Eidolon Protocol

The end didn't come with fire.

It didn't come with bombs, or sirens, or the cinematic explosions the world always expected. No-the end came with whispers. Static scratching at the edges of radios. News reports that broke mid-sentence. The rattle of gurney wheels in hallways where the doctors stopped showing up.

The city still lived then-its heart irregular but beating. People worked, laughed, fought. Bars poured cheap beer. Children played in cracked parking lots. Yet beneath the rhythm of normalcy was a fever in the air, heavy and metallic, like the taste of blood you couldn't spit out.

On the evening news, a grinning anchor dismissed the "disturbances" as riots. In the corner of the screen, blurred figures staggered through an airport terminal, lunging too fast, too violently, before the feed cut away. The anchor laughed when the footage glitched. It was the laugh of a man reading a script he didn't believe.

In hospital basements, the dead were stacked in black bags. Some whispered the bags moved. Some swore they heard scratching inside. Nurses stopped checking. Orderlies quit mid-shift and never returned.

The radios argued with themselves. One station called for martial law. Another for quarantines. Another-always faint, always crackling-pleaded: They don't stay down. You have to burn them, you have to- before dissolving into static.

And still, life went on. Cars filled streets. Lovers kissed in doorways. Mothers tucked children into bed. Nobody wanted to admit what was already here. Nobody wanted to see the blood that still glistened in the cracks outside the pharmacy, no matter how hard the police scrubbed.

The end didn't come with fire.
It came with silence.

Silence in the hospitals. Silence on the airwaves. Silence on the streets after dark.

And in that silence, something else began to breathe.