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I, Maria Clara da Conceição Ferreira, am nothing but a ghost flitting through life.

It had been this way when I studied fundamental field perturbations and paracausal felines and now, with the apocalypse having upturned everything I thought I knew of reality, I remain yet still nothing more than a ghost.

The clock struck thirteen on March thirty-first.

Most students of the Moswetuset Institute of Technology—M.I.T. for short—hid in their classrooms after the eclipse made the sky go black and the moon grow eyes, having quickly found out that the eldritch moonlight did strange things to human flesh.

You did not look at the moon anymore—you could feel it looking back.

I had been one of the first to accidentally touch a ray of moonlight. It had burnt like the worst-imaginable frostbite of a Basstown winter. I could feel it crawling under my skin, a prion chain-reaction unraveling my very soul under the light of the many-eyed moon.

My caramel skin melted away to bare muscle. I looked like the med student’s cadavers, but bright red instead. The burning subsided quickly after exposure as I fell to the ground and crawled back into the shadows.

We began to call it moonscorch because people saw transparent, subliminal flames immolate its victim while said victim, stranger still, did not. All it touched, those hand-gel tongues of fire took something of theirs and gave something back in its place—a perverse gift that ran on the same ironic fuel of fairy tale curses.

I had lost my skin but now barely anything could harm me, my muscles and bones protected by the inviolate hide of a Nimean lion. It’s been however-many-days-long since our digital devices—phones, laptops, desktops; anything that ran on the electron—were fried by an electromagnetic pulse. and I've yet to succumb to bacterial infection.

The ‘gifts’ proved useful when the monsters came.

Some of the braver and more foolish of us had ventured to the rest of the roofed campus. The survivors spoke of areas where tears in the fabric of reality opened into other worlds, anomalies pouring out and attacking anything with a heartbeat and metamorphosing anything devoid of complex thought.

Praying mantises became apex predators not of insects but instead bipedal simians, fungal-red growths forming chitin that withstood the improvised weapons of terror-stricken students. Their grasping appendages had exchanged grappling for cutting, a rusted sort of metal secreted by the fungus and then sharpened against the chitin of their brethren to the razor’s edge.

Someone, probably dead now, had christened them as ‘scythes’ because of how easily they reaped our meager lives.

This was insanity. Nothing made sense anymore. People fell into their own shadows and never returned. Reflections stepped out of mirrors and cannibalized their makers while not harming even a hair of anybody else’s head. The moon had grown eyes and burnt away my skin.

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When the scythes began to rush into my dorm, I met them with an aluminum baseball bat coated in the blood of the last schmuck that owned it.

My bones were titanium and my muscles steel cables, all of my hysterical strength pouring into the bat with the abandon of a madwoman. I had ceased then to be anything more than a spectator in my own body, my ego detached as my id took the pilot’s seat with animal fury.

The bat struck the scythe, the vibrations corruscating along the bent metal like a thousand-thousand gongs. The overgrown insect was stupefied as my hands grabbed its blade arm and stabbed its head with itself. That hadn’t been enough to kill the thing, mind—the world didn’t make sense anymore, afterall.

I twisted the arm out of its insectoid socket and then used it like its namesake, scything through any red motherfucker I saw in front of me until all that remained were trembling moonscorched students. Without the perverse gift of the many-eyed moon, you died—there was simply no contesting the strangeness of monsters beyond your mortal ken without some strangeness yourself.

Through the intervening long night, the moon slowly grew out-of-phase, being consumed by an inky darkness until only a black sun remained to paint the world red. It did not hurt nor change us like the many-eyed moon and provided roughly twenty-four hours of sanguine light. Need for sleep disappeared entirely once you were ‘scorched.

When the moon eclipsed the sun once again, it had grown rings now. These weren’t like those of a planet, like Saturn, instead drawing upon the judeo-christian imagery of the ophanim—angels that were chariot-wheels superimposed atop themselves with eyes lining the rings.

These rings became our protectors, their eyes opening to radiate crosses atop apertures into the other worlds, singling them out and warning us. The moon only scorched now when the rings did not cover the five hollow eyes of its mantle—we could feel when an incoming theophany-event neared, the hairs at the napes of our necks standing on end under the sense of impending-doom; premonition, essentially. We, the moonscorched, had gained strange instincts along with our perverse gifts.

Why had it been named a theophany-event? Well, those that were already moonscorched that witnessed the moon’s radiation for a second time… well they saw God. The moon lit them up in a pillar of subliminal fire, Gregorian chants emanating from everywhere and nowhere at all like a choir of unseen angels.

I rather wished that the angels continued unseen.

They became monsters just like those that came from the apertures: mindless and ravenous. They grew wings from their backs—bone and then flesh sprouting and conjoining to form arms with too many joints and hands with too many knuckles.

Fallen angels came at us and we stood our ground under the shade of the Campus, mantis-blades in hand.

I contended against my own friends and colleagues, cutting them down under the light of the many-eyed moon. Unlike the scythes, cranial damage took and so we aimed for the throat whenever a pack of starving angels came at us, separating skulls from necks.

We became old hands at surviving the Apoc by the seventh day since the moon grew rings. Fight, kill, hide, and repeat. Our nomad band of now only-ten roamed when the black sun rose and slept when the moon devoured it in its eclipse—it had been decided that we wouldn’t risk a theophany even with our newfound premonitions to warn us of them.

Why do I write all of this on the wall of an abandoned underground parking lot?

Because in two more hours, give or take, this world will be erased, shaken like an etch-a-sketch and reset to zero. And then it’ll all happen, again and again and again.

And again.

This was the third perverse gift that the Apoc gave me, more curse than blessing.

It started when we heard the voices.

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