107 years ago a spaceship appeared over Central Africa.
The world has been cold and hungry for all of my life. It’s a place I like to forget when I drift off to sleep every night. The dampness of it all, the danger and teeth around every corner; they haunt me just as they have haunted all the other people I know. Those people are gone now. One of the zoonomic found us.
The zoonomic are beasts made of malice. They are the haunters, movers and eaters of the world as I’ve known it. For all my life it’s been that way; ecosystems made with monsters on the top. They come in all kinds of twisted, unearthly forms. Crafted from the masks of other creatures and with an edge of supernatural hubris. The grandparents of my bunker would tell stories of the years before the ‘zoonomic apocalypse,’ times when humans were free to live and dream without the animalistic notions that I am so attuned to. They said that a person with a gun could outmatch even the strongest wild thing. Any problem in the physical domain was stripped down and beaten with the march of machines or electricity. That dream, the problem-solving kind, is a place I like to visit when I sleep – and forget about the cold and hungry world.
I’ve stopped by that place in my dreams many more times as of recent. It’s helped me cope away from the violent corporeal sadness lying just below the surface of me. Of course, that trauma stemmed from that night just a few months ago. The night when the zoonomic found us.
For all the time I can remember I had lived in the bunker. It was a community under the Earth, made up of several tens of people, all living lives contained and based in survival. The young ones, myself included, were disallowed from exiting the bunker and exploring the outside. Only the adult men and women would go out, but that was a rare thing, and was really only if we needed something that we could not craft. Otherwise we spent our days writing, reading and playing games. I was the only one who wondered and dreamed; most nights I would spend lying awake, staring at the stars through small holes in my ceiling. Everyone else dismissed me, they dismissed my craving for the outside, the dream of freedom and the past that I often waddled through. And in some ways, I did get what I wanted, I am on the outside now, exploring – but now all my friends are dead.
Maybe I’ll die sometime soon too, or maybe I’ll live enough to see the whole world, I don’t know. It’s hard to say what terrible monster will be my next nightmare, or which will be my end, I’m just going to keep wandering until everything comes and goes and waves on. It’s hard to dream any further nowadays.
