If Michael had known that by the end of the day, the apocalypse would have started and a rift in the fabric of space-time would destroy reality as we know it and thrust countless millions of eldritch horror monsters onto our planet, then he probably wouldn’t have spent the last few hours before everything went to hell worrying about his latest writing assignment.

Which, as it so happened, might turn out to be his last.

As it so happened, he didn’t. So, on November 4th, he was sat in his childhood bedroom in his parents’ house, because since his girlfriend had broken up with him he’d had to move back home. He’d turned half his old bedroom into a makeshift office, and he was trying to make it as a freelance writer.

Taking a sip of his tea, he was hit by it being cold and bitter. It confirmed to him that life was currently pretty shit, and it probably couldn’t get any worse. Somewhere downstairs, his parents sat watching the news. Since they’d retired, that’s all they seemed to do. The television set droned on interminably, making Michael want to go deaf.

It was worse this week. Even worse than usual. That’s because over the Atlantic Pond, it was election time. The American election cycle was plastered all over British news, and just like every time, this time it was different. Good and Evil. Vote for our candidate, or everything is going to hell.

Little did anyone know that hell was coming to them anyway.

As Michael tapped away at his keyboard, the television blared. The usual talking heads, shouting at one another, arguing over this candidate and that, the scandal and that, and the future and what not, and it was enough to drive a man insane.

The kettle boiled in the kitchen downstairs.

“Is it time for afternoon tea yet?” Michael's Mum shouted.

“I’m working!”

The television got even louder.

He glanced back at his assignment. Still nothing.

His mobile phone buzzed. The group chat he was part of with his friends. "Holy shit" read the notification. He tapped it to "Do Not Disturb", but then it went off a few more times anyway. Even the phone hated him.

He sighed, looking back at his screen. He’d written two words.

Two words.

When was it time to call it quits? When did he give in? When did he finally surrender? Because right now he didn’t want to admit it to himself. He didn’t want to even entertain the possibility, but he was at a loss. Then Danielle - his ex - calling him a loser who'd never make it rattled around in his head, and he looked around his bedroom; still filled with his childhood things.

It wasn't even the writing, really. The truth was he loved to write and he loved the craft and he knew, with all his heart, that he wanted to be a writer.

What was bothering him was that he was pushing thirty and was back at his parents' because he couldn't afford the rent but her and the guy she cheated on him with could, and now he was a 'writer' slaving away making near-enough minimum wage with no prospect of moving out or dating anyone again in the near future.

'Solar Panels: The future looks bright for these smart customers!'

Urgh.

He pulled up his phone, ignoring the Do Not Disturb function he'd set for himself, and checked out the group chat.

He saw a video from Australia, where one of his online buddies lived. It was a quick thirty-second clip of a massive explosion; what looked like the epicentre of a nuke going off. But the thing was that the mushroom cloud wasn't going up. It was expanding outwards, and it wasn't the dark grey-black of a nuclear blast, but some sort of sickly yellow.

And there were... shapes. Dark, moving shapes inside the cloud, getting clearer and more pronounced as they expanded.

Michael's heart was thudding in his chest. "WTF is that" he posted to the chat.

"Looks fake to me" came a quick response from another one of his friends, who was in France. Then a bunch more messages popped up in rapid fire; a whole series of pictures, then more videos. From Australia, France, Germany, America, Japan, China, and Brazil.

Michael put the phone down. His Australian friend was a bit of a prankster, and he really didn't have time for this yet anyway.

'If the world's gonna explode', Michael thought to himself, 'let it happen before I have to turn my assignment in.'

His parents called, "Michael, get down here!"

Michael felt his stomach drop.

It couldn’t be happening, he thought. He made his way down the stairs and into the living room, where the television was almost deafening. He looked first to his parents, who were dumbstruck, then he glanced up at the screen.

The news anchor had a message on his ear piece, but the words had escaped him. His jaw was slack. Behind him was footage of the Atlantic, the eastern coastline of America. Something had ripped through it. A line, almost like a scar, but a yellowish colour. It seemed to stretch on forever, going out across the ocean and beyond, into space.

This clearly wasn't election day coverage anymore.

Then the TV automatically switched to an emergency broadcast; a high-pitched beeping sound filled the air, and the flashing red logo of an exclamation point in a triangle appeared on the screen.

“Jesus, Michael, what’s going on?” asked Michael's Dad.

“I don’t know, dad. This is crazy,” he replied. “You guys have been watching the news more than I have. What did they say before the news cut out?"

"They were talking about something going on over the Atlantic. Some sort of explosion, like you'd get with a nuclear missile. Then the signal was lost."

"I saw the same thing from Australia. It looked like a nuke, but I don't know," he said, "this thing across the ocean, and the explosion I saw in Oz... it's not right."

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Then the blank screen cut to the BBC news desk, and a black reporter, dressed severely in black, started to state an emergency message to the people of Britain. Michael was much too stressed to remember exactly what it said, but it went something like:

"...the Prime Minister is on his way to an emergency bunker in Scotland. He's urged everyone else in the United Kingdom to stay in their homes and await further information. There are no instructions yet from the military. The US has also issued an emergency message, telling its citizens to shelter in place..."

The footage from earlier, the thing across the Atlantic Ocean, came back on the screen. Then it was followed by the footage that Michael's Australian friend had sent. Following it shortly after was footage from what looked like India; a massive flood event seemed to be occurring; water rushing up over the cities.

Michael felt his mobile vibrate again, and when he took it out his pocket it nearly shook his hand off. The group chat had probably a dozen more videos. Then, he got a phone call. It was Danielle, the ex who had broken up with him just weeks earlier, and his stomach sank even more.

"Not right now," he told himself. He swiped to reject her call. "Dad," he said, looking at his father, "how much food and water do we have in the house?"

"How am I supposed to know?" his Dad replied, incredulous.

"Fine," Michael said. He took in a deep breath, then headed into the kitchen. He started looking in all the cabinets and cupboards, pulling out anything that might be edible. Then his phone rang again. He didn't even bother looking at it this time, letting it ring.

Instead, he made his way over to the sink, put the plug in, and started filling it up with water. Then he ran upstairs and did the same with the bathtub. If this was the end of the world, they'd need as much water as they could get.

"Shit, shit, shit" Michael exclaimed, running back down the stairs and returning to the kitchen. He took stock of all the tins he'd found; there was a decent amount of them. And then there was a good deal of fresh vegetables. His parents had always been health conscious. But it wouldn't last. It was maybe a week's worth of food.

He quickly ran to his room, accidentally kicking his swivel chair, cursing himself in the process, and grabbed his wallet and shoes.

Making his way down the stairs as quickly as he could, he shouted through the living room door as he reached the bottom and pulled his running shoes on, "I'm just headed out. Going to the store to grab what I can. Back soon!"

Then before his Mum got more than a, "Michael!" out, he'd slammed the door shut and started sprinting to the shops. There wasn't any time to lose.

As Michael ran past the houses in his street, everything seemed oddly normal to the point that he almost thought he was being stupid and paranoid, or maybe he'd dreamed up the whole 'apocalyptic event' thing. But no, because a quick look at the sky confirmed it. The yellow scar across the Atlantic Ocean was visible even in Britain.

The sky seemed darker, and the sun, when visible, seemed tinged by that sickly yellow.

He made it to the shops in about a minute and a half, and again he was struck by how normal everything seemed. People seemed to be gong about their regular business; buying the papers, browsing for vegetables.

He had a good relationship with the owner, Mr. Singh. Mr. Singh always liked to make small talk with Michael, but today, the Indian shopkeeper wasn’t in.

Instead, a younger man - probably the owner's son, Michael guessed - stood behind the till. He didn’t seem interested in small talk. Instead, he just stood with his face glued to the screen of his smartphone, occasionally looking up and out the window. When he caught sight of Michael, he gave a tiny nod of acknowledgement and went right back to playing a game on his phone.

Michael began grabbing tins of whatever was there and bottles of water, shoving it all into the basket he'd grabbed as he came in the door. One good thing about him being stuck as some sort of hermit at his parents' house was that he'd had time to work out, so the heavy weight of all the tinned food didn't slow him.

He pulled his wallet out of his pocket and went to the counter. He put everything on the counter, then glanced up at the news report on the little television in the top right of the wall behind the counter.

It showed what seemed like riots, or a mob, in America, somewhere. He wasn’t sure where, though. It wasn’t a city that he recognised, at least.

Michael pulled out his card, and realised he probably didn't have enough in his account for everything. He sighed.

"Can I just put back the bottles of water and pay for this stuff first?" Michael asked the guy at the till. "Then I'll go to a cash point and pay for the rest."

The shopkeeper didn’t look away from his screen.

"Dude, are you going to serve me or not?" Michael asked him. The guy at the till was really pissing him off.

"Serve you? The fuck you mean?" asked the young man, finally looking away from his game.

"You work here, don't you? I've got to pay for this stuff."

For a second, the kid behind the counter mean-mugged Michael like he was more likely to stab him than ring up the goods.

Then in instant it didn't matter anymore, because from somewhere above the store, the sound of a massive cracking sound came from above, like thunder. It sounded like the roof of the building above was breaking in half. It was followed by an earthquake like vibration that rattled the whole store.

The bottles in the front window started to fall and break, spilling out onto the street, and the canned food on the shelves started to tumble over, rolling onto the floor.

Michael looked around in shock.

"What the fuck was that!?" said the kid behind the counter.

As he finished his question, the ground shook even more violently, and Michael was nearly thrown from his feet. He gripped the counter tightly to hold on.

"Bro, what the hell?" said the young guy at the counter. "I’m getting out of here. This is crazy."

He ran out the door, and then a couple of the other customers ran out as well, abandoning their shopping baskets.

"Uh," Michael started, but then realised he was talking to nobody in particular. Thinking on his feet, he decided two things; firstly, the kid had basically given him permission to have the goods in his basket for free, and secondly, he could fit a lot more of them in if he took a trolley instead of trying to carry the goods.

Five minutes later, he was back on his street with a full shopping cart.

There were a few kids playing on bikes near the houses on the street where Michael lived, and he wondered if he should tell them to get inside. They were probably about eleven years old. Then he decided it wasn't his problem. He just concentrated on pushing his shopping trolley home as quick as possible. If this was the end of the world, him and his parents would need all the food they could get.

He hoped his parents had figured out to switch the bath tap off before it overflowed, and he cursed himself for not explicitly telling them to. But they were smart people, TV-addiction aside.

The cracks of unnatural thunder had not subsided, and the air had take on a weird hue as though they'd entered the eye of some sort of storm.

Then a massive explosion shook the entire street. It knocked him on his ass and nearly made the trolley cartwheel away with all their supplies.

Michael saw the children fall to the ground as well, screaming.

A scream came from one of the houses, followed by an older man rushing out and gathering the kids. Then from somewhere around, a huge crash sounded; it was unlike the ones he'd heard before. This one wasn't thunder; it was more like something was crashing into things.

Michael looked around. He was sure that the sound was close by, but it had to have come from somewhere out of sight.

Going as quickly as he could, he got up, dusted himself off and started pushing the trolley once more up the hill towards his home.

As it ended, he must have been a couple of hundred yards away from home when the next massive crash sent him flying forward, and a massive crack went straight through the street. He tumbled and his shopping trolley tipped over. Then the ground gave way, and Michael felt himself being thrown upwards into the air.

He landed twenty feet away, and everything hurt. He felt like he'd been run over. Getting to his feet, he saw that the shopping trolley was on its side and half of its contents had fallen out onto the ground. The rest was submerged in what was now a massive chasm, a hole in the ground about ten metres wide and who knows how deep. The ground had basically split open. The road was cracked, and the pavement had crumbled into nothing. His neighbour's car, an old green Ford Fiesta, was now hanging precariously off the side of the road, threatening to slip into the chasm at any moment.

As Michael looked down, it wasn't the depth of the hole that made him recoil in terror. It was the thing at the bottom of it. He caught just a brief glimpse before the whole hole was enveloped in a black mist. A massive creature with a greenish, fleshy back, and what looked like several rows of teeth, each row bigger than the last.

Michael didn’t have time to take it in.

The thing was heading up to the surface.

***