Planet Earth, 2162 AD

It was a particularly sunny spring day when Quinton and Angus finally decided to leave Quinton’s Bexley North manor, which was peculiar, since it was the middle of winter.

But prior to that - Quinton thought it necessary to put Angus through a light tactical training program of sorts. He reasoned that without at least some modicum of know-how, Angus’s odds of survival at survival with at least some of his original limbs still attached were pretty well slim to bugger-all. Angus was thankful for it, even if he felt thoroughly humiliated by the whole thing.

The training consisted of a rigorous outdoor bootcamp involving obstacle courses, combat training, as well as humiliating practical jokes that had spurious academic value but amused Quinton hugely.

Overall, whilst the entire experience felt a little like a fraternity hazing, Angus, but by the end of it, felt a smidge more confident about braving the terrors of the world outside. Which was worth a few bruises to his body, and his ego, he reasoned.

Quinton taught him how to shoot his emasculatingly small lady-revolver, and the basics of hand-to-hand combat. In this instance, Quinton erred towards teaching Angus the sorts of moves a hapless woman (or man) might use against an over-amorous assailant. This was because brute force, or even its less effective yet slightly more inoffensive cousin, impolite force - wasn’t something that Angus would have even with a thousand years of training.

Quinton taught him about 200 ways to kick an approaching assailant in the testicles, as well as other techniques that involved using the attacker’s weight against them, and learning how to fall without getting hurt, and again kicking them in the testicles, or the female equivalent (which Angus was told was surprisingly almost as painful) for good measure.

Angus was also now sporting a lovely vest of kevlar body armour, which nicely complimented his cricket helmet and box. It gave him slightly more confidence, but he wondered why there wasn’t options for kevlar leg guards, and kevlar head guards, too - for that matter - just some sort of kevlar full bodysuit would be far more useful as far as he was concerned.

His emasculating glitter-hewn lady-revolver was strapped effeminately to his thigh, and his anxiety disorder was giving him chest pains, vertigo and and all-over woolly feeling that made him feel a bit like jelly on the drop-down table of a plane in heavy turbulence.

He didn’t feel ready, but they were running out of time.

Quinton, on the other hand, looked like the middle section of a Venn diagram where the outward circles were ‘Rambo 3,’ and ‘Indiana Jones, on a course of human growth hormones since birth.’

He was strapped with chain guns, rail-guns, nail guns and all sorts of other guns that Angus hadn’t seen before.

He had lasers, infra-red, blue and turquoise scoping headgear, ammunition belts draped across him like the Christmas tree of a weapon-obsessed Central African warlord, and the same chiselled square chin that seemed to have been measured out in impossibly perfect right angles.

‘All right Gus?’ as Quinton hesitantly looked over his shoulder at Angus.

‘No.’

Quinton winked at Angus.

“Attaboy.”

Quinton silently calculated the time to which Angus was likely to meet a bloody, squidgy ending, and then rounded it down.

‘Here we go!,’ and with that Quinton opened the door.

To nothing.

Pure, silent nothing.

In fact, it was the nothing that was odd. There wasn’t anything of the entire period of time since the big accident that had lended itself to nothing happening. Which was suspicious, to be sure.

Quinton and Angus walked for miles, stopping occasionally to look at the rudimentary road map Angus and Quinton had done their very best to commit to paper (entirely from memory, since paper maps were collector’s items and very hard to come by - GPS had advanced so utterly since the 21st century that, when coupled with the chips in most people’s brains, people had gotten used to having a sort of intuitive ‘knack’ for direction {technologically assisted, of course} and the needing of some sort of guide for how to get oneself someplace was really quite foreign).

Occasionally, a hooting monkey human would descend from a tree to grab something edible from the ground, before looking around anxiously before bolting back from whence they came. Which wouldn’t normally have seemed out of place, except for the terrified, pale look in its eyes. As if it were avoiding something monstrous.

They had finally reached a crossroad. A quandary. One way goes the right way (presumably), and the other, well, the wrong way (as is often the case in these matters). This required careful inspection of the map, a drinks break and a bit of a sit down. Quinton produced a thermos of coffee and offered it to Angus.

‘You’re very kind.’ Angus accepted the coffee graciously, and upon his first sip, tasted heaven.

‘What’s this? It’s really rather extraordinary.’

‘That’s a special blend. Peruvian cat-fox beans.’

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

‘Oh yeah? Haven’t come across that one before.’

‘No you probably wouldn’t have. I’ve got a guy, who has a guy, who has a guy that owns a boat and knows a certain tribe that only speaks to him. For one thing, he’s the only one who knows the language - for another - they really seem to only like him, and no-one else. Seriously, anyone other than him that’s tried to buy the beans has been blow-gunned to death.’

‘Oh, exciting.’

‘Yeah,’ Quinton mused, drifting off to somewhere else, ‘You’ve heard of the beans they get from a certain animal’s poop? Well coffee beans are actually part of a fruit - they’re just the seeds. There’s this critter that really loves that fruit, it turns out, and it uses its exceptional nose and only eats the most flavourful fruits. The beans just go through their digestive system end up in its poop. Then fellows go around and sort through the poop and clean the beans and you get the smoothest, most creamiest coffee you’ve ever had in your life,’ said Quinton distractedly.

Angus could feel his brain trying to wretch on an intellectual level, but his mouth simply wouldn’t do it - the taste of the coffee was simply too sublime.

‘Actually I think I’ve heard about that - but I thought it was another animal. The Amazonian Civet?’

‘Yes, yes - that’s the first animal, the Civet. Well, you see the thing about these beans, is that once the original beans have been pooped out, the Peruvian cat-fox comes along and eats the poop, and after it gets pooped out a second time, then that’s what we have here. That’s the good stuff. It’s about $2,000 an ounce.’

‘That’s utterly disgusting.’ Said Angus, as he took another long slurp of the heavenly poop coffee.

‘I know, right? Worth every penny.’

‘You really are full of surprises.’

Their brief coffee break over, Quinton packed the thermal away, and flattened out the crinkled map on the bitumen.

‘So we’re going to fetch this - Roddy? Fellow? Head of nano - whatsits?’

‘Nanotechnology. yes, that’s it. His flat is in London Fields.’

Quinton bummed and ahh-ed for a time, and his eyebrows furrowed so much that they began to fight each other for dominance in a sort of bristly forehead thumb-war.

‘I think…London Fields is…this way,’ said Quinton as he pointed confidently up the street to the left.

‘Ah, Quint - no,’ said Angus, while politely wresting the map from Quinton’s bear paws before turning it right-side up.

‘Oh right. Right you are then.’

They about-faced, and started to walk down the right-hand fork of the intersection.

At a certain point, though, they felt a slight rumbling. Angus noticed ripples in his cup of coffee.

Now, anyone with a cursory knowledge of 21st century cinema would know that ripples in a glass of anything almost always means big, lumbering, stabby death is almost certain to be just around the corner, but this story takes place in the mid 22nd, so, of course, Angus was still rather certain that something was wrong, because - well it’s pretty basic stuff really.

Far off in the distance, birds were scattering from trees. Cockroaches scuttered from an upturned skip bin off the street and into the nearest drain. The path was clearing itself for something. Something big. Something lumbering. Something stabby. Groans emanated from the buildings on either side of the road. The rumbling became louder.

But if Angus was slightly alarmed, Quinton had the fear of God sloshing through his waters. His face lost all colour almost instantly. Memories of his time on the African Savanna suddenly flooded his hippocampus as he turned his tree-trunk neck slowly back to peek over his shoulder.

Angus followed his eyes, and was suddenly transfixed by a tumbling, shouty mass of limbs and destruction in the distance. It was picking up speed.

‘STAMPEDE!’ he shouted. TREES!

They quickly darted over to the nearest trees. They were London Plane trees and mostly decorative, trimmed to be a certain height.

‘Not tall enough!’ Quinton looked around anxiously. ‘FUCK! Okay…RUN!

Angus didn’t have to be told - he was already running by the time Quinton uttered the words. He was pleasantly surprised by the thrift his spindly body was carrying him - adrenaline really is a wonder. Finally the street offered up some trees that were high enough - a couple of needly elm trees. Quinton put his hands in a hammock position ready for Angus to step into, and then he vaulted him up onto the nearest branch.

The sheer strength of Quinton’s lift sent Angus soaring, almost missing the branch. But he managed to grab a higher branch, and steady himself.

Angus looked down the street. The stampede was coming into view. It was like an angry zombie hoard of people, some standing upright, most scampering on all fours. Which wouldn’t normally be particularly terrifying, except for the sheer number of them, and the fact that they were all running so violently and brazenly fast that it seemed to suck in everything it its’ path. It was like a death crush at a music festival if everyone suddenly needed to go to the loo at the same time.

People at the front who were too slow were trampled violently by the people behind them. The blood curdling screams and animal energy was mottled with the sickening staccato of snapping bones and tendons. The sheer crush of the cumulative velocity of thousands upon thousands of bodies moving as one violent organism was as terrifying as it was grotesque. It stretched as far as he could see.

After affording himself a brief moment of relief, he anxiously looked back down for Quinton. In a heartbreaking instant, Angus realised that there was no way for Quinton to get up - for there no-one to finger hammock-vault him up like he had done to Angus, and the nearest load-carrying branch to the ground was well out of Quinton’s arm-span. Why did he have to be so damn gallant.

‘Hold on mate. I’ll catch you in a few,’ said Quinton, looking pale-faced but brave, as he darted off ahead of the rapidly approaching hoard at a blistering clip, though not quite as fast as the stampede, Angus suspected grimly.

Then Angus was alone for a brief moment, as the tidal wave of foaming mouths, churning feet approached seemed to condense before him like a tsunami picking up pace until it was suddenly upon him.

Angus hugged the tree trunk so tightly he felt the bones of his fingers start to press through his flesh. The sound was absolutely deafening. He closed his eyes as he heard groans and shrieks and booming roars. The entire tree rattled like a twig, even though the trunk was several feet thick. These weren’t mammoths, or wildebeest - simply people who thought they were - but if you have enough of them, the effects of a critical mass of frenzied humans were simply ferocious.

And after holding on for what seemed like an hour, the din lowered gradually, bit by bit, until Angus felt courageous enough to open one eye just a millimetre. The hoard had passed, save for a few crippled stragglers, bundling along limblessly like cabbages at the end of a conveyer belt.

The damage was shocking. Anything not nailed down (and a lot of nailed-down things too) had been simply torn to shreds, along with the frontings of every house not behind a wall. Even the short brick fence lines in front of certain security complexes had been crumbled away. And the human cost was obscene. Bodies littered the streets. Some were twitching, some completely disfigured. Some squealing like stuck pigs.

For a long moment Angus just stood on his branch, filled with misery at the abject tragedy of it all. These people were probably all very normal a few short weeks ago, and were probably going to die pretty normal deaths - cancer, old age and the sort. But now they were living and dying the godless deaths of animals, and it was all Angus’s fault.

And to be perfectly honest, it made Angus feel like a bit of a dick.