The Hunchbacked Old Man in the Apocalypse

A leaden-gray canopy of clouds weighed down on the ruined city until it could barely breathe. The rusty iron door of the steel mill's boiler room banged in the north wind, like the final cough of a dying man. Old Chen stooped, his back bent into a deep furrow. It wasn't age that had crushed him, but the steel-armored rat that broke his spine in the third month of the apocalypse. With no medicine to treat it, he had been left hunched over like a hunchback.