God's Country

Prologue

It wasn't the end of the world, just the end of mine.

Disaster, Disease, Human cruelty--any number of things could have torn the world apart, but in the end it was the uncontrollable nature of our existence that would consume us. 

It wasn't just that the world couldn't sustain our increasing population growth. It was that coupled with our horrid treatment of the planet and each other. There were too many of us and too many of us didn't care.

Instead of solving the problem, we tried to avoid it altogether by extending life to other planets, but it proved far too difficult and we ultimately gave up. We then opted for population control, but it was far too late. 

Not that it would have fixed anything. It was our inability to listen to one another or work together that was the real issue we refused to acknowledge. All of us were too set in our ways.

So we went about our lives oblivious to what would come. Our leaders, meanwhile, figured out what we refused to acknowledge and plotted it to their advantage. That was the beginning of the end of my world as I knew it.

Survival is a strong instinct, but, for so many, it wasn't strong enough. Disaster, disease, and human cruelty would all come to play their part.

It started with bombings and mass shootings across the globe. As casualties amounted, our governments blinded us with conversations on terrorism, gun control, and countries turning on one another, all the while circumventing what was really going on. The truth was they had their own plan for continuance of the human race and it didn't include all of us.

In the chaos and confusion, it didn't take long for worldwide communications to fall apart--hell they were already crumbling long before then. By the time we knew what was happening, more than a third of the world's population was dead or dying. Those remaining were in no way organized or able to resist their fate.

In the years following what my sister and I now refer to as the "killing days", we would discover the total death count worldwide had breached five billion. In humankind's pursuit of longevity, we had become the monsters we used to condemn. We failed to ask the most important question.

Had we really saved our planet if we destroyed our humanity and sacrificed our morality to do it?

I guess if you want to be technical about it, all our leaders really did was incite within us a dark nature that already existed and then turn us against one another.

People killing people.

Something had to change. I understand that. But this... was genocide. This was cruelty on a level they couldn't fathom. And, yet, they had knowingly condemned us to it.

The day they sealed the remaining unnecessaries and undesirables in the western half of the U.S. and left us there to die was the day I watched any remaining civility vanish. It very quickly became everyone for himself. Those of us lucky enough to survive the spread of disease weren't lucky at all.

I'm not sure luck even exists anymore.

We should have let it all burn.