You probably think you already know how this goes. 

You’re familiar with tales of horror and destruction, chaos, violence, death, and what’s worse—you like them. 

Before, humans were always making up stories that betrayed their fears, but they always ended with some kind of appeal. Satisfaction of dark appetites. Relief from the terror. Assuaging of the fear. Humans are great at making themselves feel better about terrible things. Happy endings and all. They hide, they ignore, they repress. They delude themselves. 

Well, there’s something I feel I should mention before I begin: 

This is not a nice story. 

There are no hopeful platitudes. There is no turning off the TV and starting a load of laundry and kicking the dog to feel better. And there is definitely no happy ending.

I’d like to tell you that it’s worth your time, or at least that it’s not true. But then I’d be lying and I’m doing my best to be honest for once. There’s no reason to avoid the truth about what happened, except to make you feel better, and I’ve already explained why that’s ridiculous.

The best way I can put it is that this story is about the end of the world. I’m not being melodramatic. If that’s not enough to deter you, there are also the deaths of major characters (including mine, depending how you look at it), dismemberment, blood and gore, betrayal, war, terror, epidemics, cannibalism, genocide, mass destruction, and one singularly disastrous attempt at heroism.

I’m sure there will be plenty who are eager to read this story, despite my disclaimer. You think you’re not afraid. That you’re tough and can stomach anything. You even enjoy being horrified now and again.

To that, I say:

You’re a fool.

Everyone used to like being horrified. Otherwise, who would ever have watched the news, before all this happened? Before towers began blaring music from the abyss, before televisions were filled with reality shows of torture? Horrible things used to happen when we thought the world was just fine. The same damn things: War. Genocide. Starvation. Slavery. EDM. Tie-dye.

The reason this story is different is because it actually happens. It’s your future, and nobody is going to see it coming. If I could warn you off the whole thing, truly—I would. I wish it wasn’t happening. However, unfortunately for me, this is MY story. And I’m sharing it because, well, I get really bored sitting around, and I like to imagine that somebody, somewhere, would have done the same for me.