All the Fiends of Hell

by Adam L.G. Nevill

Light filtered primrose from an indefinable source beyond the cloud cover. No miracle to be celebrated up there. Only an assurance that further reprisals and atrocities awaited any living thing that chose to resettle these buildings. The notion that human habitation could resume beneath such a sky struck him as absurd. This was a cleansing. Those that remained were being driven into the open, probably to be annihilated in the manner of small animals beaten from cover by hunters and their hounds. And once the sky was entirely red . . . the speed with which they moved. Karl couldn’t bear to think about them.

When he wondered if any of them would ever recover, he’d decided that in the unlikely event of any of them surviving for much longer, none of them would heal. There was no rehabilitation for this level of trauma. They’d all become different people in one week – harder, madder, sadder. Something they’d only recognise later. If there was a later.

Things that have never been on this planet before. This didn’t come from here, from the earth. None of it. There’s nothing in the history of the planet that has any equivalency to what has happened over the last week. Surely you can see that. Whatever is here is exterminating the last of us. Like a god.

Survivors were mere witnesses. A scattering of stragglers. No one would ever hear their brief stories. There were no more stories. A few desperate actions remained to be unrecorded and unremarked upon. Narrative had ended. Everything mankind had done and built and known was redundant, discarded. The world was a landfill. He found that the hardest thing to accept: that nothing would be commented upon again, nor processed. It just was. And then something else would continue in the place of his species.

Nothing but doom and gloom, yet you press on.