章 1: Chapter 1
'When the apocalypse comes, I will surf through it with such ease that at the end of the whole thing, I'll have already created a kingdom!'
Those were my thoughts when I watched movies and series about the end of the world. It didn't matter if the main enemies were aliens, weird monsters that you can't look at, or zombies.
I felt I had accumulated enough experience by watching and reading about such things. But when the apocalypse really came knocking on my door, I wished I was already dead.
###
Bang! Bang!
"Hooouaggh!"
The guttural sounds reverberated with each strike of the creature. From the spyglass on the door, Johnathan was able to see what could only be called a mix between an alien, a zombie and something very ugly. The skin was rotten and swollen, the smell was putrid and puke-inducing, and the creature's eyes had already disappeared.
Although he doesn't know how, it clearly discovered him somehow and it wasn't through its eyes.
'Maybe it can smell me? Or is it through sound?' He tried guessing but it wasn't easy. As far as he knew, the monster might as well have a magical tracking radar capable of locking onto anything that is alive.
The bangs on the door continued. Splinters were falling out with each strike, and the wood was starting to give in. Soon, the creature would break through his last source of security and eat him alive.
Johnathan grabbed the the small hammer in his sweaty hands and took deep breaths that did nothing to calm his anxious mood.
Having already donned his homemade armor made of scraps of metal tied together inside pieces of leather loosely sewn together, he could only hope for the best.
As he prepared himself mentally, the door collapsed with another bang! Wood flew everywhere as the creature fell down on the ground unable to keep its balance. In exchange for great strength, it's clear that it lost most of its intelligence.
Not daring to wait another second, Johnathan stepped forward and started hammering the creature's head with all his might. Each strike made his hand numb as he did his best to kill it. His small hammer lacked any technique whatsoever and his inability to strike properly made the weapon less than 50% as efficient as it should have been.
Blood splattered everywhere, dyeing part of his clothes in black, just like the color of the blood inside the monster.
After the adrenaline dissipated and his chaotic heart calmed down, he looked at monster and trembled all over. 'This dress... this face...'
Only then did he realized who he had been striking so fiercely before. She was sunny and bright, always illuminating the day of the neighbors. Little Sara was the teenage daughter of the Business Owner living at the house in front of his.
Johnathan had known her ever since he was a child and they could be considered friends, now, that little girl that he had seen growing up since young now lay dead before his feet and her blood dripped from his hands.
He was shocked, then disgusted, and finally frightened. Unable to hold on, he turned back and spilled out his lunch. His back was cold and it felt difficult to breathe.
'How... How!? Miss Liara was so rich!' He clearly remembered how she had many security guards that even carried guns. 'No! I... I didn't want to kill her, but... but... she was beating on my door, she broke it...'
Tears fell down his eyes as he tried to have a grip on himself. Even though he knew it was irrational and even stupid, he couldn't help but blame himself. His subconscious felt disgusted by his actions.
'How could you be so heartless to the point of killing this little kid that had been your neighbor just a week ago?' His heart would have screamed this if it could speak.
But his brain was different, it tried to remind him of the cold truth... 'It's good! Don't fool yourself with moral relativism! Who cares if she was a child or if you knew her? She was something else when she broke through your door! A disgusting monster that would most likely kill and devour you whole without a shred of pity or compassion! Even if it's your parents, you must kill them all the same!'
Shaking, he lifted himself off the ground and gave the dead girl another glance before picking up his hammer and leaving.
He had holed himself for almost an entire week, his supplies had long been digested by his stomach and he would have left a day later even without the girl's intervention.
For the sake of surviving, he swallowed his tears and slowly walked with sadness in his eyes towards the nearest market in hope that it hadn't been razed to the ground by hungry locusts.
As he walked down the roads littered with broken cars, rotten food and trash, he didn't even notice when a flash of ghostly white light jumped out from the girl's body and fused with his body.
His mind was occupied by thoughts about what he should do next. He had seen so many zombies from the second floor of the house he had rented before the apocalypse started. Even if the majority was slow, their strength was off the charts and he wasn't sure if they were the only ones.
"Damn it! It all started with that flash of light! I thought it was a meteor like everyone else, but now I'm doubting it..."
He still remembered the weird blinding light that suddenly turned night into day and was said to have shone in the whole world. That night, all satellites in the solar system stopped working and the whole infrastructure got affected by quite a few hours before it got back online.
There were some conspiracy theorists claiming that the light had swept them like a wave and that it was affecting the whole visible universe. It felt so unreal back then and he dismissed it without a second glance, but now? "Could this be something unnatural? Is someone behind this?"
Although even more unreal than what the conspiracy theorists had said, he chose to think in this direction because he couldn't comprehend how nature could do it on its own. Moreover, if it wasn't artificial, how come they knew nothing about this before? With their technology, they were able to notice the wave approaching when it was near, but not see it when it was sweeping through everything outside? This didn't make sense...
As he walked through the path devoid of life, Johnathan slowly cleared his mind and focused. For some reason, he started to feel uneasy and had no choice to but to clear his mind of any distracting thoughts. For him who had no sense of safety before, this foreign feeling made him tremble all over.
He had a friend before the apocalypse who had a strange ability to sense danger and it even saved him a few times. As someone who never experienced this before but who had already seen it in person, he became extremely apprehensible.
What kind of danger could trigger his horribly dull senses? If he couldn't even feel when a car was about to hit him and had to be saved by his friend, he felt that only a world ending disaster could make him notice danger.
However, even after walking for ten minutes, nothing happened and this made him puzzled.
"Can it be that I'm so cowardly that my instincts are playing tricks in my mind?"
Not knowing whether to laugh or cry, he approached the supermarket and stared at it from afar with a glance full of caution.
Hiding behind the cover of an abandoned car, he looked up at the entrance after slightly putting his head off the cover and examined everything slowly.
The doors had been broken up and the way was clear, but there were many bodies at the entrance, some were relatively normal, others were clearly zombies, and the last ones were very weird. It was like someone had made a life-like diamond statue of a frightened person.
"This... there shouldn't exist a Medusa-like monster in real life, right? This is too absurd..."
No matter what, he couldn't find words to describe the scene in front of him. If it wasn't a diamond version of Medusa, what else could turn someone into a lifelike precious gem the size of a human?
No matter how rich people had been before the apocalypse, he didn't believe there were was someone insane enough to create a statue out of diamond and place it in front of the supermarket.
"In conclusion, there must be something very dangerous that is either inside, around, or that just happened to pass by sometime ago..."
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