Apocalypse

The problem was that every trip into the old world meant entering an ecosystem that had spent decades learning how to survive without humanity.
The survivors were no longer returning to their civilization.
They were trespassing in someone else's.
And sometimes, standing on the roof of an abandoned skyscraper at sunset, a survivor could look across the city and see the strangest sight imaginable.
The buildings were still standing.
The roads were still there.
The supermarkets were still waiting.
Trees moved gently in the wind.
Birds flew between skyscrapers.
Water filled the underground tunnels.
Something enormous moved beneath the surface of a flooded street.
Zombies wandered beneath overgrown traffic lights.
A distant creature screamed somewhere between the buildings.
And somewhere, perhaps hundreds of kilometers away, another human being was doing exactly what they were doing.
Looking at the remains of the old world.
Wondering how something so enormous could become so quiet.
The world had not ended when humanity died.
It had continued without them.
And after several decades, it had finally stopped missing them.

And the places that still contained clean water had become territories.
Animals gathered there.
Creatures gathered there.
Zombies gathered there.
Some of the aquatic creatures were especially dangerous because they no longer needed to remain underground. Over the decades, some had adapted to rivers, flooded streets and lakes. Their bodies became longer and more powerful, their limbs changing into fins or webbed claws. Others remained almost completely invisible beneath muddy water.
A beautiful lake surrounded by trees could therefore be one of the safest-looking places in the world—and one of the deadliest.
Without airplanes, enormous industrial activity and millions of vehicles, the sky had changed too.
Stars were visible above cities that had once been drowned in artificial light.
At night, the abandoned skyscrapers became enormous black silhouettes.
There were no advertisements illuminating them.
No apartment windows glowing.
No traffic.
No distant sound of thousands of people living their lives.
Only darkness.
And occasionally, somewhere far away, a light.
A survivor would see it from a rooftop and freeze.
Because after decades of darkness, a light meant one of two things.
Someone was alive.
Or something wanted you to think someone was.
The surviving humans had inherited an entire civilization.
And almost none of it belonged to them anymore.
They lived in fortified buildings, underground shelters, isolated villages and settlements surrounded by barriers. They scavenged old supermarkets. They collected rainwater. They searched abandoned pharmacies and warehouses. They grew crops where they could. They avoided cities whenever possible.
But the cities still contained things they needed.
Medicine.
Tools.
Seeds.
Fuel.
Batteries.
Clothing.
Books.
And sometimes, people.

Skylights had shattered.
Trees grew through food courts.
Vines hung from balconies.
Fountains had become ponds.
Escalators were covered in moss.
Some lower floors had completely disappeared beneath dark water.
Store mannequins still stood behind broken glass, their clothes faded and covered in dust.
Sometimes a survivor could walk through an entire shopping mall without hearing anything except water dripping somewhere in the darkness.
Then they might hear footsteps.
Not theirs.
The sound would echo through the enormous corridors.
One step.
Then another.
Then silence.
And somewhere beneath the mall, something might slowly move through the water.
Ordinary homes had suffered differently.
Some were almost completely consumed by vegetation.
Others had collapsed roofs and trees growing through bedrooms.
Children's rooms remained frozen in time.
Toys sat beneath layers of dust.
Family photographs still hung on walls.
Kitchen tables still held plates that nobody had cleared.
Calendars remained open to the month when the world ended.
Those places were often more disturbing than the ruins.
Because they still looked like homes.
A survivor could walk into a bedroom and immediately understand that someone had lived there.
Someone had slept there.
Someone had expected to wake up the next morning.
And then they hadn't.
Clean water had become more valuable than almost anything else.
The old municipal systems were dead.
Rivers had changed course.
Reservoirs had become overgrown.
Swimming pools had turned green and stagnant.
Rainwater collected everywhere—in underground garages, rooftops, basements, abandoned vehicles and broken fountains.
Some cities were slowly filling with water.
Others were drying out.

Some had no eyes at all.
They didn't need them.
They sensed vibrations through the water.
A survivor could stand silently beside a flooded tunnel and see nothing.
Then a single drop of water would fall from the ceiling.
The creature beneath the surface would immediately turn toward the sound.
That was why survivors learned never to throw stones into underground water.
Never to wash blood into it.
Never to walk through it carelessly.
And, most importantly, never to assume that something was dead simply because it was floating.
Some creatures had learned to imitate floating bodies.
Others waited completely motionless beneath the surface, allowing algae and plants to grow across their backs until they looked like submerged pieces of ruined infrastructure.
The water itself became part of the danger.
Old subway tunnels had become enormous underwater passages. Trains rested beneath the surface, their windows filled with darkness. Entire underground stations had become artificial caves where fish, amphibious creatures and things that had once been human shared the same ecosystem.
In some places, the water reached the streets.
Heavy rain could turn entire intersections into shallow lakes.
Basements filled first.
Then parking garages.
Then underground stores.
Eventually, water spilled into subway systems and tunnels, carrying debris and animals with it.
Some creatures had learned to follow these waterways.
A survivor might therefore walk through an apparently safe street and never realize that something was swimming beneath the cracked asphalt in a flooded underground passage directly below them.
The shopping malls had become perhaps the closest thing to ancient ruins.
Massive structures designed to contain thousands of people now stood empty.

And somewhere behind the ruined checkout counters, something might be sleeping.
That was the terrifying part.
A survivor couldn't simply enter an abandoned supermarket and take what they wanted.
They had to ask themselves:
What has been living here for the last thirty years?
The underground portions of civilization had become something else entirely.
Parking garages, subway stations, underground shopping centers, basements, maintenance tunnels and the lower levels of skyscrapers had slowly filled with rainwater and groundwater after pumps stopped functioning.
Some were ankle-deep.
Some were completely flooded.
Others had become enormous underground lakes.
The lower levels of shopping malls were especially dangerous.
Water reflected the ceilings in perfect black mirrors. Old advertisements hung above flooded corridors. Escalators disappeared beneath the surface. Store signs flickered only in the memories of those who remembered them working.
Sometimes the water was perfectly still.
Sometimes it wasn't.
At first, survivors assumed the creatures living in the flooded sections were simply mutated versions of animals that had been trapped underground.
Then they began finding things that could not possibly have survived there.
Something with too many fingers would occasionally grip the edge of a submerged staircase.
Something pale would swim beneath a flashlight beam and disappear before anyone could identify it.
There were creatures that had developed completely different bodies after decades in darkness. Some were almost transparent, with thin skin through which faint organs could be seen moving. Others were covered in slick scales and possessed enormous mouths designed to open far wider than anything natural.

Some had once been animals.
Others were impossible to identify.
Long-limbed creatures sometimes moved across rooftops, using their hands almost like another pair of legs. Pale things disappeared into drainage tunnels. Some were almost human-shaped until they turned their heads too far. Others had developed thick hides, enormous jaws, or strange sensory organs that allowed them to detect movement from astonishing distances.
The survivors learned not to stare at them.
The city had developed its own food chain.
And humans were somewhere near the bottom of it.
The supermarkets were perhaps the strangest places of all.
From the outside, many looked almost untouched. Their enormous signs still stood above the entrances. Advertising posters still clung to the windows, faded by years of sunlight. Rusted shopping carts had formed piles around entrances where vegetation had grown through their wheels.
Inside, however, time had transformed them.
The automatic doors were permanently open.
Dust covered the floors.
The fluorescent lights had died decades ago.
Shelves stood exactly where they had always been, but most of them were empty.
The food that had once filled them had not survived.
Cardboard boxes had collapsed into powder. Plastic packaging had cracked. Cans had rusted and fallen from shelves. Refrigerated sections had become enormous empty chambers, their glass doors covered with moss.
Yet the supermarket was not completely dead.
Plants had found their way inside through broken ceilings and shattered windows.
Thin trees grew between aisles.
Roots pushed through the floor.
Mushrooms covered damp corners.
In some supermarkets, entire sections had become jungles.
A supermarket that once held thousands of customers could now contain a single enormous tree growing beneath the old bakery sign.
The children's cereal aisle might be covered in vines.
The pharmacy section might be underwater.
And somewhere behind the ruined checkout counters, something might be sleeping.

The city had not been destroyed.
That was what made it frightening.
There were no endless fields of rubble, no enormous craters where civilization had once stood, no burned skeletons of buildings reaching toward the sky. Most of the city was still there—quiet, abandoned, and slowly being swallowed by everything that had existed before humanity decided to cover the earth in concrete.
The roads remained.
The apartment buildings remained.
The supermarkets remained.
Even the traffic lights still hung above intersections, frozen forever on colors that no longer mattered.
It was simply that there was nobody left to use them.
Decades had passed since the sudden death of humanity, and nature had begun reclaiming the spaces humanity had spent centuries taking from it. Trees grew from cracks in highways. Grass covered parking lots. Vines climbed apartment towers until entire sides of buildings looked like enormous green walls. Roots pushed through sidewalks and lifted slabs of concrete into uneven hills. Some buildings had become miniature forests themselves, with birds nesting inside broken windows and trees growing from rooms several floors above the ground.
In spring, the abandoned city almost looked beautiful.
Almost.
Because something was always moving.
The streets belonged to the dead now.
Zombies wandered between abandoned cars, crossing intersections without purpose. Some moved slowly, dragging their feet across the asphalt. Others had changed over the decades, becoming frighteningly comfortable with the ruined environment. They knew how to move through buildings. They knew where water collected. They knew where humans had once lived.
And they were not the only things walking the streets.
The creatures appeared less frequently, but when they did, even the zombies seemed insignificant.
Some had once been animals.