A Way Out

A Way Out

An important man walks hurriedly into a faintly lighted room. The doors are slammed open as the president of the United States of America enters. All the other people noticed the entry and are glad the president made it in time. The other people are some important decision-makers from around the world, representing people of the free world, which geographically means mainly USA and EU. This meeting is a final place of freedom, a getaway of reason. At the middle of the room is an altar, made of artifacts from earliest civilizations like Sumer and perhaps earlier, through Greek and christian realities. All of the treasures are the key components to a fairly complex religious apparatus. At the middle of the altar is a ribcage, which is surrounded by two broken stone slabs, a wooden cup and various other strange things from Judaism, Buddhism, etcetera. Most of the people in the room do not know what they are, except a couple archeologists, scientists and theologians.

The President of the USA promptly encourages scientists to put the show on the road as soon as possible, and they did. A scientist walks towards the altar with a transparent tube, which holds a black material, a tiny dot, between two strong magnets. The scientist slams the tube to the ribcage and the black dot starts to levitate above and center of the altar. Little bit of shaking, which reminds of a mild earthquake, puts the room under stress and starts to worry people with no knowledge of what is going to happen next. The black dot merges with the ribcage and rises from the altar. The other religious artifacts follow the lead and start to circulate the ribcage. Inhumanly bright light emerges from the altar and fills the room. When the light recedes, all the people in the room see that the artifacts are gone, but there is a white hole, reminiscent of a tear, which emits a bright white light, just at the same position where the rib cage was. People can not believe what they are seeing, and are more confused when an arm comes out from the tear, which resembles a human arm. The hand straightens out a finger. Scientists are hurrying after one another, towards the hand and all of them touch the finger with their own fingertips. Soon all the people in the room followed the example. The last one is the President and he touches the finger tip from the tear. Everybody starts to see their body to dim, and it frightens some people to the limits of insanity. Scientists start to calm em down, but it does not matter, because it has already started. Everybody vanished, except two persons, a man and a woman, who hysterically watches everybody gone. The hand pulls in from the tear and the tear closes, leaving these two people alone in an empty dim room. It takes 10 seconds of silence, before the room is filled with a firestorm, and a massive explosion. The explosion is the size of Nebraska, leaving a massive crater at Nebraska, center of the America. The blue firestorm follows the massive explosion, covering the entire USA, leaving no nooks alone.

World War 3 began in Ukraine, eastern Europe, where Slavs fought mainly amongst themselves. It was a conflict of proxy war, where the west supported western values, while the east wanted their influence to conquer whole Ukraine and eventually whole Europe. USA supported vastly western Ukraine with massive arms raise, without taking part in the conflict directly. Russia was the one who started the whole theatre with self-interest, and tried to purge western boundary further to the west. When the conflict started, the world was instantly divided into two parties, east and west. It took over a year to deepen conflict, meaning opposite values started to accumulate to greater forces and interests. World was split into two coalitions; The Rationality and The Juggernauts. The Juggernauts call people of The Rationality as Rats, and The Rationality calls The Juggernauts as Jugs, an empty cup. Rats mainly consist of Northern America, EU, Australia and small parts in Asia. Jugs is a coalition of nations from the darkest corners of the earth, consisting of a politically corrupt world, including people with decades and centuries marinated in misguided values in life and warped reality of the world, seeking only self-interests. The world was soon on fire and all out war was in every continent.

 The main theatre was in Europe, but great frontiers were in the South China Sea, Bering Sea, Africa, Australia, and covert operations happened even places most people did not know existed. Jugs intelligence service surveyed the massive explosion in Norhern America, which some experts concluded as a nuclear strike, but nobody has seen as massive size strike, or capable device exist, not even in their dreams, ever. Most baffling aspect was how it happened in the heart of the enemy territory as such an unexpected event. Actually nobody was expecting anything like that would happen, not even in intelligence services at the Jugs camp, not as such an convenient event, which would solve the war decisively for Jugs. Nobody claimed it in any parts of the army of Jugs, not even terrorist groups, but they concluded it by resolving that Rats had enough and just gave up everything, maybe because unexpected morale drop internally, or by some unknown terrorist group inside the heartland. Rats frontiers collapsed to the last man and the world turned red and black, and Jugs celebrated the successful campaign. The world was theirs, the future would serve a platform for self-interest and impudence for the most bold and pervert minds, who would do anything for themselves and forget others. The forces of Jugs started to invade Northern America and they had a surprise waiting at the ashes.

The gigantic explosion and the blue firestorm left a desert of ashes to its wake. All the forests, foliage, undergrowth, bodies of water, animali from big to small, even bacteria and fungi, were all annihilated. Jugs frontier advancing and their science division realized it as they entered the Northern American land. The burnt trees were just stalks of ashes, animal skeletons were littered everywhere and all the waters were just empty hollow bowls of steam, like it was the last breath of life. But there was more, there were human survivors, mostly with extensive scalds, but somehow they managed to survive. That is the the another reason which baffles the scientist and intelligence services left on earth: how did they managed to survive, when all other life is gone around them, even structures of cities are just piles ashes in a shape of former existences as the never seen before heat from the explosion completely wrecked them. Turns out that all people left behind were the scum from the deepest barrel from their former society: criminals, narcissists, psychopaths, sociopaths, murderers, pedophiles, etcetera, and the whole spectrum of vanity from tiny to big, were there, naked and burned, trying to survive in the land of the dead. Something had happened to them though, through the blue firestorm; They would not die. Some of them surely managed to embed and manipulate themselves to a new fold of the new world order, and they fit perfectly. Some, though, the worst could not help themselves and gave up to their inner beasts and tried to run through a bullet wall to maul their new victims, but only died and their weak human bodies were left there to rot. But these beasts would later get promoted, not in Jugs company, but elsewhere. 

The invading forces reached the massive crater at the center of USA. The whole astronomical formation was an absurd sight, since it was all glassed down, but the site was not as deep as its diameter would suggest. Its depth in the deepest point was only 100 meters deep. Meanwhile scientist tried to understand the anomalies all over the former USA and Canada, when the occupying mass really started to settle in and study their new died world, something more absurd started to happen. First sightings described the absurdities at random locations as tears that started to open from nowhere in mid-air, emitting bright pungent red light, and they would expand as a tear would occur in a sheet of paper. They grew and grew, and the red light could not be observed by anything vision protective from weld masks to highly advanced laser protections or augmenting apparatus. All the vision enhancers would just fry and burn. Sightings of tears started to multiply rapidly, so their locations could be seen from space by a bare eye. There was a moment, when the multiplying appeared to halt, but from a ground view, anywhere you might be, you could only see endless sea of red light, which could not be viewed by a mortal eye. Only way to avoid the light was to go kneeling down, put your head to the ground, cover it with your arms so your eyes would be hidden and protected. Only way to protect your eyes were to look at the burnt, ashen ground. Not even a human body from another could stop lights.

It appeared that the whole invading Jugs insertion were there to kneel as they tried to protect their eyes. Headquarters in another continents and entities observing the situations, tried to understand and connect the lights, tears and total collapse of the whole army to a one rational thought. There was not any. Then it appeared that so called walkers started to emerge from the tears, the things with a rotting human body looking like a 1000 year old mummified corpse, walked endlessly and appeared not to be violent creatures in nature. The problem would come later when these creatures contaminate living things in their wake with diseases never heard or existed, like a unknown type of plague which would go rapidly through a body, leaving behind a pulsating bubbling dead corpse. There was no apparent end to the emerging creatures from tears, and the North America looked like a seething hive of ants to a observer in a far away in space. The emergent event was so vastly continuous, that there were mountains of walking, slithering undead creatures, which soon reached oceans in every beach, and they just walked into the water. They either walked on the bottom or floated like driftwood on the ocean. One noticeable thing was that these rotting corpses blocked the bright red light, so some remaining military forces managed to regain their stance momentarily to fire a shot or two to an approaching tidal wave of walking corpses.

… To be continued.