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Well, I have recently exhausted my list of things to waste my time on, so I started writing with the intention of actually finishing the story this time. I probably won't but I find that if I post the beginnings of a story somewhere and people like it I feel more motivated to finish. So, here it is, I'd like to get people's reactions too it.
Chapter one
Accountability.
Mankind went out with neither a bang nor a whimper. In stead, we were extinguished with a sound of hedonistic pleasure. The year that most people noticed that something was wrong, truly wrong that is, was in the summer of 2016. It wasn’t immediately evident to most people, only those who spent a great deal of their time outdoors. This is because the first sign was a marked and visually noticeable increase in the homeless population.
Janet was taking her morning Jog, listening to The Shins on her mp3 player and trying not to think too hard about the situation at home. She was drifting away, losing herself to the music, when a dark shape obscured her path. She looked up to see three unkempt men in ragged looking clothes. The one on the right was huge, speaking both in a manner of muscle and girth, and had an unreadable expression on his face. It might have been uneasiness. The one in the middle was slightly shorter than average height, had thinning hair and resembled a rat in the way he carried himself. The one on the left looked as if he was extremely unhappy about what was occurring and was standing slightly away from the other two.
The largest of the three smashed his meaty fist into her face, as she was about to ask what they wanted, and she fell back onto the pavement holding her bleeding, broken nose. The hands of the middle one fell upon her instantly, searching frantically for her pockets. She was wearing jogging shorts, which didn’t have any.
And so affections fade away, and do adults just learn to play the most ridiculous, repulsive games-
The lyrics to the song that she was listening to stopped short as the ear buds were yanked out and the three made off with the device in place of the wallet she wasn’t carrying.
She got back from the hospital later that day, changed out of her jogging clothes, and picked up the surprises left behind by her children’s animals. She then commenced to feed said animals, and wash the dishes that had been used while she was away. She wanted to lie down, her nose was killing her, but she felt obligated to maker her two sons and daughter something to eat for lunch before she did so. Only her eldest son ate any of what she made, the others threw theirs in the trash.
The second sign of humanities impending collapse arrived in the winter of that same year, when a portion of the newly risen homeless population froze to death. Those that died were often left there for days, unnoticed by anyone but other homeless. It was not uncommon for an entire group of them, huddled together in some abandoned alley for warmth, to perish over the course of just a few weeks. Those that woke up alive would sometimes place those that didn’t in the middle of the nearest place of heavy pedestrian traffic.
Jack grunted as he dragged another stiff, frozen body to his ambulance. There would likely be no one to identify the corpse, let alone claim it; but Jack was told to pick them up and take them in. Jack did as he was told. His partner was supposed to help him with the bodies, but he began to vomit uncontrollably each time he tried to touch one. So, all the work was left up to Jack. His partner, Tommy he was called even though his real name was Samuel, helped him operate the stretcher as much as he could without being near the bodies, which wasn’t that much. He only helped with getting it out. Eventually the body and the stretcher were both securely inside the back of the vehicle and Jack got behind the wheel. Tommy got in after him but made sure not to even glance back at the cadaver. The tips of Jack’s fingers were numb on the steering wheel.
The drive back to the hospital was uneventful as ever. They saw a few more of the deceased lying sprawled on the sidewalks and Jack reflected to himself that they weren’t even making a dent. It started to snow lightly, barley even noticeable.
Jack unloaded the body and took it to the morgue in silence. Doctors and patients alike stared as he passed by. He wondered why until he realized that he had forgotten to cover the body. The glazed, frozen eyes dully reflected the overhead light. Nothing he could do about it now.
He dropped the body off with barley even a greeting to the mortician, went back to the ambulance and got behind the wheel. He was already turning the ignition as Tommy was telling him that they had received their next location. Jack couldn’t help but let his spirits sink a little as he realized that death had become monotonous.
The third and final sign before the true tragedy struck three years later, when the schools closed. The student teacher ratio had grown to astronomical proportions, and the students no longer lent their respect to the person at the front of the classrooms. Hundreds of instructors had been injured by their students worldwide, and an undisclosed number were rumored to have been killed. There were no cases in which the entire class attacked the teacher; usually only between three and fifteen of the students participated. Though, that was typically enough.
Mr. Wilbur, the instructor of a tenth grade science class, was nervous. He had received several anonymous death threats in the mail in the previous week, all of them typed and all of them bearing the same date that the attack would be carried out. He had taken them to the police, but they didn’t have any information for him yet. He had discussed it with Mr. Thompson, the principal, who had suggested he take that day off. There had been extreme difficulty finding a substitute teacher, however, and Mr. Wilbur had eventually decided against staying home.
He watched each student that came to the front carefully and constantly kept his mind on the location of a yardstick he kept in the classroom. He would have liked to have a knife or a gun, anything but a yardstick, as protection but it was illegal for him to bring anything like that into the classroom.
A dark haired girl who had probably been busy texting while he had been giving his lecture was standing in front of his desk almost asking for the answers to the work sheet that the students had been given. She was clueless. Mr. Wilbur tried to concentrate on helping her and watching for anyone else coming up to the desk at the same time. In just a few moments his attention was fully focused on helping her with her paper, it was a well-orchestrated attack.
A brown haired walked quickly up to the desk, only being noticed by his teacher at around five feet away. Mr. Wilbur knew that this was the student who had sent the letters just from seeing the expression on his face. The student pushed the dark haired girl out of the way and pulled a folding knife out of his pocket. The instructor put his hands up in a defensive gesture and tried to rise from his chair but was stabbed in the gut and sank back into it. An unpleasant pulling feeling accompanied the pain as the knife was withdrawn and replanted in his right cheek. This time the excruciating scrape of metal on bone accompanied the pain both as it was pushed in and pulled out. The coupe de gras of this performance arrived when the student raised the knife above his head and brought the blade down just above his science teacher’s forehead. He had intended to puncture through into the brain, but the knife was knocked aside and became lodged under the skin of the scalp. The student abandoned it their and ran. The front half of the class was screaming.
Like any good road signs, heeding these warnings would not have effected the outcome of the situation, for it was a problem that any civilization worth the soil it rests on will eventually face, but only the best ones come out of it unscathed. You see, aliens didn’t attack, no nuclear bombs went off, and no deities returned from their thrones. We simply became to good at surviving.
The true problem, the real end, occurred in 2020, when the food ran out. People first raided supermarkets until they were barren and empty. Soon after every housewife’s personal vegetable garden was dug up, either by the family or strangers looking for a meal. Then people started flocking to crops, eating the plants right off the stock, stealing and slaughtering cattle. Someone got the bright idea to move to a less populated area, so millions of people made a B-line for Africa. Soon enough the population problem was no longer isolated to modern cultures, everyone was starving and dying.
Simon was hungry. He hadn’t eaten anything in four days and what really worried him was that he was getting used to the pain in his stomach. He had tried to eat some of his cat’s food but ended up dry heaving when he tried to swallow it. He decided to start buying a canned brand once this was all over.
He was lying on his kitchen floor; empty packages that had once contained food items were strewn randomly around him. All of the cabinets were open and empty, the refrigerator was also open and a cold draft was moving across Simon’s face as a result. The handle to the pantry door was lodged in the drywall and the pantry was empty except for some mousetraps on the floor. Simon had eaten the cheese off of them already. He looked longingly at the barren icebox and frowned as he tried to work out a solution to this predicament. His cat pranced in and started rubbing against his hand in an attempt to get him to pet her. He complied. After staring at her for over a minute as he pet her, a solution came to mind. Simon ate meat that night.
Eventually people took to the forests en masse. Trying to hunt down any woodland creatures that might serve as a food source. The forests were empty within a month. All of the orchards were left desecrated and everyone knew but was afraid to say what came next. The only ones left that were helpless enough for the adults to prey on were the children.
Roberta cried as she skinned her daughter. She didn’t want to do it, she really didn’t, but she was so hungry. Meat from her Alyssa’s thigh sizzled as it hit the stovetop. Roberta would kill herself before she would admit it, but it smelled good. Really good. She left her daughter’s head untouched, however. If worse came to worse she would have to eat what she could of that too, but she hoped it wouldn’t. She called for Andrew to come and eat after she was done cooking a portion of Alyssa. She hid the rest of the body in the freezer, hoping her son would be too small still to reach it. A tear rolled down Roberta’s cheek as her son asked where his sister was. She patted his hair softly and told him not to worry about it.
Andrew really seemed to like this new kind of meet and asked what it was. Deer was the answer she gave, knowing he had never had it. She watched him as he ate; knowing that if worse came to worse she might have to eat him too.
There had previously been measures to stop the impending tragedy, birth control, abstinence, laws on how many children a family could have, other less pleasant ones. Nothing seemed to work, though. Condoms broke, the pill failed, people broke their vows, and laws will always be ignored. So it went that the cannibals and the lucky lived the longest.
There were those that formed pacts with one another as society collapsed around them. These groups of people, brought together by the unanimous desire of survival, implemented strategies to stay alive. One of the first was a group of farmers who protected a piece of land with their lives. That is to say, they died. Others were more fortunate, however. Saving food and rationing it amongst themselves to survive as long as possible. The ones that lasted on intelligence and the ones that did whatever it took to stay alive.
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