Okay no, don't call me Ishmael. It's not my name. I don't know why I thought I should lead with that. But hey, the entire world is falling apart, I can't shitpost on my favorite underwater Mongolian basketweaving forum anymore, so I might as well start a diary. It's pretty much the same thing, right?

I suppose if you're reading this then I'm probably dead. Or maybe you're my kid and it's 30 years from now and shit has settled down enough that I started a family and wanted you to read this for some reason. Or maybe it fell out of my pack on a trail and you picked it up. There's really a lot of options where you get to read this now that I think about it so, hi. Welcome to my journal. My name is Henley Alexander, but since you're going to be reading my deepest darkest thoughts and desires, you can call me Hank. I've never written a journal before so you're gonna have to forgive me if I don't really do this the "proper" way. Is there a proper way? Fuck if I know.

Alright so, uh, yeah. The world has pretty much ended. I don't know when you're reading this, or if the thing that happened can just... un-happen... so to put it all in a nutshell, it appears our world has konverged with some kind of weird-ass fantasy bullshit world. I say konverged not converged because it's important to a small group of idiots that I used to spend a lot of time, too much time really, talking with online. If any of you retards are reading this, fuck you WFG was right. If you, dear sweet reader, don't know what that means, don't worry. I'll stop referencing it. 

My 11th grade English teacher taught me to start from the beginning, so from the beginning here we go. 

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My world ended on a crisp fall day in September. I was driving down I-81 coming home from a 2-gun competition at Peacemaker, one of the local ranges. I'd done, in a word, horribly. We all have off days, but I was off that day. One of the magazines for my beloved CZ-75 burst open as I was loading it for the first of five stages. The baseplate came off, the spring shot out, the follower got flung into high orbit, and the rounds tumbled onto the ground. It just got worse from there. The less said about how it took me ten seconds to knock down a steel plate the better. On a good day, I can do that in two seconds. On a bad day, it takes me five. Ten was just embarrassing. Ten seconds doesn't sound like a lot, but when the match average for that stage was thirty seconds, well, let's just say I dragged that average down. 

Maybe I wasn't paying a lot of attention as I was driving. Maybe I was thinking about how I had probably the worst day of shooting I'd had since I was just a wee twenty-one-year-old first getting into competitions. So maybe the crash was my fault. On the other hand, I tend to lay at least some of the blame on the fucking eight-foot-tall orc that stepped out into the middle of a goddamn highway. 

My thoughts at the time went something like this, with considerably more profanity interspaced. What a goddamn fucking mess that match was, Jesus I can't believe it took me- what the FU- and that's when I hit the orc. At the time I didn't know it was an orc, I didn't even register the green skin, the ratty animal-hide outfit, the two-handed sword, or the tusks. I thought I slammed my ancient rust-coated pickup into a rather tall person. The next thing I knew I was in a ditch off the side of the road, there was an airbag in my face, and my nose felt like someone had just slammed it into a brick wall at Mach 5. 

I got out of the car and stumbled over to the side of the road, sat my ass down in the grass, and waited for the world to stop spinning. Intellectually I knew I probably had a minor concussion, a broken nose, and what would certainly be an expensive repair bill for my truck. I knew that I should go try and help whoever I just hit, but my legs had decided I wasn't moving an inch from that seat on the grass. So I sat. I turned my head and vomited into the grass. Yup, definitely a minor concussion. I waited. I waited some more. I'm not sure how much time exactly passed, but I think it was at least half an hour, maybe more. At some point, the world settled down into a light swaying instead of its former highly aggressive spinning. Taking that as a sign I could at least stand without immediately falling flat on my face, I levered myself up and started walking toward the rear of my truck, looking for whoever I hit. 

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I immediately fell flat on my face.

A little while after that I tried again, and this time I managed to stay vertical, with some assistance from leaning on my truck's passenger side door. I walked a few steps, paused, took a few deep breaths to keep from vomiting again, and took another few steps, steadier this time. 

If you've never seen the results of a highway speed truck going toe-to-toe with a human, or I guess in this case humanoid? Bipedal meatbag. If you've never seen the results of a highway speed contest between a truck and a bipedal meatbag, count yourself lucky. That poor bastard was scattered all over the highway. There was a twenty-foot smear of red where he'd gotten dragged along by the undercarriage, and bits and pieces of him were artfully thrown every which way. 

I vomited again, this time not so much from the concussion that I was getting more and more certain I had, but from the gore and the stench. I admit I'd lived a relatively sheltered life up until this point. Dad was from the holler sure, but mom was a "coastal elite" in the parlance of my grandparents, and we'd lived in the suburbs my entire childhood. The closest I'd ever come to an actual dead body before now was roadkill. Of the animal variety, not the orcish kind. 

After I finished emptying my guts of whatever had yet to be discarded, I took a few more deep breaths, trying to get myself under control. I reached into my pocket, pulled out my phone, and started trying to dial 911. It took me three tries to hit the right keys with my fumbling fingers, and then those wonderful concussion after-effects saved my stupid life. I hit call and immediately dropped the phone. 

It took me a full second to process what just happened, which shows that the greatest force keeping me alive on this planet to date has been a concussion and dumb luck. Because in that second, I took a stumbling step back, and my phone fucking exploded. Fortunately, phones don't make good bombs, so I only got a few minor nicks from the ensuing shrapnel. The force of the blast was enough to sit me right back down on the ground, and I stared at the small hole in the grass that had been a $500 wonder of modern technology a moment ago. 

Well, shit. That was the first conscious thought I had after watching my phone try its absolute best to kill me. Not exactly poetry but in my defense I was, as I may have mentioned once or twice, concussed. It was around this time that I noticed all traffic along I-81 had ceased. I mean there was not so much as a moped in sight. That freaked me out. It's five in the evening on a Sunday. There should be a river of automotive design flowing down this road. This road doesn't get this empty at two in the morning on a workday, which I know from experience. But at that moment it was emptier than my stomach. 

Trying to process this absolute absurd wrongness distracted me enough that I was able to stand up and walk to the road, craning my neck left and right to try and spot something, anything. That's when I saw the sword. The big fuck-off two-handed broadsword laying in the grass. A big, fuck-off, two-handed broadsword still firmly in the dismembered grip of its former owner. The green-skinned grip of its former owner. 

I'm not a doctor, but I was a nerd. A hardcore nerd. I had a running weekly DnD group with some old college friends, I read Warhammer 40k lore, I was, am, a certified genuine American Nerd, capital N. So my brain made a few leaps, and it hit me like a train. I had just killed a cosplayer. I wasted a few more minutes wondering what a cosplayer was doing wandering onto the interstate in the middle of nowhere with nary a convention to be had (trust me, I knew exactly when all the conventions were). Eventually, I decided it didn't matter. I needed to find a cop or something to report this to, and my phone had just made its best attempt at a murder-suicide, so that meant driving into town. 

My legs were a bit steadier by this point, so I slowly walked over to my piece-of-shit truck and started her up. Or, well, I tried. The engine had given up the ghost. Still somewhat in shock, I did the only thing I could think of. I slung my gun case over my shoulder, locked the doors, and started walking. You may be wondering why I chose to take my guns. Was it a premonition? A feeling that something was truly wrong and I should be armed? A masculine desire for implements of death? Hell no. With my truck dead, aside from my gaming PC, these guns were the most expensive things I owned, and there was no way I was just leaving them on the side of the road. 

The five-mile walk to the nearest town, Winchester, is pretty much a blur until about the last mile. I think that's about when I shook off the lingering effects of shock and that nasty little c-word because the first four miles are a big old nothing. The last mile I remember bitching to myself, a lot, about how my legs hurt, how my gun bag was heavy, and how stupid goddamn cosplayers should have the common sense God gave a damn cat and stay out of the damn road. 

When I finally got to Winchester, it was in flames.