Who doesn't love the apocalypse?

Because I know I do. It's such a fascinating subject to me, figuring out how to get by when everything and everyone you've ever known is gone -- and of course by "fascinating", I mean "keeps me up at night and has me planning how to survive in the empty (and possibly zombie-infested) wasteland that was once human culture."  This....fascination....isn't helped in any way by all those documentaries and specials the History Channel and Discovery Channel run really late at night. You know, the ones where all they talk about is the inevitable destruction of the planet by asteroids or aliens or floods or earthquakes or zombies a terrible and highly contagious virus that wipes out almost 98% of humanity? Yeah, those are really going to help me get to sleep tonight, Discovery Channel. Thank you for letting me know that there is no hope for preventing the total and complete decimation of the entire fucking galaxy. Seriously, for as informative as they can be -- I mean, thanks to the After the Apocalypse special on the History Channel, I now know how to start a fire with some steel wool and a car battery and how to properly scavenge supplies from a dead body, which are both incredibly important life skills that I was lacking -- I still find them to be pretty terrifying.

But hopefully this terror has proven to be a good thing, because from my ridiculous fears have come something actually resembling creativity. The original version of this story was written a little over a year ago, and I've been playing around with this idea since then and never really going anywhere with it until the past few days. The ever-lovely Harper "remixed" this idea in her own story a while ago and while we've been working on a collaborative "redux" of that on and off for the past few months, this is something a bit different.
 

 

( Enjoy? )