Hi, my name is Caelus. At least that’s what I will be going by in this book. You see this is the forty third time I’ve written this book. This is the twenty third time I’ve tried to get it published. And the third time I’ve used an alias.

I used to write it with my own name, but I learned that it would only cause trouble. I also used to care about those around me, but that died down long ago.

I’m 24, and I’m fairly intelligent. That might be because of the Z1N1 though. You know when some people say we only use ten percent of our brain? Well they are fucking stupid.

We consciously use about 40% of our brains at all times. The other 60% goes to things like breathing and pumping our hearts. I should know, I’ve studied human neurology for a long time.

Let’s start by going back to the first time. Or, maybe about a year before. That’s when it REALLY started, although no one knew about it then. You should be warned though. This is more like a diary of past events.

Some things will be skewed, as most things are, through the lens of perceptions. When I was angry things seemed more annoying. When I was sad, things seemed more dramatic.

This is a true recounting of all of the major, I like to call them Infinity Loops. There were times when I interviewed other people, but it doesn’t matter. They never existed anyway.

Back when I was 23, I was just an ordinary guy. I had a less than perfect upbringing, but I was happy with my life. I was attending college, and paying for it myself.

I worked four days a week at a job that didn’t really matter to society, but I was happy with it. I got money, and had a lot of work friends. Most of the people there were really nice.

This story isn’t about that though. This story starts, as it always does, on 6/24/2015.

I was browsing the internet. I did that a lot back then. I don’t really remember what I was looking up, probably reading something online or looking at online comics. I wrote back then, but I only published online.

My girlfriend got sick the day before, so she was basically out the entire day. We sat around watching some series on my game console. It was that night that I noticed I had started coughing. I worked in a grocery store at the time. I may have spread my ‘cold’ around a bit but it doesn’t matter.

Spreading the disease was probably a blessing to about one in thousand. To the other 999, well they were going to die anyway.

A few weeks went by and my girlfriend and I got over our ‘colds’.

Our daily lives continued as if nothing had changed. For the most part it was true. Everything was the same as always. For about six months that is. That’s when the world started to notice the ‘Irregulars’.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

That’s what they are called most of the time anyway. A few times they were called ‘Demi-Humans’, but those were only the bleakest times.

The irregulars were categorized as such because of their irregular changes. They tended to become more prone to violence, more aggressive. They grew more powerful than any human would be capable of. Their skin aged rapidly. Decades were added on in only weeks. They stopped the aging after a few weeks, but seeing violent, powerful, old people was scary as hell.

There were only a few secluded cases, and the government took care to stop the disease from ‘spreading’. Little did they know it had spread six months before.

After four months of battling the disease, the president went into hiding. Not that it did him any good. The entire world was falling apart. Military patrolled the streets of big cities, impromptu militia walked the roads of smaller towns. All to keep the Irregulars at bay.

I was lucky. I lived in a city. A city with a nicely armed military force.

I’m not going to lie and say I was brave through the entire ordeal. Sure, at first I pushed the issue to the side, but then it got bigger. Bigger and bigger it grew. Until finally, my city was invaded by its ‘first’ irregular.

Of course, the military took care of it. But that was only the start. More cases started popping up. Every day new people would change into the elderly death machines. It became a habit just to kill all old people on sight.

I lost my job a week after the first incident in my city. Not that money mattered anyway. People had taken to looting and killing to make it by. The only reason we were safe, was that my girlfriend’s family had a few weapons, and I was a bit of an apocalypse survival type.

They were nice enough to let me live with them as the end approached. The family was her, her mom and dad, her sister, her sister’s baby, and her sister’s three dogs. The disease didn’t seem to affect any being except for humans.

Her baby was almost 2 now. I love kids. Always have. I just love to hold and hug cute little babies. Animals are the same. Anything cute and cuddly was lovable.

I digress.

I wasn’t really close to my family, part of the ‘less than perfect upbringing’. Anyway, with her family I weathered what I took to calling zombies. I called them that mostly because of the impeccable timing of ‘Nuclear Fallout IV’.

We slowly began to get on each other’s nerves. Anger escalated within every family unit. This one was no different. I was lucky enough to pick one that didn’t want to kill each other. They didn’t even kick me out.

The last day was horrible. It was the single scariest day I’d ever experienced. The entire last month we were watching the news almost non-stop. The last week had several bombings. Supposedly they were the government trying to stop the break out.

It was bullshit. Everyone knew the disease had infected all humans. The only thing that we had left was to wait to turn.

The last day. It was insane. It was something out of a nightmare. The news reported people showing strange signs of something akin to the ‘supernatural’. They seemed to possess some other-worldly powers. No two powers were exactly the same.

None of us believed it. It was just some kind of hopeful joke to play on the unsuspecting masses. Then came the reports of the bombs.

The bombs were straight out of a sci-fi novel. They didn’t explode, or implode. They didn’t seem to do anything. Every time one of the bombs was shown, it just disappeared. Just like all the matter around it.

The entire family was rapt with attention. Hanging on everything the news caster said. Suddenly the news show turned to static.

I was the only one that seemed to notice what was going on. I hugged my girlfriend, tightly. I just wanted to hold her one last time. I couldn’t hold back my scream as I saw the walls turn to particles. Suddenly I was engulfed in darkness.

For an eternity I raged against the darkness. I cried and screamed. It wasn’t fair that I had to die! It wasn’t fair!

“IT’S NOT FAIR!”