I have decided to start posting several of my old short stories on here... nothing spectacular, just fun things I wrote while I was on the road with my previous job, sitting in hotel rooms, and trying to pass the time.
Here, is the first of these posts: Apocalypses Now! - Written in February, 2010.
Apocalypses Now!
As far as I know, I am one of only nine surviving members of the human race.
Tragic, I know.
Me, a fucking college dropout with a crappy job is one of the few “elite” who lived through it all.
It was like every bad movie ever made came true, one after another.
On March 12, 2010, a very large meteor impacted rural China. The initial blast killed thousands of Chinese farmers, villagers and the like. Luckily, it wasn’t large enough to do worse. As soon as it was possible, roughly a month after the impact, the governments of the world descended on China with every research tool known to man.
Field camps and men in large, plastic suits filled every television screen you could find. They claimed that the meteor was teeming with biological life from the Universe. It was heralded as the “greatest scientific discovery in the history of mankind.” Well, eleven years later, I’d have to disagree with them.
It started out well enough. The entire planet seemed to be in a good mood. We had proof of something other than ourselves. While there was some distrust from the religious right at first, they soon came around and proclaimed it a “message from God.” Hey, whatever works for them. All I know is that everyone and their brother was happy. One of the immediate discoveries from the meteor was… well, it was the cure for cancer.
I mean who wouldn’t be excited about that? Well, that was the last good thing to come from it all.
Doctors and scientists basically got into the world’s biggest pissing contest to see who could discover the “next great thing” from the meteor, which they were now calling “the Ark.” It held an amazing amount of “stuff” in it. Most of it was biologically compatible with our planet, but part of it was silicone-based. They were making claims that it held the answer to immortality and advances in computing beyond Steve Jobs’ wettest dreams… Computing power quadrupled in less than a month. The silicone microbes were, in fact an amazingly fast element for use in computing that humans had never even thought of. Things were on the up and up across the globe.
Well, one of their discoveries turned out to be less awesome and more terrifying. Some sort of microbe from the Ark seemed to… well, not to mince words here, but that shit brought people back to life. Not in the cool, “hey, nice to see you grandma” kind of way, but in the ‘hey, I’m going to eat you’ sort of way. It reanimated the dead. At first, people thought it was some form of rabies or dementia brought about by a virus, but it wasn’t. This virus multiplied within the bodies and brains of human hosts and replaced their normal insides with nothing but the will to move, eat, and multiply some more. It was the ultimate definition of a virus.
I mean, shit… Zombies, man.
At first, people took the news stories of the outbreaks as a hoax or some sort of religious attack on the Ark’s scientific amazements. Well, it didn’t take long for that shit to go right out the window. Soon we were faced with broadcast after broadcast of humanity facing down thousands upon thousands of our dearly departed in the streets of every city on the planet. It was a Hell I never thought I would never see the end of. Well It took two years, but some scientist working on technological advances from the Ark came up with a solution: Robots. He built a working, super intelligent being with the abilities to fight an enemy that required no sleep and fed on the living.
Again, the world rejoiced. Factories across the globe were transformed from car factories into AR01 factories. (Army Robot model 01) Within weeks, never sleeping, never eating machines were mowing down hoards of the undead. It was turning the tide against the virus-laden legions of death roaming the globe. Well, it wasn’t too long before that dream also backfired.
On July 29, 2015 AR02 came off the assembly line. On July 30, 2015 AR02 became self-aware and took over the legions of AR01s currently scouring the globe clean of the undead. AR02 decided that the enemy of undead was only an enemy so long as it had a food-source… Man. So, with the swift, logical progression of the newest in new technology the living were once again faced with a perilous fight against an un-bending enemy. Our only solace was the fact that the machines had destroyed enough of the “zombies” that we weren’t facing a two-front war.
Well, some man by the name of R. Bradbury - no relation to Ray - went all “John Connor” on the machines. He and his freakshow resistance fighters killed off the machines. Awesome, right? Unfortunately they used multiple nuclear warheads to do it. Which, instead of being our salvation, plunged those of us fortunate enough to have made it this far into a winter of perpetual night.
Yeah… Three years of nothing but snow and darkness. The best we could figure is that a few thousand people lived across the globe after the zombie apocalypse, and the robot apocalypse … and the nuclear apocalypse. Well, that was all fine and fucking dandy until on June 2, 2021 we made contact. Yep… it turns out the Ark was an alien’s version of humanity’s “Voyager 1” probe. It was meant to bring with it messages of good will, peace and prosperity. They didn’t think, for a second, that it was going to kill off 99.99% of the human race.
But it gets even better… or worse?
When they landed to make contact, a few of the survivors attacked them. Fear and violence took control and bam! A fucking inter-stellar conflict.
They won.
Not “They” as in the humans, but “They” as the fucking aliens.
Can you believe that shit? A meteor, a virus, zombies, robots, nukes and fucking aliens… Then, to top it all off… Of the nine of us, six are dudes. If I didn’t believe in God before this shit… Is sure as shit don’t now.
Nobody’s that mean.
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