What do you want?

She looked over at me with an annoyed glare and asked, "What is it that you really want?"

"I want all of us to get out of this alive," I repeated the response I had stayed firm in since the beginning. Though even I will admit, this time it felt more like a scripted response than a genuine thought.

"Bullshit. What do you really want? Everyone is selfish when it comes down to it. Accept that truth man. This isn't a bad thing, it's just the reality. So what do you really want? What is it that lives outside of this do-gooder persona you try so hard to take on?"

I didn't know how to respond. I felt I was a mature 22 years old, but I realized I had never given this basic question much thought. What do I want, I repeated in my head. What do I want?

I sat there thinking, Lisa by my side, for what seemed like an eternity. I looked up at the sky, now thick and blackened with plumes of smoke. We were 46 hours into the evacuation of our city. Most of the wealthy bought their way out weeks ago. They had heard all of the reports, they knew what was coming, so they ran with all the expediency possible on our small fringe world.

The rest of us had to wait. We had to wait along with the other 4 million people left on the planet. We were waiting on a lottery system, constantly praying your number would be called for the next 30,000 person barge ship could take you away off the planet. I waited pondering Lisa's question, what do I really want?

I waited even as the initial salvo of fire bombs had disrupted much of our basic infrastructure. Word was that within the next 72 hours, the full fleet would be here and those still left on the planet were likely to be trapped in the fire storm. I watched a burning building in the distance finally collapse into itself. The flames crept, then leaped onto an old maple tree standing indefensibly next to the building. It was quickly engulfed in the red and orange glow of heat, the branches snapping and wilting in the flames.

Lisa looked back at me and asked again, now sounding lost in her own thoughts, "So Adrian. What is it that you want?"