The sky wasn't blue. Marcus had never seen a blue sky, not really. He had seen pictures of it—faded, water-damaged photographs in rotting magazines—but the reality he lived in was a canvas of bruised purples, toxic oranges, and a perpetual, suffocating gray.
It was the year 2060, though the calendar didn't matter much anymore. Time wasn't measured in weeks or months; it was measured in breaths you managed to take without coughing up blood.
The Old World, the one the elders whispered about with tears in their milky eyes, had ended forty years ago. It didn't end with an alien invasion or a robot uprising. It ended because of a man named General Silas Thorne.
The history books—what was left of them—said Thorne was a decorated war hero until a border skirmish took his wife and two daughters. Grief is a heavy thing, but Thorne had access to the launch codes. In his madness, he decided that a world without his family wasn't a world worth preserving. He turned the key. One missile flew. Then a hundred. Then thousands.
Mutually Assured Destruction wasn't just a theory; it was a promise.
The ecosystem collapsed in days. The sun was choked out by a nuclear winter that refused to end. Humanity, the self-proclaimed apex predator, was reduced to rats scurrying in the rubble of their own hubris.
Marcus adjusted the ragged scarf over his nose and mouth, checking the Geiger counter strapped to his wrist. It clicked rhythmically, a slow, steady metronome of death. Click... click... click. Safe enough. For now.
He was twenty years old, skinny as a rail, with hair matted by ash and eyes that were constantly scanning the horizon. He was a scavenger, like everyone else who hadn't died of starvation or radiation sickness.
He moved silently through the skeletal remains of what used to be a shopping mall. The steel girders groaned in the wind, sounding like the moans of ghosts. He wasn't looking for gold or technology. You couldn't eat an iPhone. He was looking for calories.
But in his backpack, wrapped carefully in three layers of plastic scavenged from a trash bag, was his most prized possession. It wasn't a weapon. It wasn't medicine.
It was a trade paperback. Invincible: The Ultimate Collection, Volume 1.
He had found it two years ago in a sealed basement. It was the only thing that kept him sane. When the nights got too cold, or the hunger pains felt like knives in his gut, Marcus would light a small tallow candle and open the pages.
He would stare at the bright colors. The yellow and blue of the suit. The red of the cape. He would read about Mark Grayson, a boy who looked human but was something more. He read about Omni-Man. He read about Superman in other torn comics he'd found.
"Look at them," Marcus whispered to himself, his voice raspy from the dry air. He ran a dirty finger over a panel where Invincible was soaring through the clouds.
In those pages, people drove cars. They went to high school. They ate hamburgers at diners. And when the sky turned dark, someone came to save them.
Marcus looked up at the jagged ceiling of the mall. No one was coming to save him. No one was coming to save any of them. The heroes were ink and paper. The monsters, however, were very real.
A sound snapped him out of his daydream.
Crunch.
It was the sound of concrete being crushed under heavy weight.
Marcus froze. The silence of the wasteland was absolute, which meant any noise was a death knell. He slowly reached for the rusted pipe he kept on his belt—a pitiful weapon, but it was all he had.
He crouched behind a slab of fallen masonry, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He held his breath.
Sniff... Sniff...
The sound was wet, guttural. It smelled like ozone and rotting meat.
Marcus peeked around the edge of the concrete.
It was a "Strider." That's what the survivors called them. Before the bombs, it might have been a wolf, or maybe a mountain lion. Now, it was a nightmare of evolution. It stood six feet tall at the shoulder, its skin a patchwork of scales and tumors. It had too many legs—six of them, ending in obsidian claws that clicked against the floor tiles.
It was hunting.
Marcus saw what it was tracking. A rat, fat and tumorous, scurrying near a pile of debris. The Strider moved with a terrifying burst of speed, a blur of muscle and violence. In a second, the rat was gone, vanished into a maw filled with rows of serrated teeth.
Marcus squeezed his eyes shut. Don't move. Don't breathe. Wait for it to leave.
He knew the rules of the new world. History had reset. We were back to the primal days. When it is Human vs. Beast, without guns, without tanks, without help... the Beast always wins.
He waited for what felt like hours. The clicking claws moved away, fading into the depths of the department store ruins.
Marcus exhaled, a long, shaky breath. He needed to get out. He needed to get back to the settlement before dark.
He stood up, turning to retreat the way he came.
His foot caught on a piece of loose rebar. CLANG.
The sound rang out like a gunshot in a library.
Marcus froze. His blood turned to ice.
From the darkness behind him, a low growl vibrated through the floor, shaking the soles of his boots.
He didn't look back. He ran.
"Go, go, go!" he screamed in his head.
He scrambled over piles of rubble, his lungs burning as the ash-filled air tore at his throat. Behind him, the sound of pursuing claws was deafening. It wasn't just running; it was closing the distance.
Marcus vaulted over a tipped-over vending machine, crashing onto the floor. He scrambled to his feet, but his legs were weak from malnutrition. He wasn't Mark Grayson. He wasn't a Viltrumite. He was just a starving human in a world that wanted him dead.
He saw the exit—a hole in the wall leading to the street. Sunlight, or what passed for it, spilled through.
Ten feet. Five feet.
Something slammed into his back with the force of a freight train.
Marcus flew through the air, smashing into a concrete pillar. The impact knocked the wind out of him, shattering his ribs. He hit the ground hard, tasting copper.
His backpack had ripped open. His comic book slid across the dirty floor, landing open. The page showed Omni-Man floating above the Earth, untouchable. God-like.
Marcus tried to crawl toward it, tried to crawl away, but a massive weight pinned him to the floor.
He rolled over, screaming as talons pierced his shoulder.
The Strider towered over him. Up close, it was even more hideous. Saliva dripped from its jaws, sizzling where it hit the concrete. It didn't look at him with anger. It looked at him with hunger.
Marcus raised his rusted pipe, swinging it with all the strength he had left. It struck the beast's snout with a dull thud.
The beast didn't even flinch. It merely blinked, annoyed.
It swatted the pipe away, breaking Marcus's arm in the process.
Marcus gasped, the pain blinding him. He looked up, staring death in the face. He thought about the comics. He thought about the heroes who always found a way to win at the last second.
Where are you? he thought, tears cutting tracks through the ash on his face. Where is the savior?
There was no one. Just the wind howling through the ruins of a dead civilization.
The beast lowered its head, opening its jaws wide.
The last thing I remembered was a large gold eye, staring at me with primal indifference, and then black.