The Apocalypse

From Rebecca Lee Wiki

Chloe's Account

It all began innocently enough. In 1984, physicist Evan Novatny set up a contained and controlled experiment involving quantum mechanics and the space-time continuum. The exact nature of the experiment has since been lost, but whatever Novatny did, he created what is now believed to be the equivalent of a scratch on the space-time continuum. And although the experiment itself was safely contained, what with quantum and space-time being what they are (namely, largely unknown), the effects of his experiment were not contained. The scratch was mirrored all across the globe.

And nothing happened.

Well, that wasn't entirely true. The scratches existed. Deepened. Lengthened. But for years, nothing happened. No one knows when and where the first tear opened, where a scratch got just too deep for the fabric of reality to take it, but it's estimated that it began in the early 1990's. The fabric of reality split, just a little bit, and let just a little bit of something on the other side in. It wouldn't have been a big deal if it could be monitored, controlled, reversed. But no one knew the tear existed and even if they had, they didn't have the knowledge or technology to do anything about it. And it wasn't the only one. Tears started opening all over the world - in every country, in every ocean. And things began to slip through. Creatures that had no business existing in our world. And the tears grew wider, the more creatures came through. It wasn't an overnight process - no one seemed to notice anything was off until just after the turn of the century. And then scientists, spiritualists, and the homeless started to notice... well, the scientists called them anomalies, the spiritualists called them bad spirits, and the homeless just called them "things" or "monsters". But the world at large didn't listen until the first news-creating event.

In 2005, a tear in St. Petersburg, Russia opened wide enough to let in large creatures, as opposed to the relatively small (but generally no less nasty) ones that had been slipping in. They were snake-like, they stole children from their beds, and they caused a city-wide panic. A week later in Bangkok, Thailand, some sort of pod of aquatic creatures began overrunning fishing ships, killing and eating the sailors and leaving the ship floating without a crew. In city after city, week after week, horrible atrocities that had few (if any) eye witnesses were happening.

And so, like any rational species, the human race blamed... each other.

North Korea was the first, in 2006, launching three nuclear missiles at Australia, destroying a good portion of the eastern seaboard of the continent. Iran and Iraq both followed closely after, both countries bombing each other and Israel and Saudi Arabia. Within days, the Middle East was completely wiped out. In the midst of all this, surprisingly, it was China who tried hardest for peace, until they were bombed by the United States and Russia, and they retaliated out of self-preservation.

The American government refused to acknowledge the monsters, and was fittingly decimated by some sort of invasion of DC, followed by a missile from some as-of-yet undestroyed country. By 2008, every large city in the world was either destroyed, nearly destroyed, or overrun by monsters and creatures of all sorts. Governments had fallen apart, food was scarce, and only the most intelligent and capable people survived for very long. It didn't take long for this to become the norm. Time lost the same meaning - no longer did hours, weeks, months mean anything. All that mattered was day and night; summer, fall, winter, spring. All that mattered was survival. Some people insisted on surviving on their own. Some people found others, formed small communities, groups, clans. Few children were born, fewer survived. Pregnancy was almost always a death sentence on the woman, unless she was part of a particularly well-defended and well-supplied group.

Now it's 2012. This is reality. Things are still coming through the tears. Well, they are in North America, anyway. We don't get much news from across the ponds. The large cities are either too pumped full of radiation to live in or still full of monsters. We survive as best we can in the open areas, the abandoned towns. Most vehicles don't run anymore, though some groups have found ways to scavenge, conserve, and replace gasoline. Most people walk. Some lucky ones have horses, oxen, wagons, or bicycles. Surviving is enough of a challenge without everything else the universe throws at us.

Welcome to America.