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⁰¹DUMPSTER FIRE
❝ All our times have come. Here, but now they're gone. ❞
―Blue Öyster Club, Don't Fear The Reaper
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APOCALYPSE DIDN'T COME WITH PURGATORY. No light at the end. Only a shade, ingesting everything into decay from the beginning. The theories proved wrong. Oceans did not swallow masses. Lethal winter storms or scorching summers never came. Asteroids did not bombard the planet. It wasn't a nuclear holocaust, nor a cybergeddon.
The end of the world arrived when God laughed.
Religion pulled the paramount ruse ― they said the dead would resurrect, so the dead came alive. Undead magnitudes of living corpses awakened. Within days, choked by screams, millions were eaten alive. The world became a graveyard and danger crept the corners.
The apocalypse destroyed law and order. Governments, hierarchies, systems... It burned houses down and tore families apart. Friends turned into enemies; lovers became strangers. It grieved hearts and drained hope. Every crucial line drawn around the ferocity of humans vanished; no more kindness, purity, or courtesies. Whether by choice or not ― it made both saints and sinners into killers. Their sanities hung on the leash of madness.
And if you got bitten by one of them, you died in hours of fever. You came back as one of the prowlers. Odious with corrosion, snarling terrors. Sticky with rotten blood and gurgling like a broken record, famished for living tissue. Cracking bones. Flesh. Hemoglobin.
That was what had happened to Ronald.
Redivivus monster.
It was easy to die. But inside the eyes of everyone, terrible to live through. Not many words had been shared since the world ended, more of a string of shrieks and curses. Away from the city center, a smothering silence prevailed. People learned how to talk with their eyes ― nodding and motioning as if any sound would shatter the safety.
And so, Harlene learned the gestures of those around her. Onward the night they met on the highways to the days building up their settlement, she minded and caromed. Growing up with Dale, he was the easiest for her to read. Everyone could see he was a kind soul as he had shared their safe spot with foreigners. It was impossible to recall how they had escaped those roads of hell, ending up on the cliffs by the quarry. They established a camp of roughly thirty someone ― some from the beginning, some stumbling into the site on pure luck.
