Fort Gillem, Forest Park, Clayton County, Georgia. Tuesday, October 8th, 2019. 05:58.
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Most survivors remained unconscious for days after Armageddon.
A man in military uniform woke up, tasting ashes. It was still night. His body ached as he stood up. Remembering the sensation of his entire being burning, he checked and found no wounds on himself. As he recalled, he remembered the meteors. How every other person in the military base screamed along with him. The haunting memories broke something in the man's psyche, the same that would happen with several survivors.
Looking around him, everyone was burned, cooked from the inside, faces locked in expressions of pain, horror, and death. They were already smelling bad.
For hours, He walked among the dead, civilians and soldiers alike. Anywhere he went, he only saw people he knew, their faces frozen in their last moment of agony like a grotesque wax museum of horror. The man decided he'd died and went to hell. Or this was just a hallucination. Drawing his gun, he shot the base commander's head. It exploded in a spray of gore and blood.
Fort Gillem had thousands of people. He was the only one alive. Anywhere he went, the man met only the dead.
He decided not to care anymore about anything. The man laughed, cackled. Drooled. Urinated on his squad members. They were assholes anyway. He tied a string to a grenade, piled up bodies on it, then pulled. It blew up in a shower of gore and shrapnel.
Then he sang. "Hell! Ain't a bad place! Hell is from..."
He reached communications and tried to contact the rest of the army. No frequency he tuned on, no distress call he sent had an answer. Comms were gone. The satellite uplink was dead. No internet. No cell coverage. No GPS. Even the Russian copycat GLONASS was dead. Land lines were the same. It was as if the rest of the world had just vanished. Or died, just like Atlanta to the northwest.
Laughing, he decided it was his moment of glory as he abandoned his sanity altogether. The world was dead but now he was free to rule. With the weapons in the military base, he could forge his own kingdom. He would rule over this land of the dead. He would become Satan himself.
He just had to find some minions and a strategic spot to defend his realm. Other lost souls he would command. He put on a bulletproof vest and helmet along with his full field gear. Outside the base, he found three men approaching.
"Hands where I can see, motherfuckers!" He shouted and aimed at them. Shifting his aim a bit, he fired a warning shot.
They quickly complied. "We don't want any trouble, sir."
"Did you see any other survivors?"
"No, sir. Only the three of us." One said.
"Please don't shoot me!" Another whimpered.
"Gentlemen, under military statute seventy-five dash thirteen dash twenty-eight," he made it up on the spot, "this is a national-level emergency. You are conscripted into the United States Military, effective now. I am your commanding officer, and you will do as I say. Failure to comply can and will be punished with immediate termination. Do you understand?"
"Is that legal?"
"I don't think…"
The deranged soldier fired a full burst, ripping out chunks of pavement near the men. "Don't you understand? We were attacked by an unknown enemy! You are called to serve your country! The expected answer is 'yes, sir' and a salute." He finished by pointing his gun at them.
He was obviously going to shoot them if they refused. Since the other option was obviously death, they obliged. The three men shouted "yes, Sir!" and saluted. The madman had gained his first three lieutenants.
*
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Lakeview Apartments, Forest Park, Clayton County, Georgia. Tuesday, October 8th, 2019. 10:00.
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The girl put the feather back on her desk.
She felt stupid for nibbling on the feather.
But in Sara's defense, it was only after she tasted the thing she was convinced it was real. Reality hit her like a speeding Truck-Kun without sending her to the isekai. She was not hallucinating. Everything was real, the fallen Celestial, the world's end, the fires, the dogs barking, the feather, and probably the parasite in her gut. if it was in her gut, to begin with. But she was sure she'd swallowed it, so it probably was in her gut. Didn't it mention her esophagus?
She felt she had to do something.
Sara was drowning in the silence, eager for human contact. Funny how that worked. Before, surrounded by an ocean of people, she preferred to keep her distance. Now, she had an urge to talk to someone, anyone. The fairy said less than one in every thousand survived, but it also meant she had other people alive out there, right?
She looked at her glowing glass and silicon brick. The cellular signal was still down, and so was the GPS. She couldn't find a single WI-Fi network in range with the power outage. At least she was charging her phone off her foster father's power bank. She had to go back into the room with two dead people to find it. An idea came to her. She went back to her window and leaned, taking a good look at the street outside. She saw a crashed car poking out of a building on the other side, but nothing moved.
"ANYONE THERE?" Her shout echoed in the silent city, answered by dozens of dogs barking.
"HELP!" A distant man's distressed and hoarse voice shouted from afar a few moments later.
Her first instinct was to run down the fire exit and find the person. Then she remembered what happened and the movies and her decision not to meet survivors. Especially those of the male persuasion, if she could help it.
"WHERE ARE YOU?" She shouted nonetheless.
"I'M TRAPPED IN MY CAR!" The man shouted. "HELP! I CAN'T FEEL MY LEGS!" He begged again.
"SHUT UP, YOU FAGGOT!" Some other man shouted over a speaker. The mechanized voice didn't hide the undertone of madness.
She felt a wave of relief. Counting her, there were three survivors already. Even if one was wounded and the other felt dangerous, they were still people!
"HELP! HELP! SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP!" The first man started to holler.
Several gunshots from an automatic gun echoed in the air, reverberating off the building walls, drowning the sound of Sara's pounding heart. Then silence, utter silence. Dead silence. She thought her breathing sounded as loud as a rock concert.
Thumping inside her head, her heart beat a dreaded cacophony, reminding Sara that the social norms and unspoken social contracts vanished when the world died. The shooter fired a bit more, for whatever reason.
Finally, only sepulchral silence.
The girl shook and trembled in utter existential dread and fear for her life, her sanity leaking out of her eyes as she cried in silence. Sara swallowed the scream that wanted to get out as she withdrew back to her room and closed the curtains. It wasn't the time to carelessly risk her life for the sake of a stranger. She rationalized that the person crying for help could very well be faking it, he was a very good actor. Yes, that must've been it.
It was all a theatrical performance. That wasn't real.
"Please, talk to me," she begged the Celestial fairy. Nothing happened.
*
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Lakeview Apartments, Forest Park, Clayton County, Georgia. Tuesday, October 8th, 2019. 12:00.
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A lonely girl grew bored of staying in her room, fearing for her life.
What would wallowing in denial accomplish? She had to think about her own survival. Food and water wouldn't be delivered to her door anymore. Without electricity, the water pumps wouldn't work. The ubiquitous city utilities she took for granted were no more.
Water, however, was a big issue. Sara licked the inside of her mouth, and swallowed her saliva. She was getting thirsty just by thinking about running out of drinking water. She had to do something. The water in her building's water tank would go bad soon. That sprung her out of her stupor.
She went back to the kitchen and fetched every container that could hold water. Sports bottles, the used water and soda bottles bundled for recycling, even a wine jug with a little wine left which she dumped in the sink. She rinsed what she found with a bit of tap water, then filled them with filtered water. That would last her a few days.
The food situation wasn't so good either, not to say worse. She ate everything ready for eating in the fridge and most of the easy meals. What was left were cooking ingredients, a skill she regrettably never picked up. She was a disaster in the kitchen, the only thing she could do were the easy things, like frying an egg or boiling instant noodles. Her hand went to the chef's knife. Her foster father insisted several times to teach her, but the stupid spunky girl refused every time.
As if reminded that she needed food to exist, her stomach complained. Was it the parasite inside her? Maybe the word "parasite" was too rude. She did ingest it of her own free will. But she would need more food soon and her house wouldn't have anything for her.
Sara sighed. Too late to learn how to cook on YouTube. There was no YouTube anymore. No Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, nor Google. No Wikipedia. Not anything else. The World Wide Web was as dead as the rest of the world.
Pessimistic, the girl feared people would soon devolve into savagery, return to being cavemen. Scratch that, she heard a man kill another just for being annoying. Sara shuddered to think what would they do to her.
She looked at the broom closet door, and her thoughts focused on the toolbox. Sara took it out and checked the contents. Random odds and bits of metal, screws, bolts, and lots of assorted tools. She took a small straight strip of metal, pliers, and put herself to work. Bending it on both sides, she made a Z-bar. Sara checked it on the keyhole of the kitchen door, and it fit. With this tensioning tool, she only needed a lock pick before the whole apartment building would become available for exploration.
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Sara hoped some of her neighbors survived but she heard not a soul make a noise in the whole place. Her gaze drifted to the knife on the table. Would she need it? Getting into a fight was stupid but not being armed was even stupider if she was dragged into one. If her neighbors were dead or missing, she could loot their pantries for food.
She went back to her room and took a hair pin. After she removed the plastic caps with the pliers, she opened them until the legs were perpendicular and bent the tip of the straight side. She could use either the straight or the wavy side, depending on the locks. Back to a life of felony, it seemed. She had diligently stayed clean since she was caught and cut a deal with the DA. No. It was an emergency, she justified out of sheer desperation. Besides, law enforcement didn't exist anymore.
*
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Lakeview Apartments, Forest Park, Clayton County, Georgia. Tuesday, October 8th, 2019. 12:30.
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Despite the fancy name, nowhere in Sara's apartment complex, one could see a sliver of a natural water body. It was probably just bad marketing to sell the bunch of cheaply-built five-over-one apartments as fast as possible before word of the issues with the wooden structure on a concrete slab became visible.
Tenants were mostly workers of the many warehouses and industrial complexes that dotted the surrounding cities, taking advantage of a loophole in the zoning bylaws. The developers assumed people would be thrilled to live just a few miles from work and they were right. Sara didn't care. The apartment building beat sleeping in dirty alleys in the cold of winter any day. Her conclusion was that the developers had to cut some corners to build affordable housing.
She was currently focused on polishing and remembering her lock picking skills with the front door of her own apartment, with keys at arms' reach. The skills she learned in the streets quickly came back to her and she was confident she could pick the other locks in the building. Not as fast as the magical lawyer hands from YouTube she loved so much but so long they opened, it was enough. So far she wasn't pressed for time but she was well aware the situation would change fast as other survivors would rampage through the many houses and buildings in search of supplies. She had only a few days of drinking water and whatever was left in the building's water tank. She had to secure more.
The first victim... she meant, the first apartment she would check for survivors, yes, survivors was Mrs. Robinson's right across the corridor. Sara stepped outside, shrieked, and ran back inside, slamming the door behind her. Her blood pressure dropped again and she felt a cold run up from her extremities. The improvised lock pick fell on the kitchen floor. She had found another dead body in the corridor.
As burnt as her foster parents, lying on his stomach, staring straight ahead like salvation was that way, with an arm stretched in front as if attempting to crawl forward or grab someone running away from it. Just like one of those zombie slasher movies but uglier. Sara shut her eyes and slid down the door until she sat on the floor. Then she sent her mind on a tangent, to avoid thinking of the new dead body.
The fairy said that only one in every thousand people survived the biblical-style Armageddon. Atlanta's metropolitan area had how many people living in it before yesterday? Six, ten million people over twenty-nine counties? That left several thousand survivors. She bit her lip as she remarked to herself that at least one had already died to survivor attrition, then how many to random violence. What Sara missed was that dozens, hundreds of survivors died in the massive pile-ups at the several freeways that crisscrossed the urban landscape. And then more died from the falling meteorites and debris.
Maybe those were the lucky ones.
No survivor interaction would be safe going forward. From gun-crazed maniacs to desperate people, to sexual predators, to well-meaning people hiding a terrible secret agenda. Not even the government or military would provide relief. Only one out of every thousand survived and she was sure the fairy said the culling didn't have any bias toward any ethnic group, age, gender, or wealth. It was as random as it could be. Most were dead regardless.
Like Mr. Taylor from the last apartment down the corridor lying on the hallway floor. Distraction over, her attention went right back to the dead body. She spun and went from sitting on her butt to standing on her knees as she faced the door and opened it just a bit. She peeked, then shut the door.
A cooked dead body, check. Creepy position, check. Immovable, check. Mr. Taylor, check. She whimpered. At least it wasn't staring straight at her. Mr. Taylor died looking at the door to his apartment.
*
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Lakeview Apartments, Forest Park, Clayton County, Georgia. Tuesday, October 8th, 2019. 13:10.
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Two choices. Either move Mr. Tailor's body and regain access to the staircase, or give up on the rest of the building and leave through the fire stairs and find shelter elsewhere. One of these brought serious issues. The uncertainty of the outside. The crazy guy with the automatic gun. She didn't want to draw the attention of other survivors. Not until she felt safe enough to meet someone alive.
No way she would deal with the dead body in the corridor right now, though.
Back to her living room, she took her time as she paced around the coffee table and sipped water. The silence of the damned outside was broken by a sharp wailing. A police siren. Sara's heart fluttered. Maybe civilization survived! She rushed to the window facing the street and was about to throw the curtains open when she heard the unmistakable sounds of tires screeching and a car crash. Changing plans, she just peeked between the curtains.
Apparently, the police cruiser did a tailspin and rammed the side of a parked car. The airbags were deployed and she could see people moving inside. After struggling to break free, two young men walked out of the vehicle. They immediately started to bicker out loud, the silence allowing their voices to go a long way.
"Damn, you idiot! Did you have to total the cruiser?" The first one yelled, angry veins popping out of his neck as he bled from his forehead.
"I saw a kitten crossing the street!" The second man shrugged.
The lights and siren on the police cruiser were still on. She noticed they both had firearms tucked in their pants, an accident waiting to happen as she heard some guys talking during her years on the streets. One misfire and they would be removed from the gene pool and maybe win a Darwin Award, if that was still a thing. No internet, so no trophy for the stupid guys. The first one slapped the second on the back of his head over some stupid blame game. Sara was dismayed. This wasn't an organized relief operation. Obviously, these two idiots had taken a police cruiser for a joyride.
"The world has gone to shit. Fuck you and your kittens. Now we need to walk back to the station to get on another ride."
Suddenly, automatic gunfire rained on them. The girl tried to hide but her body wouldn't answer, her legs and arms didn't move. She was frozen in fright.
The first guy fell down with blood spurting out of his chest as a hail of bullets ricocheted against the asphalt and the police cruiser, silencing the car for good as the siren went out but not the lights. The second man ran around the car crash and ducked.
"Help me!" The first guy gurgled as he spat blood.
"Fuck it! I'm not—"
Another hail of bullets struck the police car right next to the dying man. She was frozen on the spot, stuck like the proverbial deer in headlights, witnessing her fears come true, shaking, sobbing, and leaking a little down under. Her legs protested as her muscles turned to jelly but she couldn't pull out. Somehow she knew she had to witness the events unfold.
"GET OUT OF MY LAND!" It was the same megaphone male voice from before.
"Third floor, yellow building," the dying guy told his partner. "He has a fifty cal machine gun. Kill the bast..."
That was the Light Garden office tower a couple of blocks down the street, right at the major intersection between Jonesboro and Forest Parkway. That place had a vantage view over the neighborhood and the military base, a perfect place for someone to shoot at people on the street.
The man's head popped like a balloon, sending blood and flesh everywhere. Sara shrieked and attempted to close the curtains but she was sure she didn't do it fast enough. She was sure the second guy saw her. They made eye contact. Fuck, fuck, fuck, she needed to do something. Instead, she remained frozen underneath the window, shaking like a cup of water with a t-rex approaching.
"GET OUT OF MY LAND! THIS IS MY KINGDOM NOW!"
"Everybody is dead, you dimwit. You are the king of a necropolis!" The second guy shouted back.
"YOU AREN'T YET. BUT IMMA GONNA FIX IT!"
His promise came with another shower of bullets. She heard bullets strike metal until the police lights went out and the car caught on fire but didn't explode. Hollywood had lied to her.
Standing on her knees, she peeked between the curtains. The police cruiser was now on fire, and the second guy was nowhere in sight. She saw no corpse but the first one, bleeding out on the pavement.
The decision about staying or leaving was sealed. She couldn't go out in the open if the neighborhood policy was to shoot on sight. Sara decided she had to disturb Mr. Taylor's final rest. The hallway wasn't the right place for the kind middle-aged neighbor.
Sara attached the knife sheath to a leather belt. She wasn't so sure she had been spotted but didn't want to be defenseless in case she got a surprise visit from the second joyride guy. If they took a police car and guns, they probably took other police paraphernalia too. Like riot control stuff such as tear gas or pepper sprays.
She summoned scraps of courage and walked out into the corridor. Then went back, without any girlish screams this time. The fourth time was the charm. As she approached him, she noticed Mr. Taylor was exactly on the same spot, staring at the door. Queasy, the girl inched next to him and knelt on the ground.
"Rest in peace, Mr. Taylor," she prayed as she tried closing his eyelids.
At least she tried. Moving her hand over the eyelids like in the movies did nothing. They slid past and touched the dry eyeballs. Mr. Taylor felt oddly stiff. She wished she had internet access to Google it up. Next, she tried dragging him. But the corpse was stiff as a plank and extremely hard to move. Moreover, it felt greasy. Disgusted with the situation and her own reaction, Sara wiped her hands on a paper towel and decided to check Mr. Taylor's apartment first. It was the safest one at the end of the corridor.
She took more than a few minutes to pick the lock but it relented and opened on the twelfth try. "Excuse me," she said as she trespassed. A polite burglar in the apocalypse, she chuckled to herself.
"You're welcome, Sara," Mr. Taylor answered.
*
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Mr. Taylor's apartment, Lakeview Apartments, Forest Park, Clayton County, Georgia. Tuesday, October 8th, 2019. 14:54.
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Hollywood depicted ghosts as translucent, glowing, blue, grayscale, every which way but the real one.
Mr. Taylor's was easily recognizable, very solid to her eyes but he was also not the same. His obsessions, sins, and burdens were all visible on his body. Every pocket had a bunch of crumpled money poking out, almost falling out but never doing so. His trousers appeared to have a third, misshapen and wavy bulge inside them that ran all the way to his knee. He had bulgy eyes and a forked tongue and his gaze made her very uncomfortable.
She instinctively knew those were his sins. His material attachments. Avarice, lust, addiction to porn and hookers, a habit of spying on people to pry their secrets. The senses she inherited from Verachiel told her he wasn't mired so deep in sin he was beyond redemption, condemned to the pits of hell. If they were still around. All bets were off regarding the fate of the dead in this post-Apocalyptic world. Heaven and Hell no longer existed.
Gone was her image of the kind neighbor that always had a nice word for her. She shivered as she now recognized what Mr. Taylor thought when he looked at her.
She tried calling the fairy for help but got no answer, only a mild headache as a reward for her attempt. So she awkwardly waved at the ghost without making eye contact. "Good morning, Mr. Taylor."
The ghost sighed. It sounded mildly annoyed but still polite. "There's nothing good this morning, child. The world has ended and I died."
She nodded. "So you are aware that you are dead. Are you upset?"
He stared down at himself. "I am well aware of my predicament but I am not upset. The flesh I left behind in the corridor is but a forgotten husk I shed. How may I help you?"
Sara considered her options. Once more, she found her base emotions eerily subdued as she recognized she was oddly calm next to a ghost that probably would go straight to the sex offender registry if people knew what he did. She only had a hunch from the senses she inherited but the way he said the words "child" creeped her out. Probably the fairy was once more messing with her mind to keep her calm and in control. She hated it less and less as she admitted it was very useful.
The monster before her was repulsive. Gone was the image of the kind neighbor that was obviously preparing to give out candy during Halloween, if the baskets full of candy on the couch were to be believed. Oh, god! Did he hurt any kids? Did it matter anymore? What should she do? Mr. Taylor waited patiently for her to make up her mind. A pedophile neighbor wasn't her idea of a starter ghost. Shouldn't things start easy and then ramp up?
She decided to play along with the Seraph's wishes. "Actually, I wanted to help you. Do you have any unfinished business?"
The ghost hadn't taken its eyes from her even for a moment. But now it stared at one of the bedroom doors. Every apartment in this building was built the same, the only difference was that each half was mirrored left and right.
"Actually, yes. I have a few terabytes of child pornography on my computer. I would like you to delete it before the police find out. The siren gave me shivers. As did the US Marshals that kept watch over you."
There it was. Fairy calming her down or not, Sara was about to panic. She turned around and took a step to leave. The ghost held her by the wrist. She yelped and yanked her hand free but froze on the spot. The ghosts could TOUCH her? What the hell? Her mind ran on a tangent and decided to go AWOL. Sara blanked out for a moment.
"Please," Mr. Taylor's specter begged.
She looked at the entity and lied, "I'm just going to get a hammer. There's no electricity, I have to smash your hard disk."
Now that she wasn't attempting to go away, the ghost moved away and she made a vow to wash it first thing after she made it back home. That's when she heard the fire ladder roll down on the ground floor. Then the sound of something heavy climbing it, boots striking the metal and ringing the whole escape rig. Trying to keep her heart from jumping out of her throat, Sara rushed past the ghost as she beelined to Mr. Taylor's bedroom and pulled the blinds aside to look.
The second guy was climbing her fire exit.
"I have a hammer. It's in my toolbox," Mr. Taylor said as he followed her to the bedroom.
"Do you have a gun too?" She asked. The ghost nodded. Sara winced and flinched away. Maybe she could kill the disgusting neighbor a second time.