the curb. He made another trip in and then returned with a tub of popcorn. Then he plopped his ass down and fed his face while he waited.

He said he would do that if the world ever decided to end. Although in the last twelve months that "if" slid towards "when" with each passing day. He told me one night that he didn't see the point in trying to fight it. If it really was the end, then what would be around after to stay alive for? Your friends would be gone, your family probably gone, civilization gone. Wasn't it hubris to think you could be the guy who would turn out to be Mad Max and save the people who were left?

As I headed for the neighborhood shelter, he gave me a wave from his front row seat. "Go on, Jamie," he called. "I'll hold em off as long as I can."

Which was ludicrous, of course. A rogue nanite swarm was the sort of thing you didn't hold off. Not with only ten minutes' warning, at least. With ten minutes, you had barely enough time to get as many people as you could inside the shelters and seal them. And really, I was lucky to even have a shelter on my street. I'm sure across the country, families were duct taping the doors of their pantries or basements while inside, assuring freaked out little children that everything was going to be fine.

It wasn't, of course.

When they took Nathan, they entered his system and engineered a stroke, first off. I could tell he was finished when he finally let the bowl slip from his lap to spill kernels on the ground.

They then took him apart, bit by microscopic bit, until there was no evidence he had ever been sitting there. In fact, if you just drove by the chair, which no one would ever do, you might think it had been left out for the trash.

Having watched all of this occur over the closed circuit television, which was wired up to let you know when the coast was clear (again, what a joke), I saw how quickly our water rations were diminishing, how the morale of my neighbors was degrading into fistfights and yelling.

I look at the chair now on the monitor and I'm almost jealous. Better a front row seat at armageddon than waiting to die crowded into the mezzanine like we are.