Afterworld: Rain of Monsters

The storm is a bad one, spitting out monsters along with wind and rain, lightning and thunder. We don't usually get them like that, up here in the forests of the plateau. The Sacred Trees usually hold them back. They're more common out in the plains, where a bad storm in the right season can wipe out half a city, I'm told. Regardless, we're going to have to organize a troop to go out there and wipe out whatever survived the fall -- which will be the strongest and the worst of them. We'd better be ready.

"How bad?" asks my wife, carefully modulating her voice so as not to do us any damage. 

"Not disastrous, but it'll be trouble." I shrug. "It's more water for the reservoir, but we'll be hunting Things for a couple of weeks after this -- and in the woods, yet."

"They'll be weaker there, at least," she said, and I nodded agreement. 

None of us were entirely sure what the trees on this particular section of the Cumberland Plateau were doing to weaken the apocalyptic intrusions, but it it was impossible to deny that they were doing something. The beasts and stranger things that tried to come up the mountain weakened, sometimes died on their own, and frequently just turned back. It made occupying the former University of the South almost safe, despite concerns about food, fresh water, and our fellow refugees. 

There are cracks in the world now, almost like overlays in some places. Strange things emerge from them, bringing multiple apocalypses all at once. Some of that has settled back, but some of it hasn't. Miami was devoured by a spreading infection so bad that the government nuked it -- back when we had a government, and working nuclear arms. Most of the Everglades are an irradiated wasteland now. The city of New York, I'm told, remains haunted by killer ghosts -- unseen things that walk through walls and kill instantly with a touch. The Dallas/Fort-Worth Metroplex was taken over completely by the zompires, who have been expanding more slowly ever since -- their need for blood holds them back, now that the surrounding communities have fled or been consumed. Seattle, on the other hand, had banded together to turn back the massive beasts prowling its streets, and was now considered a sanctuary of sorts. I had word of this from one of the skin-changers, Devon, who had skinned one of the beasts and could now use that skin to assume its likeness. 

Of the ones who'd managed to survive, not all had come through unchanged. The plagues that preceded the intrusions had been bad enough on their own. 

"I'll come with you," my beautiful wife said softly, knowing that I wouldn't stay back when the troop formed. Too many of them would be ordinary, unaltered, still purely human. They would need the support of the Strange, like us: the ones who'd been altered by the end of the world. It would keep their casualties down, and here at the end of all things we desperately needed to keep their casualties down.