William Andrews stood in all of his frumpish glory before the cubicle which he lorded over. It seemed he had the disarray down to a science, making each precisely placed object appear to be totally out of place. No other cubicle had quite the mess that his did, and William told himself that he was proud of that. It showed, he would insist, that he was a hard worker with no time to tend to the shuffling of pens and papers.

The reality of the matter was that William spent most of his day rapping the hairy back of his left hand with a pen, which he would click at different rhythms and disassemble and reassemble again countless times. In all honesty, he wasn’t exactly sure what his job was, and the newspaper for which he worked had only printed the vague words “Editorial Staff” on his identification badge.

Sitting in the empty office, William’s thoughts trailed from the fact that he was the only one in the building to his one-room apartment and seven cats. He wished he could bring all of the pudgy little creatures to lie about his cubicle on the mounds of paper and strange-smelling folders that would occasionally be brought by. It would make it quite like home, he thought, if he could have his cats and a small fridge full of greens and yogurts (which had, despite his strict vegetarian dieting for the past four months, resulted in him gaining four kilograms).

Perhaps, William realised, it was an holiday that he was unaware of. He rose to his feet and made his way to a small television in the crime reporting centre. William flipped on the screen and plopped down into the comfortable chair of the crime report supervisor.

“…into Essex yesterday at dusk,” a woman was saying into a large microphone. “Behind me you can see the absolute carnage that the Red Army has…” Insufferable Liverpool accent, William thought, changing the channel to the London station. “…now seems inevitable,” a tired-looking man was saying on the new channel. “The Communists are requesting the peaceable reporting of all citizens for work and housing assignments, assuring that most will be allowed to-”

William turned off the screen. Thank God, he thought, that my grandfather was a washout and moved to the provinces. If I were Sir William Andrews the Third, I’d probably be dead. Something inside of him urged William to take up arms of some sort and do whatever he could to fight the invasion, however the majority of him simply wondered where he should go to register, and whether he would have to do any manual labour.