The apocalypse arrived on a Thursday, on the back of an unmarked semi truck.

The sky was black with smog and thunder clouds that roiled and seethed like an upset stomach. The rain fell acidic and cold, making the tall grass smolder and all the things that lived in it run for cover.

The truck had been a part of a scheduled supply restock provided by the Conglomerate, the contents of which were mostly mundane and not worth mentioning. The contents of the unmarked semi truck on the other hand, rippled with an impossible heat haze that surrounded the entire truck and made it look slightly holographic.

The truck's driver was an underpaid man named Roy who had just been told to drive the cargo from point A to point B and not ask questions. He'd done his job remarkably well.

Even when the cargo started whispering to him in his sleep.

Even when he started seeing things in the darkness behind his eyelids.

Even when the truck crashed, becoming a smoldering heap of metal crumpled as easily as paper.

Even when Roy's sorry carcass was halfway out the windshield with glass in his face and even more splitting him open like a spatchcocked chicken.

Even when he closed his eyes and let oblivion take him, only for him to wake up seconds later back in the driver's seat of his truck parked on the side of the road. Whole and healthy, the truck unscathed, the cargo calling his deadname in the faint silence between his hyperventilating breaths.

Roy vowed to quit truck driving the second whatever he was hauling was gone and the money he was owed was safely in his hands. He didn't talk to any of the hazmat suited science types when he pulled into the Facility's cargo area, he made them sign for their delivery, waited for the money to land his account and sped off the second his truck was empty.

The cargo was handled with care, a collection of liquid cooled canisters plastered with every kind of hazard warning known to man. Each one contained a severed body part, and if anybody listened carefully they could hear those parts calling to each other, reaching out and trying to become whole again.

You could hear it. Loud and clear.

Like the universe splitting apart at the seams and crying out in such indescribable agony that it obscured all else.

The entire world pitched left upon the truck's arrival and sent you hurtling towards the ground as your body seemed to give up out of nowhere.

Later on, the medical staff would tell you and Mara that it had just been a seizure. That it was just a side effect of the brain damage you'd gotten from years of having people dig around in your skull uninvited. It was why you couldn't really see faces, why you could see sounds and taste colors.

Didn't matter if you'd never had a seizure until right that second.

They gave you meds to help with it, and told Mara to keep a closer eye on you in case it happened again. She kept you in the apartment all day that day, and let you watch TV. She wasn't supposed to, but there wasn't much else she could do to keep you busy.

So you sat with your bear, you'd named him Mr Man at some point, and watched epilepsy safe children's programming. The med team wasn't sure if you WERE epileptic but it was probably best to play it safe. Just in case.

The new meds made your head swim and made the whole world feel washed out and strange. You could still hear the cargo, crying out for itself deep in the bowels of the Facility. A deep and terrible longing without color and without shape that seemed to probe your very soul, looking for answers, looking for help.

Escape.

Solace.

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Oblivion.

You threw up.

Mara took you back to the infirmary and they kept you overnight in case something else happened. Except for the massive headache the noise was giving you, you were fine, they gave you nutrient broth to sip and a comfy quilt to sleep under, and your bear to hold. You were right as rain the next morning.

The sudden absence of the sound was almost as horrible as its pervasiveness. You weren't sure when the crying had stopped, but the fact that it had unsettled you so much that you couldn't focus on much of anything for the next couple days.

They weren't very interesting anyway, just the Keepers' attempts to get everybody on roughly the same schedule. Lots of visits to the infirmary, blood draws, throat swabs, physicals.

Things that you were already very used to. You got candy and cute bandages for your troubles, even though you didn't have skin in the places they stuck you. You were built to be experimented on, disassembled and reassembled as conveniently as possible. That meant that you had little ports in your arms where needles could be stuck, or an IV placed or whatever anybody might need vein access for.

…still, you liked the bandages and were starting a collection of the coolest ones on your wall behind your bed. Mara offered to put them in a scrapbook but you preferred the wall, it brightened the place up somehow.

Whenever you saw Roady, you'd compare bandages and see whose was cooler, and then you'd have to go find V and use him as a tie breaker. He insisted that he was not your friend and that he didn't like either of you but he judged your bandages anyway, because it made you go away. He put up with the both of you sitting with him during meal times and following him around during recess, even though he didn't do much except sit and people watch.

If you asked, he'd tell you about the other kids in the Facility. Some of them he knew before coming here, others were new to him, but he talked about them the same way the smooth voiced narrators in documentaries talked about wild animals.

There was a girl named Coronet who went by Nettie, and she was only nice and well behaved when there were adults around. She liked attention, good and bad, and would do next to anything to get some. This usually involved introducing herself to anybody new and talking their ears off for however long she could manage. Or doing handstands, or running really fast, or whatever 'look at me look at ME' type activity she could think up.

Nettie did not like you, because she was operating under the assumption that you were Anza's favorite. In fact it had been her idea to humiliate you that first day.

You did not like Nettie.

Another kid was 4242, she had naturally pink hair and a knack for stirring the pot whenever she got bored. She'd start fights between two people and just watch them go at it, it didn't matter who they were. Back at the group home she lived in before all this, she once got the guy who ran it arrested purely because she thought it would be funny.

It was but that's besides the point.

You avoided 4242 at all costs, for your own safety and sanity.

Then there was Edwin, a shy little boy who preferred to be by himself. He was wholly unremarkable and an easy target for bullies, but most folks left him alone because V liked him and stood up for him like they were brothers, even though Edwin was pasty and white. Edwin could read several grade levels above what he was supposed to, and had a tendency to devour every bit of written material he could get his hands on. He was also trying to teach you how to read, with great difficulty because you hated letters.

Numbers were fine, reasonable. Any string of random numbers was an actual real number with a name and a value. You couldn't make a gibberish number like you could gibberish words, which made numbers inherently superior to letters.

Edwin did not share this point of view with you and had made several attempts to teach you about irrational numbers, but you refused to comprehend their existence.

Despite all of this, you liked Edwin and he liked you.

There was also Akira, a tall girl of Japanese descent that minded her own business and tried her best to remain unbothered given the circumstances. You two didn't interact much, but you were on good terms. Sometimes she ate with you during meal times, or retrieved your Frisbee when it went flying in her direction. She had thin, shimmery scales along her throat like a snake that she shed every couple of months. It was kinda gross, but she let you keep some once, and now they lived in a jar on your bedroom shelf.

It felt nice to have people who liked you, not tolerated, not acknowledged, LIKED. You had FRIENDS and people to play with who didn't mind that you were well… you.

You told them about the not-seizure and the crying. Roady believed you, she'd heard the sounds too and they'd kept her up all night until they stopped suddenly, "Like in that part of Bambi where you hear the gunshot and everything gets real… bad." She made a pained face that explained what she was trying to describe better than words could.

You had never seen Bambi, but you could imagine the gunshot tearing the world apart until there was only silence. You wondered if the crying thing was dead but something told you that it wouldn't be that easy, that clean, that quick.

A shudder rippled through your little group. Goosebumps speckled V's bare arms and you watched him rub at them, visibly unnerved.