Prologue?: The World's End

No sirens, no final broadcast, no heroic last stand—just a long, gray dusk that never lifted. Cities sank into their own shadows, highways cracked and bloomed with weeds, and the sky turned the color of old bruises. Whatever ruled the earth before was swept away in less than a year.

People said it started with the rain.

The first storms came in late summer, thick and oily, clinging to skin like a second, suffocating layer. Those caught outside came home with fevers that burned through them in days. Hospitals filled, then overflowed, then went silent. By the time anyone understood that the rain wasn’t just poisoned—that it was changing things—it was already too late.

The creatures came crawling out of the aftermath.

They were wrong in every way a living thing could be wrong, too many joints bending the wrong directions, mouths where mouths should never be, eyes that reflected no light at all. Some were small enough to slip through cracks; others moved like heavy machinery in the dark, shaking entire buildings with each step. They hunted by sound, by scent, by the thrum of blood.

And they ate people.

They didn’t just kill; they fed—patiently, methodically, as if they were reclaiming something that had always belonged to them. The first months were carnage. Streets turned into feeding grounds, houses into nest sites. Survivors learned quickly: noise meant death, light meant invitation, and open space was a grave you hadn’t fallen into yet.

Now, twenty-three years after the first black rain, the world belongs to them.

Humanity exists in fragments—small, scattered enclaves hidden in the bones of the old world: collapsed subway tunnels, rusting cargo ships beached on dry seabeds, hollowed-out factories where every window is sealed and every door double-bolted. Children are born who have never seen the full sun, who know trees only from tattered books and faded photographs.

In one of these last pockets of human life, beneath the ruins of a dead city, a single rule keeps everyone alive:

Never go above ground after dark.

Tonight, for the first time in years, someone is going to break that rule.