From above the sun returned in vibrance to light all scenery at once, but it did not bathe the world in glorious white light. No, indeed the sun had been destroyed and in its place was a void. The thing of absence radiated black rays of sunlight that in an instant completed the transformation of the world to black and white and beyond this point to its natural inversion. What was red became cyan and what was green became magenta and what was blue became yellow. All the world clashed in vibrant glory as its saturation returned to full and reverse. The magenta grass blew with a still wind beneath the yellow-white sky illuminated by a black sun that radiated not warmth but coldness. Anya’s white skin began to chill and she shivered, moving her arms to tightly bundle the torso beneath its torn peach-colored coat.

There was no God that came down to explain what this world would contain. There was only the smell of blood and burning flesh as Anya continued to push the button at intervals. Under the light of this inverted star she felt invigorated, as though she could kill God.

He deserved it, the bastard.

She walked through the empty fields of gently-blown magenta grass and they were soft on her jackboot’s leather skin. In the distance, buildings were visible, and yet they had never arrived. She almost doubted her own ability to traverse them, but in time they loomed as large as the skyscrapers they were before her. Dozens of stories of blue-black bone once hardened by the sun had become stilted and appeared to be melting away. Their once solid bricks had become soft to the touch as Anya ran her hands along their surface. It almost seemed as though a stiff breeze would destroy this monument to man’s hubris. To think they could build something to withstand this black sun? What vainglory.

She waltzed the blue-black streets dotted with various refuse of all shades and came upon nothing and no one. There were no bodies and no cars. Where once there were endless carriages powered by the human ingenuity to detach muscle from the worthless and powered by the vigorously-beating hearts of the most virile among them, now there was nothing. They had once covered every surface of the street, and now they were all gone.

She entered a building. If it collapsed all the better.

It had once been a shopping mall— the height of human ingenuity— once a collection of exotic spices and the home of the Grand Slavers’ Hall, but now it was reduced to a collection of statues. Beneath the bendy-walls were endless rows of petrified corpses. Some held their hands high to protect themselves from the light. Others held their children tightly in standing and sitting and screaming positions.

Deep within the pit at the center of this grand mausoleum were the muscular statues of slaves. They looked identical to their masters. One master in particular held a whip in what had clearly once been a striking position. The slave in his rotund front had been cowering, and his arm had been raised. Now the whip was slack.

She imagined the slave as taking great satisfaction in watching his master die, but couldn’t help but wonder which was more pleasurable: the act of knowing both you and your master would soon perish; or the glorious smile it must certainly have brought to watch your master’s wrist grow limp, his last act of meaningless defiance of fate being rendered as impotent as his lovemaker. She imagined it was the latter, of course, but couldn’t help but wonder which of the slaves had embraced their own death more than the master’s. It must certainly have been a high percentage of females and children. They weren’t on display here, but…

Anya shook her head and perished the thought. They were in the flesh mills, she knew.

She walked the endless rows of petrified corpses, all charred by the cool rays of black sunlight. To all sides the walls had begun to sag so deeply they seemed ready to fall at any moment. She watched as the first necrites entered the mall. They took no interest in her, instead opting to immediately run to the corpses. She allowed them this small victory in order to see what would happen. Judgement was in her palm as always, at the ready.

The first bloody skinless corpse found the first charred frozen pillar of ash in the shape of a man and began tearing at it like a barbecue rib. It started with the neck and worked its way down, but did not have the opportunity to finish its meal. Other necrites began tearing at the blackened flesh like ravenous dogs, but soon they began tearing each other apart limb from limb by the jaw. As every hardwood surface found itself soaked in rivers of blood, the first of the necrites began to change into something greater. Its muscle fibers solidified as though they would form a single continuous surface, and they began to whiten, as though the blood that ran out continuously had finally begun to drain its interior. Soon it was a near-perfect mirror image of herself, and in that moment it stopped attacking the others.

The first of the new beings was a pale white, but not entirely bleached as her own skin was. It still held remnants of color, and its feet were stained entirely red with the blood that poured out of its kin. Indeed, the other necrites continued chewing at the new being’s flesh, but their teeth were ineffective and the new being’s hands were easily able to bisect the others at the torso in a quick spin.

The new being was disinterested in the others, though this was only visible in its body language, as it had no face. Instead, it came for her. Anya placed her finger on Judgement’s raised smooth surface. It would require nothing but a twitch to blow the new being away. It did not speak and did not attack her. Instead, it simply walked slowly to a point some five feet distant from her side and stood still. It did not move further when questioned but mirrored her movements when she stepped to the side. She allowed it to live as it would be easy to kill as and when necessary.

Meanwhile, Anya did what must be done. First that was to observe the lack of food in the mall. It had all seemingly been rendered black ash just like the people. Then she left the building and found the tall white walls once deeply stained with ash that had defined all her memories before the life of a soldier. That was to say she found the tall white walls of a flesh mill, once stained with the ashes of the bodies reprocessed inside. It took all her courage and force to break down the double-steel door at its front. Inside were the usual smiling staff, happy even in death. Happy because of death.

She kicked them and scattered their corpses to the wind. When this building collapsed she wouldn’t spare them the chance of being found intact. Deeper within the foyer was a second double-door. To its side was a memory-style flesh lock, but Anya’s knife had already been broken. She didn’t spare the door her anger. It flew open and let out a loud noise in defiance, but ultimately fell silent as the bricks inside the door showed themselves before her. From behind, a horde of greater necrites followed.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Deeper within the building and down the long hall was a converted coal-fired steam plant. It had once been the start of a new age… but that age had never come. Instead they had discovered the new flesh and all it could promise. And so they had built these facilities. Inside were the petrified ashes of children had to transport the many containers between rooms. Detached hearts and nerves and livers needed to be processed quickly. Reattachment required a deft hand, and as childrens’ were small it allowed them to fit inside tight spaces. This included the abdominal cavity, and enabled the use of smaller incisions. Women, then, were used to hold the organs (mostly).

Inside the many bloated, distended bellies of the blackened pregnant corpses that dotted the room were many organs. Slowly the organs would whiten inside, and as they ripened they would be plucked at intervals right for each purpose. The most worthless scraps were not ripened at all. Instead they served as the beating hearts of the various cars and other infrastructure within the city. Being as there were so many and each one requiring four or five to power itself, it didn’t make sense to use quality parts for such a common purpose. There were only so many to go around, and only so many slaves to tend and be used in the flesh mills.

The next-most-ripe would be turned into mortar concentrate. Buildings were volume-intensive projects, and while the most expensive among them used pure mortar set into their shape, most used bone for the structural parts and mortar to fill the gaps. In this way the joining material was actually far stronger than the material itself, and gave the buildings additional support that allowed them to withstand forces most older materials couldn’t dream of. Further still, so long as the scaffolding was allowed to hold for the months-long curing process the concentrate would begin transforming the other materials around it, augmenting their nature and slowly changing the building into nothing but mortar itself.

These buildings, of course, were all affected by the black sun as the people had been, even if the process of their destruction was slowed by their lack of pulse. Anya so wished to destroy everything here before it could be covered by rubble, but it would seem the greater necrites had begun to pour over her from behind. They had no interest in her flesh— rather, they sought to tear open the pregnant stomachs of the women turned to ash. Her finger twitched and Judgement came down. The greater necrites, however, were unaffected by this act and continued a dead-line on the ripened organs.

There was panic in her heart as she watched them claw open the many bellies of the dead and smash their insides against mouthless faces— bloody entrails absorbed through the skin. It would seem that even without teeth or lips or tongue they could consume— and what was inside had not been charred beyond appetite. Indeed, unlike the statues Anya had already destroyed, it would seem only the outer layer of these women had been turned to ash. Perhaps only their skin. Everything beneath the skin was red and pink and white as it should have been. In fact, it was likely their deaths were from the suffocation induced from their mouths being stitched shut rather than the instant death of a brain turned to ash.

At this thought and sight Anya began to wretch and heave, but little came out. She hadn’t eaten in many hours, and there was nothing but bile inside her, but even it was the color of her bleached skin. It fell impotently on the ground, unable even to quell the sound of tearing flesh and its smearing against toothlessly closed mouths.

She had grown up here in this place. The building still haunted her dreams, even as she suppressed every childhood memory that dared surface. It had been a long year in forgetting the last dream. She had been over it… able to forget.

And now there was only this to remember.

She had become a soldier to damn these fucks to hell. Grab a gun and kill them all. Shove one up their ass and fiddle with the trigger just to watch them squirm, but now all her tormentors were dead and all those she wanted to save were being pilfered for parts by faceless abominations. Anya forced herself to look at the ashes of those who had replaced her and the open stomachs of those who had grown up to be placed in chains. Had they helped produce the gun she now put to her head?

BANG.

Click.

*clink*

The smashed bone bullet created by Anya’s nutrients fell to the ground. She sighed deeply with a thousand tears. Even her suicide had been rendered impotent.

She threw Judgement aside and ran from the building. The dirt was soft beneath the magenta grass outside in her hands as they began to dig into the sky-blue dirt. A thousand necrites stormed into the city beside her, but they didn’t care about her anymore. She had become an invulnerable being of new flesh and becoming the same was their only pursuit. She had been stripped by force of her humanity and made into one of them. Cursed to live past her peers. Cursed to live in a world where all her friends and family had been killed not even by spite or hatred or a will to conquer but by the cold machinations of some archon or another that wished to see the world lose itself forever. For what possible reason could you want to blow out the sun?

She didn’t know and it didn’t matter. The dirt flew from the pit as it expanded. She did not tire. She did not thirst. Her only physical pursuit was death, but it would be wrong to say it would be by her own hands. Anya had been dead for some time now. Perhaps from the moment David died. Or Raethor. Or Peter and all the rest. Or from long before that inside the ash-stained walls she had slaved away inside. Watching and watching and cutting out and harvesting the organs removed from one body to reprocess to something useful inside another. Perhaps even the painful death of having your organs harvested would have been a kinder fate than to struggle against something so grand and so total in its devastation only to fail by inevitable fate. Anya had always thought it would be better to live and to struggle for change in an impossibly brutal system. She had fought her way to becoming a soldier, even as she knew being someone else’s gun would do nothing about anything at all. And yet she had tried to be a force for change anyway. Now the bodies of her comrades had been left to rot in an open field and the pregnant corpses of those she had sworn to protect had been defiled.

But it didn’t matter anymore. None of it did. Perhaps her whole country was dead already. Perhaps the whole world was dead already. There was no further purpose in Anya’s life as a soldier, and there was no more humanity left in herself and perhaps the world to protect. She didn’t want to live on in a world where she had been forced by God to cast her humanity aside.

The pit had grown deep enough to lay in, so she set herself down inside and began piling dirt at first over her feet, then waist, then torso. It would be a shallow grave, but that was ok. There was a rumbling from the distance, perhaps from the buildings of the city having fallen down, but it didn’t matter anymore. The occupants were dead already, it made no difference that their buildings made of hubris had fallen over. This world was cursed, and always already doomed to this end, she finally knew that now.

Anya’s last words were “If there is a God, I hope he rots in hell.”

When the last of the dirt covered her face she felt great inner peace, as though death was the last thing necessary to cast the turmoil of humanity aside. But there was no great light at the end of a tunnel in her hole, only dirt.