Chapter 525
The news came on like a disease, a plague in every home. The government's downfall—it was all anyone spoke of. Channels flipped between talking heads, each spewing their own version of the apocalypse.
"Order must be maintained," one proclaimed, face serious under the studio lights. Nobody listened. Everyone was too busy seeing it themselves, the raw and unforgiving truth that didn't make sense.
Michael was fourteen, living life as best as he could, day in, day out, it was his only way to stay sane. His life was a cycle of dull school corridors and empty evenings at home.
His mum was glued to the telly. Her eyes were dark pits, wide, staring blankly, as some so-called-expert predicted what no one understood. He knew the TV wasn't to blame for her vacantness, but still hated its constant glow.
"Mum, what's happening?" Michael asked, trying to break through her trance. She only shook her head, her lips moving silently. Michael knew no help would be offered, as the words coming from the box took all her attention.
"We're being punished," she murmured one day, "For all of it." Her words felt like ice, slow and cold, sliding into his chest and squeezing around his heart until all he felt was dread. He wasn't used to seeing her talk to the TV as if she were praying to it, her face full of terror.
Days became an eternity of waiting, dread was a new constant companion. Michael tried to find answers at school, but everyone was as lost as he was. Everyone apart from a select few students, the students everyone always gossiped about, and stayed away from.
The odd, quiet group in the corner—they started meeting in the old cemetery after class. Michael had watched them from a distance, hidden behind trees, trying to see what their deal was. Something about the way they sat in their small circles on the damp grass didn't feel human.
He decided to approach them, desperate for anything that wasn't this endless not-knowing. His walk to the cemetery felt slow, every footstep was forced as it crunched on the leaves. It felt as if a thousand thoughts fought in his head, weighing him down more than the fear itself.
"What are you doing here?" one of the group asked as soon as they saw him coming towards them. They were sat crossed-legged in a small circle as they usually were, the girl in the centre the only one speaking, their 'leader' Michael assumed.
"I just… I need to know what's happening," Michael answered, his breath shaky. It seemed every word out his mouth got worse than the last, more hopeless, the words of someone asking for a life line in a sea of shit.
The girl smiled—a cold, tight, gesture. "We're all going to pay. It's starting." He could feel the weight of her words as her lips made every letter seem deliberate, cruel, final.
Over the next few weeks, the country changed. Riots took hold of the streets, but these weren't human cries, it was more primal. Screams at night, not of fear, but something deeper—rage and terror were new languages for the dead and dying.
Michael found himself at the cemetery more often, watching the group, his eyes wide in horror and fascination. They seemed to know, really know, like they had answers nobody else did. He had become the ghost, watching from a distance, never heard.
"They're here, aren't they?" Michael asked the girl one evening, her eyes looked as though she had expected him to come running back. Her stare almost made him want to walk back to where he was standing, away from her dark glare, as a warning he didn't want to believe told him this was the end for him.
She nodded, her lips drawing into a thin, sharp line. "The old gods. They're not happy. Not after what we've done." Her words hung like fog, cold and wet. Her voice almost too low to be heard over the rustle of dead leaves and far-off screaming in the town.
The riots grew worse, the violence more insane. The streets, once the scene of daily indifference, became hunting grounds. Michael's mum stopped speaking, her eyes just reflecting the horrors on the news—horrors they all soon felt first-hand. The days kept dragging him by, day after day.
Michael walked into town with her, her quiet making everything else sound louder. Screams in the distance were becoming background noise for his own thoughts, screaming with more intensity in his mind, his own little riots of the lost and forgotten.
"We should go to the cemetery, Mum, meet them," he suggested. He wasn't expecting an answer from his mum. She just kept on walking, looking straight in front of her, eyes empty and face expressionless. Her footsteps made barely a sound on the dirty pavement, so silent the air screamed around her, deafening him with its echoes.
He held her hand tightly, hoping the squeeze might say something words couldn't. But his touch offered nothing. The contact made no sound either, an unnatural touch of two ghosts moving as one towards the cemetery, towards hope, if it could even be found anymore.
That night, everything took on an ugly new dimension. People didn't just fight in the streets anymore, they transformed, or at least that's what his mind tried to make sense of. The night roared as eyes began to change into those of beasts—their bodies twisted, sounds became animalistic. Humans weren't human anymore, only pain.
"We angered them too much," the girl in the cemetery explained. She looked at Michael with a pity he'd never seen before, the type of sad that he wanted to run and hide from. She spoke as if each word burned her mouth, yet spoke slowly and softly to prolong the agony of them being out.
He wanted to ask who 'they' were, but didn't, terrified her answer would break him. All around him he felt a strange, new reality as people started screaming. Every moment felt longer than the last, each word becoming a hammer to his chest, making it harder to breathe, to think.
Michael watched as the people around him became things—horrors from stories only old men and drunks spoke of, that was now their lives. Eyes on the pavement, bodies of animals, twisted limbs on humans. The screams turned from terror to pain, pain no words described.
He clung to his mum, the only part of his world that was still his, a piece of himself, although even that seemed so far away now. The things out in the dark, on the streets, in the alleyways, were now walking toward them all, like a predator slowly stalking their prey, or maybe as someone would if they were drowning as they try and fight their way up for a last gasp of air.
His world felt like a nightmare he couldn't wake from, a hell no person deserved. No amount of good made up for the world of hate, the cruelty that had become their payment for greed. The truth hurt, every sound became unbearable. He closed his eyes in a final moment of fear.
When Michael opened his eyes, it was to a silence even more deafening, all hope vanished now, nowhere, nothing. No people screaming. Just a quiet. It was more disturbing, the nothing felt too much to make sense of, the world he wanted but knew wasn't for the better.
His mother's eyes cleared, not vacant but still too silent, almost a death stare, blank, nothing. She blinked a few times. The silence became its own punishment for all that was done, no hope for the future just this silence. Her eyes widened, seeing.
He took a sharp breath, taking his own look at the world that was supposed to still be his home. But he wasn't sure how much more of the world he wanted to see as he quickly scanned his surroundings. The air itself looked darker somehow, no hope on offer in the world, its absence a warning of their demise.
The group from the cemetery was gone, vanished like they were never there at all. Like everyone, they were all taken, punished by these Gods the old books spoke about, and now even she knew to be true. Every name ever cursed on his tongue made his own mother shake with fear at hearing their names spoken aloud again.
He stood in the empty cemetery with his mum, two survivors who now needed to live this new existence. Each day was a countdown; the quiet didn't last. It never could. Not for long, only seconds, and it came back worse, much worse, worse than ever, each sound felt like being burnt alive slowly, his mind burned itself alive trying to comprehend what their fate would be.
They tried to return home but found nothing but destruction. Buildings crumbled, nature reclaiming its space. Fires burned where they shouldn't—blue flames in broad daylight, on trees, in bushes, in cars, making the world look like a hellscape. Nature wasn't what it used to be anymore, not human, too evil to comprehend.
One morning, Michael woke to find his mum gone. A note left behind, scribbled words on paper—"I'm sorry." Words so small to make him break the way he did, his world shattered again. He fell to his knees on seeing her final attempt to make him live his new life free of her.
He left, roaming this new, desolate world. Alone was his constant state, never seeing, never knowing if anyone, anything, else lived anymore. Or at least not on his side, wherever that side was now. Michael saw it all unfold from nothing to hell to what felt like, was surely the end.
He was a witness, a living testament to their greed and his penance. Days were endless stretches of walking, hiding, surviving for nothing. Only now, his silence wasn't his own. Even if someone were there, who was he going to tell, or maybe he should keep it that way, what was his was now everyone else's, their new horror to embrace.
One day, Michael found himself back in London, or where it once stood, near a house on his old street. A once-familiar landscape, it was all barely recognizable—ashes of his past. Nothing else remained, as even nature could never have survived in a world without the people it ruled over.
He entered one of the houses, his own—it felt foreign now, memories just ghosts, not his. All around him the house tried to whisper in a world he only half-lived in, trapped in a new existence of half-life, no escape from this reality.
Michael walked upstairs to what was once his room, just ash, debris, and burnt wood. His mum had been keeping photos under his bed. But now, they weren't photos, not pictures, but real, living glimpses of his past life—him, his mum, friends all trapped in these moving pictures like imprisoned souls begging for help.
He picked up one, staring into a scene of his 10th birthday. His younger self laughed, face full of joy. A joy that would never be felt again by him, his past life was now just one long torture scene that never ended. He saw himself happy once, and the photo became his own torment as time went on.
Michael held onto these pictures—fragments of a life lost. A way to make him never forget who they all once were before they became monsters, animals. Each scene in the moving images played as a sick reminder, a horror too real.
As weeks turned into months, the loneliness ate at him. The images in the photos started changing, their smiles turning into screams, their eyes, blood red—faces becoming animalistic. All as a message from what, who he still never knew for certain, yet it all screamed a reminder.
Michael decided to end it—not death, but a different end, as if one could exist. There wasn't even a guarantee his wish was his to make anymore, not if these old 'Gods' wanted to keep him, use him to feel alive in the only way a thing that cruel ever could, with the end for them only just starting, not the end he deserved.
He would destroy the photos, the final tie to a past that no longer served anyone. If death did indeed come then so be it. He couldn't live like this anymore, alone in a broken world. Nothing was certain in life anymore, he decided what his final chapter would be, not these beings, or the world he once walked.
In the heart of what was once his home, he gathered the photos. One by one, he dropped them into a burning pit of blue fire he had found still burning in a home nearby—watching as they twisted and melted, the screams of his past becoming silent forever. His way to make the noise stop for good.
But as the last photo turned to ash, Michael felt a change. Not around him, but inside. Something inhuman took hold—his body twisting, eyes turning red. All he saw was the same horrors he saw destroy others on the street all those weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds ago, turning his stomach.
He became one of them—a creature, a monster. His final act, a last middle finger to the world that had taken all. And now all his screams and growls would be a new, ever-constant presence, forever the witness and now their victim to add to the never-ending punishment, for crimes, the old books had never mentioned in detail until now.