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❝ In the hills, people hide. Join together, rot inside. In this land, the only hope is to die young. ❞
Borrowed Time, Borrowed Eyes, SubRosa
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APOCALYPSE CAME NOT WITH PURGATORY. There shone no light in the end; there had been no middle earth to cleanse their souls. There was but a tenebrous shade, ingesting all into decay from dawn to dusk. Their theories proved wrong, for oceans did not swallow masses. Lethal winter storms or searing summers never arrived. Asteroids did not heap on the planet. It hadn't been a nuclear holocaust nor a cybergeddon.
The end of the world arrived when God laughed.
Their beliefs mocked them with the riddles written in holy tomes. Their religion pulled the paramount ruse. The Trinity claimed the dead would resurrect, so the dead rose alive, volumes of parading corpses devouring billions within days, torn apart by cannibalistic horrors. The world became a graveyard, corners of which danger crept in light and dark.
The apocalypse destroyed law and order. It incinerated homes and sundered families. Friends turned into enemies; lovers into strangers. It grieved hearts and drained hope. Governments, hierarchies, and systems broke down. Every sacrosanct line drawn around the ferocity of humanity vanished ― there would be no kindness, purity, or courtesies. Whether by choice or compulsion, both saints and sinners were forged into killers to survive as their sanities hung on the leash of madness.
And if you were bitten by one of them, you succumbed to a lethal fever. You came back as one of the prowlers. Odious with corrosion, snarling abominations, sticky with rancid blood, gurgling like a broken record, famished for living tissue. Splintered bones. Ossein. Hemoglobin.
That was what had befallen Ronald.
Redivivus monster.
To die was easy. To live was excruciating. Not many words had been shared since the world ended, more a string of shrieks and curses. Away from the city center, up in the hills they had hidden, a smothering silence reigned over the grove. People learned to talk through their eyes, nodding and motioning as if any sound would shatter the fragile safety.
