00. Chloe – Prologue

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If you’d asked me just two weeks ago, to picture the End of the World, it wouldn’t have looked like this.

Call me unimaginative or color me naive, but every doomsday prediction I know of came inked in paperbacks or through the glow of a screen.

Where are the zombies or demonic hordes? Why are there no asteroids or space invaders, or rebellious machines and their damn dirty apes? And where’s that mutant-infested wasteland littered with convenient health packs and ammo?

With centuries of fiction speculating how to survive the Worst Case Scenario, you’d think at least one of the usual tropes would apply.

Rising waters? Hightail to the highlands or fight for the right to the nearest boat.

Rising undead? Shoot ‘em in the head.

Alien armada? Blow the Core to End the War!

Except there was no war, no core to blow or enemies to kill, not that any convenient ammo dumps would come in handy for the task. You wouldn’t find so much as a sharp stick left, let alone a gun. No, all we have now are dwindling rations and rising body odor, and a dozen more questions for every answer found.

The winds of change blew in fast, and the change blew civilization apart in hours. Now days and seasons are synonymous, clouds billow underfoot in psychedelic timelapse while anything not nailed down flies skyward, and what should be terra firma crumbles overhead.

Even the oceans have gone, rained the wrong way. And it wasn’t just the water. It rained cars and skyscrapers, too. It rained trees and dirt and cows and chickens, cats and dogs, and Hallelujah, it was even raining men. The last of mankind stands on the ceilings of ruins.

But some of us were saved. The best and brightest, the cream of a crop to be planted in new, fertile lands while the masses were left to cling to the charred remains of our old cities. Crumbling, twisted, skeletal labyrinths dangling over endless sky, exposed to unpredictable elements in a world where a single misstep could lead to the longest drop of your suddenly shortened life.

And what are they clinging on for? Hope for some continued existence? Defiance in the face of an unjust end? Or maybe, just maybe, they believe those above have enough humanity left to extend a hand before it’s too late.

My name is Chloe Heralds, and this is the story of how our world, and our lives, were turned completely upside-down.

Catch you on the flipside.