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Chapter 98

I never before considered it. The apocalypse. The people. The terror.
Everything.
I know I'm only in a vision, like sometimes happens, but I'm scared for the people I'm watching, because I know none of them will survive, and the worst part is, they know it too.
I can see it in their eyes.
I'm standing in the middle of a road, paved with a hard surface like black concrete. There is no forest, no Wold around me, only sparse thickets of grass, dead and yellowed, splotches of it blackened and singed. Entire fields in the distance are aflame, blazing bright infernos, miles long and many more wide. They cough black smoke up into the sky, with leaping flames which tower high above the tallest towers in the First City.
There are no clouds, and there is no blue in the sky. The smoke is everywhere, black, blacker than the night, and much more solid. It could be day, could be night. The very little part of the sky that is visible is red as the fire beneath it, redder than the sunset.
The sky is reflecting the fire and blood below.
I'm frozen, but I wouldn't be able to move anyways. My eyes water and tears overflow, my mouth slightly open in devastated horror, but I don't blink the tears away, or even move to wipe them away.
People scream. Hundreds, thousands, millions of voices are raised to the wind, in one crying, pleading cry, a final joined plea. They seem to be asking, "Why!? Whatever have we done to deserve this!? Help us!"
I see in the distance multiple glimmering spikes, metallic and cold, thrust high into the air so as to boast of their magnificence. A city, I know, and probably our destination. It's on fire.
Around me, countless of the metallic, giant colored bug-things swarm the roads, swamping it, passing right through me because I don't exist here. Cars, I suddenly recall from a long-ago conversation with my mother.
There are way too many of the carriage-like things, for the four-lane road. People panicking everywhere, flooring their cars in a desperate bid to escape, to live. They slam into the rears of other cars, and the wheels still spin, the air clotted with exhaust fumes and the smell of burnt rubber. A car combusts from the engine strain. Burnt flesh.
The road is clogged with cars now, so there is no possible way through. People are trapped in the vehicles, screaming and hammering on doors and roofs. Windows shatter. People scramble through the broken glass, emerging blood-soaked and cut up. They clamber onto the roofs of their cars, slipping in their own blood, and stumble along the tops of the cars, stepping over one another and trampling those who have fallen, slipping and being run over by someone still hoping to escape in a car.
'STOP!' I want to cry out, to make them cease their own foolishness. They're killing each other to save themselves.
Somebody whips out an axe, and I have to close my eyes and bear the sound of snapping bones and breaking bodies, as they clear a path through the overwhelming, writhing mass of humans, dead and alive.
They're all moving in the same direction. Away from the city which I'm headed towards.
Scrambling, limping, crawling, dragging, bloody and dying, sick with terror, they drag themselves away, and the entire road, for as far I can see in either direction, is a twisting, screaming, bloodstained mass of limbs and body-parts, some not entirely connected as they should be.
People who still have use of their legs flee into the small woods on the sides of the road, others drive their cars through the ditches, hitting the mob with a sickly crunching sound as they go.
A man shuffles past me, the one with the axe, and I wince when I see his eyes. The look in them in not human, or not civilized, anyways. But he, and all the others fleeing the end of the world, clearly emanate the one primal instinct which was programmed into the very first Beast, and resides with us yet, as deep as it may be. Something you can't deny, which not even your common-sense can turn around. The will to survive, and to do anything possible, including the cold-blooded murder of your own kind, to achieve that.
The basic instinct of survival.