What was the most painful moment of your life?
Was it the hollow absence after losing your parents?
The gut-twisting ache of your first love shattering your heart?
The scorching humiliation of being laughed at in a crowd?
Or just the blinding, stupid agony of stubbing your toe on the bedframe at 3 AM?
For Jack?
It was being born.
Nothing—not the slow graying of the world as his eyesight failed,
Not the sickening CRUNCH of metal and bone in the car wreck that shattered his ribs, snapped his femur like kindling, and turned his teeth into bloody gravel.
Not even the endless, soul-crushing months spent staring at the stained ceiling tiles of a sterile hospital room, utterly alone—
came close to the agony of that first breath.
His parents, in the starkest terms, were cultists.
Fanatics.
And that legacy was poison:
No childhood friends. No siblings to share secrets with. No cousins for chaotic holidays.
Parental love? A foreign concept.
Cultists didn't love. Not their child. Not even their own flesh.
Only the twisted, gnawing hunger of their beliefs mattered.
Their devotion was a cold, sucking void where warmth should have been.
He lived a life etched in gray.
A barren landscape devoid of laughter echoing in hallways, shared birthday cakes, scraped knees patched with care, or any memory worth clinging to in the dark.
And then…
Just when the numbness felt eternal…
Just when he believed the universe had scraped him utterly hollow…
The apocalypse arrived.
Not the fiery rapture preached by zealots.
This was man-made.
A silent, glittering horror unleashed in a lab.
A virus.
So viciously advanced, so insanely fast, it tore through humanity like a scythe through wheat.
No warning. No cure. No chance.
No one knew the Patient Zero.
No one pinpointed the first cracked vial, the first whispered warning ignored, the first border crossed by death wearing a smile.
But Jack knew one thing with icy certainty:
It didn't bloom from nothing.
There had been signs.
Whispers choked in censored reports.
"Isolated incidents" buried on page seven.
Scientists vanishing.
Birds falling silent over cities.
The usual pattern.
Governments lying.
Truth buried under concrete and panic…
Until the graves weren't deep enough.
He remembered the day it all began.
A Monday.
Dull sky. Coffee-stained commuters. The normalcy was a lie.
No one was prepared for the madness that followed.
The virus didn't just kill—it Erased.
It scraped away reason, empathy, memory… …leaving only gnawing hunger.
Mindless things staggered where people once stood.
Eyes milky and vacant.
Jaws slack with thick, bloody drool.
Driven by a single need: flesh.
Chaos erupted.
A businessman sank rotten teeth into a student's throat.
A mother caved in her toddler's skull with a fire extinguisher.
Screams weren't human—they were animal shrieks tangled with wet tearing.
The sidewalk became a butcher's block.
Entrails glistened under streetlights.
A nightmare seared into his retinas.
It would haunt every waking breath.
By sheer luck—
(A dumpster reeking of spoiled meat, a shattered alley window, the woman who shoved him behind a delivery truck before being dragged away by her hair)
—he survived.
With three others.
Strangers with wild eyes and shaking hands.
They'd fled like rats, finding refuge in the steel jaws of a deserted shopping mall.
He'd once read:
"Humans are the most virtuous creatures…
…and the most monstrous."
That line festered in him.
Maybe his parents' cult-blindness made it resonate.
But in the mall's flickering emergency lights, he saw the truth:
The line wasn't just right—it was incomplete.
The horrors there weren't just outside the barricades.
Inside, virtue curdled:- A security guard traded bottled water for "favors" from a starving teen.
- A group voted to throw a wounded man over the balcony "to distract the biters."
- A pharmacist hoarded antibiotics while a child died of infected dog bites.
Disgust choked Jack.
Disgust at them.
Disgust… at himself.
How can I just WATCH?
Why am I SILENT?
He knew.
Cold and certain.
If he spoke—
If he acted—
He'd be next.
Blood on the tile.
Another sacrifice to the mall's new gods: Cowardice and Cruelty.
Survival had a price:
Watching hell…and saying nothing.
Day by grinding day…Things grew worse.
First, the networks died.
Screens flickered into static graves.
Phones became useless plastic bricks.
The last garbled emergency broadcast dissolved into a hiss of dead air.
Silence fell.
A silence deeper than any humanity had known.
Technology didn't just fail—it rotted.
Servers melted in overloaded data centers.
Satellites spun uselessly in the void.
Generators choked on contaminated fuel.
The comforting hum of civilization…
gone.
The military?
A final, fractured gasp.
Tanks rolled through burning suburbs, guns blazing… until ammo depots ran dry.
Helicopters circled like angry wasps… until they fell from smoke-choked skies.
They held lines drawn in blood and sand…
…until there were no lines left to hold.
Nations panicked.
Missiles screamed across continents.
Mushroom clouds bloomed—sickly, desperate flowers.
Cities vanished in radioactive light.
Did it stop the Virus?
No.
It only scorched the fertile ground where the infected multiplied.
Fire couldn't cleanse this plague.
Before the Fall, theorists argued:
Who would inherit the ashes?
The elite in their mountain bunkers?
The rich with their stocked vaults?
The powerful with their private armies?
They were wrong.
Dead wrong.
The bunkers became tombs when air filters clogged with ash.
The vaults became ovens when power failed.
The private armies turned their guns on their masters for the last can of beans.
Not one of them clawed their way to sunrise.
The true survivors?
In hindsight, it made brutal sense:
The street-smart scavenger who knew which pipes held clean water.
The stubborn farmer who could make seeds sprout in poisoned soil.
The quiet librarian who remembered how to set a bone, distill medicine from weeds, build a fire without matches.
The ones who knew how to live with the earth, not just dominate it.
When the last lab coat was stained with blood…
When the final genius choked out their last breath begging for a cure…
Humanity turned.
Not forward… but back.
To its oldest shield. Its oldest crutch.
When the generators died and the nights grew long and cold…
When the canned food ran out and the infected scratched at the barricades…
When hope was a ghost and despair gnawed your bones…
When you'd trade your last bullet for a reason to see the next dawn…
That's when the veil tore.
The media's lies?
Exposed.
The "freedom" they sold?
A gilded cage.
A prison built on debt, distraction, and the slow poison of comfort.
We weren't citizens.
We were livestock.
And in that suffocating darkness…
They reached for the only light left:
Religion.
Not the polished sermons of cathedrals.
But raw, desperate faith.
Whispered prayers over gangrenous wounds.
Candlelit shrines made of crushed soda cans and broken glass.
Fingers tracing faded symbols on damp concrete walls.
Chanting old words whose meaning was lost… but whose rhythm held back the terror.
Because in a world stripped bare…
Religion offered the unbearable weight of suffering…a name.
A purpose.
A fragile, defiant reason to raise the knife… …and fight for one more bloody sunrise.