The telephone booth looked pristine among the ruins of London, a glaring red reminder of what was lost. No, not lost, thought 20 year old Harry Potter. Taken. Taken by Voldemort.

It's doubtful the American who pressed the button that launched the missiles knew Voldemort created the Scottish flu. All it took the bastard was an epidemiologist under the imperious curse tasked with "designing a virus to kill all the muggles" to end it all.

Today, everyone in the world knew that Voldemort was behind it. Of course the world's population consisted of 47 marked death eaters, Voldemort and Harry Potter, so that isn't exactly surprising.

When Voldemort went muggle in his third, increasingly desperate, effort to win a lost war, he etched-out the ultimate pyrrhic victory. His Scottish Flu killed all the muggles but it didn't end there. It killed all the wizards and witches as well… and all the mammals, the birds. Not even the magical creatures were spared. There were no centaurs in the forbidden forest or house-elves tending to the needs of the survivors. If any of the goblins still lived after they sealed off Gringotts and every other goblin bank, nobody would know. The 49 current inhabitants of the surface had bigger problems than a goblin census.

Harry didn't know the specifics of how Voldemort saved himself and the last of his followers or why it somehow kept Harry among the living as well. All he knew is that he wished it hadn't spared him. Harry first fought Voldemort before he turned two. He had killed him four times now, not something most can say about their nemesis.

Harry continued to fight after Voldemort took his parents. After Sirius fell through the Veil. After Hermione and her parents were murdered. After Dumbledore. Fighting on as the world died seemed no different but when the world breathed its last, that began to change.

There would be no rebuilding this world of ash. Revenge was all Harry could hope to accomplish by fighting now. Letting Voldemort rule over the world he destroyed seemed revenge enough. Unfortunately for Harry, Voldemort and his followers wanted to keep fighting.

Harry fled, or performed a tactical retreat as he saw it. They gave chase. Harry reduced the world's death eater population by 7 and the pursuit mostly stopped. He wandered after that looking for a reason to fight, for survivors. Two years later he found himself back at the entrance to the ministry of Magic.

Harry kicked the debris away from the bottom of the door to the phone booth and wrenched it open expecting it to be stuck. It wasn't. He lost his balance and fell backwards but his self designed radiation suit kept any witness from seeing the embarrassment on his face, though as he was likely the only person in the entire country, that was a moot issue. Enchantments protecting against radiation were almost nonexistent before the bombs fell on London. Harry doubted any of the death eaters knew of them or even cared to learn them. Only the UK burned though, there were plenty of less irradiated places where they could pretend to rule the world.

Harry also made it a point to destroy any magical knowledge he found in his wandering, after securing a copy for himself of course. If the death eaters searched for the world's hidden knowledge, Harry thought it best if they found only ash.

Harry stood and entered the phone booth. The inside was just as immaculate as the outside. For the thousandth time Harry cursed wizard's lack of common sense. Sure, it was a simple spell to make a phone booth impervious to damage. An even simpler spell would make it repel dust and graffiti too. These spells made it too clean and undamaged though. Were there muggles left to see it they would have likely discovered the hidden magical world.

Harry grabbed the receiver and entered the code to access the ministry.

"…come to the …try o… ma… state yo… an… …son for yo… …it," said the voice on the phone amid the static. Apparently some things weren't magicked to be impervious.

"Harry Potter," he replied, his voice muffled by his helmet, before thinking a moment and adding "suicide mission?"

The voice on the line attempted to say thank you before the line went dead. A visitor badge with "Harry Potter: Suicide?" printed in big letters emerged from the coin slot. Sounds about right, thought Harry with a dark smile.

The phone booth started its journey downward and Harry cast a silent lumos with the palm side crystal embedded in the ring on his left hand. He'd learned the benefit of not using his wand for light and keeping the source out of his eyes helped preserve his night vision. The ring wasn't the showiest trinket he acquired in his wandering, just a wide silver band with a large red crystal set on the top and the now glowing clear crystal on the bottom, but it was damn useful. He wished he could have done more to thank the witch he'd taken it from than bury her.

Reaching the atrium, the doors opened with a pleasant ding. The atrium was pitch black, not a single floo lit, and silent as a tomb. Harry raised his left hand to light the way, his breath hitching at the sight in front of him. Corpses littered the floor, the walls lined with cots occupied by even more corpses. When the flu mutated and hit the magical community, St Mungo's quickly became overwhelmed. The ministry became a makeshift hospital itself.

Just like the phone booth, impervious charms kept all the dead's clothing in immaculate condition. Harry had discovered early in his wandering that corpses with clean clothes were likely magical. It made deciding which bodies to search easier. Unexpectedly, those in the atrium were desiccated like mummies, though they had only been dead for under a year. Harry glanced at his watch, seeing the two left most lights glaring red, and discovered the cause. There was no air in the room. With the rebreather in his radiation suit, Harry hadn't even noticed.

He quickly scanned the bodies for loot with an experienced eye but spotted nothing he needed. He was already loaded for bear.

Once he made his way to the garish magical brethren fountain at the center of the room he pulled a marble size ball out of one of the pockets on his belt. He had liberated the belt from a comic book loving wizard in the states who had fashioned it after Batman's utility belt. Harry hadn't known who that was at the time, though he helped himself to the wizards comic collection and soon found out. Flicking his wand out of its holster after setting the marble on the ground, he enlarged it to its original beach ball size. Heaving it up, he cast a silent charm to affix it to the outstretched arm of the wizard statue on the fountain.

This ball was one of the more showy trinkets he found, an unfortunately single use item. The United States Magical Army Division called it Napalm-M. It burned as hot and angry as Fiendfire and didn't even need oxygen, so it would work in a vacuum. Harry found it after discovering the USMAD's research department in the magically hidden 6th arm of the Pentagon. Harry pilfered their stock but couldn't access the directions to make them. The Americans had almost surpassed the Japanese in getting magic and technology to interact and while Harry gained a fair amount of skills in his wandering, he had no idea how to even turn on the army's computers without access to power. He didn't even bother to destroy them to keep the knowledge away from the death eaters. They would likely be worse than him with technology.

Harry set the timer on the Napalm-m device. After thirty minutes it would activate if a magical signature came within 5 yards. That should deal with any death eater who might be following, thought Harry.

He continued towards the security station, noticing some of the twin's products in the confiscated items bin, Harry shrunk the whole bin and put it in one of his belt pouches before setting another Napalm-M device.

Harry walked past the lifts to the stairs which were thankfully empty of corpses. Only one floor down to his destination: the Department of Mysteries. The antichamber spun as soon as he entered and he readied another device. This one was twice as large and had radiation warnings plastered on its side. This was the USMAD's ultimate weapon against a magical foe. A magic targeting neutron bomb. According to the notes it would destroy all magic in a 500 yard radius. Witches and wizards would turn squibs, wands would become sticks with odd things inside, ernchanted items would lose their enchantments, potions their potency. Any magical creature that couldn't survive without its magic would die. Of course it shared the same effects as a muggle neutron bomb so the radioactive blast would kill anything still living even if they could survive without magic. Harry set it, same as the others.

Once the spinning stopped, Harry located the death chamber door and went through. Thankfully, the trick to get past the spinning room was the first thing he learned in his summer as Croaker's intern.

The death chamber hadn't changed since he first saw it at the end of his fifth year, a long, black stone walled room with an equally black stone arch in the center. The Veil of Death. His destination this morning.

Being completely alone for the best part of a year, Harry had done a fair amount of reading, he was always on the hunt for new books. One of his most recent finds was a tome regarding some radical 14th century theories on the Veil of Death. Harry found it in the library of a South African wizard, the only volume in that library that Harry hadn't collected at that point.

The book argued that the Veil wasn't a gateway between life and death, but a gateway between worlds. The idea of a new world filled Harry with hope, hope he hadn't felt since well before the last victim of the flu died. Even if the Veil led to the world of the dead, it would be better than the current world of the dead Harry inhabited.

Standing before the archway he could hear the murmured voices of the Veil but couldn't distinguish any individual words. With a flick of his wrist he unholstered his wand and cast a quarantine shield that encompassed both himself and the Veil. His next spell was the last spell he learned from a living human, an antiseptic spell specifically targeting the Scottish Flu, well all flu viruses really, but the Scottish was the one killing everyone. Had the CDC witch Harry learned the spell from created it just a month earlier, this world might not be so dead.

Harry felt a cold tingle pass through him as the spell killed any flu virus inside the quarantine shield. It wouldn't be proper to kill off the inhabitants of his new world… unless it was some sort of hell planet or a dead world like this one.

Shaking off that thought, Harry closed his eyes and walked through the Veil.