They are coming, and no one can stop them. That’s what the news said at least. In fact, it was the very LAST thing the pretty anchor on Channel 9 said, before she burst into tears and the station cut to static.
A pretty awful thing to hear after weeks of riding the highs and lows of the new cycle since the monsters emerged from the peaty depths of the old bogs, awoken by the ever more ambitious extraction operations that had meant to harvest the potent fuels that lay locked away in the opaque abyss. ESPECIALLY heartrending when so much of what had been said in the days leading up to mankind’s spiritual surrender had been breakthrough after breakthrough in understanding the beasts. Where once, upon their first emergence, they had been little but immortal mysteries, now at least we had some grasp on what they were, how they operated. The sludge they exuded, that horrific substance that transmuted everything it touched into steaming, stinking, rotting piles of itself, was NOT some unholy demon slime, but rather a tightly organized liquid lattice of organic nano-machines gone haywire. Machines that apparently fueled their own locomotion and replication by consuming other organic matter, machines that were unaffected by fire, electricity, radiation, and damn near every other destructive capability we had on hand, but machines nonetheless. Things we could begin to understand and hopefully defeat.
However, such time was not allotted to us. As the initial few slavering, shambling forms rose from the bogs and began their apocalyptic march across the continent, every step they took hastened their spread. Every plant, animal, and person they came across was unwillingly converted to their cause, and even the greatest minds of humanity could only look on in horror as the world melted away beneath them.
Erek was one of those minds. One of the very, VERY few that had been granted a spot in the Ark – a bunker originally built as his government’s potential refuge from a cold war gone hot, now hastily refitted to act as one of mankind’s very last shelters against the coming storm. A place buried deep, deep in the Earth, surrounded by steel and bedrock – two things known to be impenetrable to the beasts and their hungry, liquid coating.
A siren starts to whine. The vault door begins to slide shut. He looks out at the green world for what may be the last time, trying to focus on the fleeting beauty of the waving trees and the rustling grass. But try as he might, all he can see is the beast – a harbinger of the end, standing over the bones of an evacuated town.
The door slides shut. And in the darkness that comes as the sun goes away, the only light that remains is the burning end of his cigarette, glowing softly in the dark.
Selected from Annex C-8391P.
0:00 Gravity of Fragile – DEX 1200
3:16 Elderly Cipher – Rand Aldo
5:56 Lo – Harbours and Oceans
8:09 Woodwind Reviere – Daniella Ljungsberg
11:43 Drone of Melancholy – Elm Lake
15:15 A Vision of Nothingness – Luba Hilman
18:26 Whispers in the Fog – Lennon Hutton