Survival

Unknown Author

2190 A.D./170 Years A.I.  

   The Trumpets sounded 170 years ago. 170 years ago, the Seals were broken and humanity came to face the horrifying summation of its sin. Humanity crumbled, and the world ended in fire just as Paul had prophesied. But when it ended, there was so much more than we were warned would happen. It ended in rivers of blood as the world burned.

    We had no warning. It started in the darkness a world away, with nothing more than a whimper. The first victim was a remote village, then a town succumbed to a strange new sickness, and then cities, and soon entire nations had been swept under the crushing wave of its pestilential fallout. The world couldn’t cope, and efforts to slow the advancing disease instead only served to strengthen it, giving the ones brave enough to venture outside the comforting walls of their homes a false sense of security. Then the airborne virus took them just as it had so many others. 

    The sick walked among us. Their bulging black veins and bloodshot eyes could never have warned us of their impending madness. With tainted minds they took to the streets, spreading violence as much as their own plague-stricken breath. Suddenly, as if their bodies burnt out, the mad dropped comatose. 

    We waited with baited breath, praying that this was finally the end. For a while, it was. For a while, we had hope. How ignorant we were. 

    Out of the burned out quarantine districts and locked down hospitals, the first signs of something new began to stir. The mad were rising, awakening from their comas and patrolling the empty streets, searching and hunting. Their slumber changed them, those that awoke did so with a vengeance. They stalked the darkness with razor sharp claws and jagged fangs set in unhinged jaws, they were hunting for us. 

    The armies of the world responded to this new threat with a heavy hand, and for the first time in human history there was relative peace and cooperation as attention shifted from each other to something new. We might have known them by different names, Scourge, Azotar, or Teufel. But they were enemies to us all.

    The Impact Wars started, and humanity struck first. This new Scourge was gunned down at first sight, ordinance was dropped on dense cities and suburban neighborhoods, and forests were burned down all in a bid to slow their advance. 

    But, the Scourge were more intelligent than we gave them credit for and they united against us just as humanity had against them. The Scourge were primitive and uncoordinated, but they had something we lacked after the virus ravaged the world: bodies for the grinder of war. 

    Millions died as coordinated packs of Scourge hurdled walls and circumvented even the strongest of defenses. We fought battle after battle only to find their numbers still growing by the day. With nowhere else to turn, the nukes started falling. Eventually we came to realize that there was no winning. We could turn the world to ash and the Scourge would still crawl from the wreckage. So we stopped. We spared the world in hopes that there might be a way to pick up the pieces someday.

    For decades, we hid in fear. There were rumors that some people kept up the fight, and rumors of rumors that they won. It didn’t matter; the rest of us were too weak to fight, and we could barely scrape together enough supplies to live another week. Surviving was all we could do.

    The Scourge never reunified as they’d done during the Impact Wars. As humanity fell, so did the Scourges' primary food source, and their exponentially growing population plummeted. Their unstable numbers gave humanity opportunities. Some took the chance and tried to salvage civilization for the betterment of all while others used it as an excuse to create despotic tyrannies, hellbent on shaping the world to benefit them alone. 

    The goodness of humanity crawled out of its caves, out of its palisades and strode forth into the ruins of society only to be met by despots and the entangling vice grip of mother nature. Once dense urban sprawls had turned into vine wrapped concrete jungles. Tenement halls had been turned into breeding grounds for the Scourge. Stadiums were repurposed as impregnable fortresses from which the tyrants and mercenaries flexed their muscle. 

    Now, 170 years later, we’re on the cusp of a breakthrough. We’re finally on the path to restoration, to hope. Democracy and the rule of law are spreading across the land, and it’s only a matter of time before the old world isn’t so old anymore. 

    I pray that by the end of this century, we won’t be just surviving anymore. We’ll be living, we’ll be thriving, and we’ll be free from the tyranny of men and the Scourge.