1.4 Rescue

Drake awoke in a hospital bed. His head was throbbing.

“Oww…”

He clutched his head where the wound was. He suddenly remembered what had last happened. He had been in the middle of Cyll, in all the chaos, and was hit by a falling piece of a building. He got up to check his surroundings, cautious to find large black monsters anywhere around him.

“Woah, woah, hold it, man,” A voice said.

Beside Drake was a man in a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and a colorful tie. Nothing matched up. He had a shabby appearance and headphones on—a relic from decades ago. He had light brown hair, a goatee surrounded by stubble for a beard, a gaudy earring, a pair of glasses that contrasted just about everything else about him.

“Ya can’t just move around like that after wakin’ up!” His English was similar to slang spoken in the early 2000s, but Drake doubted it was ever this bad back then. The man forced Drake to lay back in bed.

“Excuse me, but who are you and where am I?” Drake had to know whether he was in safety, and also who this weird guy was.

“The ‘where ya are’ part… I can’t tell ya that, dude. I’d betta leave that to your friends ta explain.”

Friends? Drake thought, I have friends who're here? The more bizarre thing to Drake was that this person was contradicting his own style of talking by using two different pronunciations of ‘to’. Who the heck is this guy?

“As fa the ‘who I am’ part, well, I’m yer docta.”

Drake looked at the man straight in the face. He grinned back. Drake wasn’t sure if he was being serious.

“Oh, right! I should introduce maself! I’m Dr. Stephan Poll.” He grinned again and extended his hand. Drake looked at it, not moving. The so-called ‘doctor’ took it back awkwardly after a few moments. “I saved ya after you were brought here with a concussion. You’re from, uh…” He looked at his clipboard, “Cile? Ceel? Whateva’, what matters is that I saved ja life.” He closed his eyes and tilted his head back in self-praise. Drake blinked. He couldn’t believe that this guy was a doctor, nevertheless saved his life.

At that time, the door to the dark, windowless room in which the two of them were opened, and a third person joined them. This one, Drake recognized.

“Steve!” Drake exclaimed, happy to see his partner again.

“Hey, Drake! How are you feeling?” Steve walked up to the bed Drake was on.

“Good, apart from a headache. What happened? Were you the one that saved me?”

“Yup. After you left, I was unsure of what to do, so I followed you to see what you were going to do. I saw you getting hit by the rubble. I ran over and brought your unconscious body here.”

“Thank you.”

“No problem. You saved me too, after all.”

“By the way, where is ‘here’?”

Steve winced at the question. He turned to Dr. Poll. “You haven’t explained it yet?”

Poll waved his hand dismissively, “Naw, I thought you’d explain it betta’.”

Steve turned back to Drake. “Let’s leave the room and get some fresh air. I’ll explain on the way. For now, just know that you’re in complete safety.”

Drake slowly got off the bed with the doctor’s assistance and walked with Steve out of the room curiously. The doctor was complaining about not being able to complete some procedural checkups and asked Drake to come back later. He seemed to care about his patients, though Drake doubted his qualification.

“Drake, what is the last thing you remember?” Steve asked as they walked down the corridor.

“Huh? Well, the chunk of cement hit me in the head and I fell unconscious.” Drake left out that his last thoughts were that of worry that a mutant would eat his vulnerable body lying on the ground. He felt it was weird that that was his last thought.

“Well, after that, I picked you up and carried you to that helicopter that was taking in some people. I got us seats. It flew away from the city to where we are now.”

Drake was surprised Steve got them onto the vehicle. There were hundreds competing for those seats, for a chance to get to safety, wherever that may be.

“Wow. That’s amazing! Where did it take us?”

“Before I say that, I’d like to ask what you thought of the situation with those creatures? What were your theories on where they came from and how they got to the city?”

“Well, I was too focused on survival to think much about it. I originally thought they had come from the meteorite that crashed near my house somehow, but after seeing the creatures in Cyll, I thought maybe the two events were unrelated and that some animals were randomly transformed into those abominations. That explained all the rodents in the city.”

“Good observations. But the truth is that the events are correlated. Those… mutants were caused by the meteorite crash. Further, the mutants weren’t just at Beil and Cyll.” Steve looked at Drake seriously. “What happened, happened across the whole world.”

Drake recalled what happened. The vivid scenes of people getting chased down and eaten by those monsters. He had thought that it probably wasn’t just happening in the two cities, but for that to have happened to the whole world… Some part of his subconscious must have thought of that possibility before, but it pushed the theory away because he couldn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it. But here was reality, showing the worst case he had dismissed in disbelief. Drake felt sick. He stopped walking.

“Your inference that animals on the planet were transformed is true. We think most of the human population has been wiped out. The casualties have been estimated at fifteen billion.”

Drake didn’t want to hear more. He wanted Steve to slow down. All of humanity? Destroyed?

Steve patted Drake. He knew how he felt, having gone through the same storm of, quite literally, world-changing information. But he needed to get through this quickly. Drake would have to attend a certain important conference which would start in an hour, and Drake needed to catch up to the present situation beforehand. Steve got Drake and helped him start moving again, heading for a large glass window at the end of the hallway.

“It is indeed tragic. But people have survived, not quite like us, but by hiding in underground shelters and other safe places where the mutants can’t get them for now. Our situation… is a bit different. Have you heard of Project Ark?” Steve asked.

Drake answered: “Yes. It’s supposed to be a government project to prepare for The Apocalypse.” Drake just realized that he was living through the apocalypse that everyone had predicted. “The government was supposed to create a sanctuary where a handful of humans can survive any apocalypse and continue the species.”

“Precisely,” Steve replied as they turned a corner.

At the end of this hallway was a large window, and Drake wasn’t quite sure of what he saw through it. He went towards it to confirm what he was seeing. Steve followed, letting the view sink in for Drake.

Drake had always thought that Project Ark was a myth, or that it was just a name through which corrupt politicians could funnel money secretly into their pockets, but what he saw in front of him through the window completely changed his mind:

The two were in a tall building, presumably a hospital, surrounded by other tall buildings. A city. Yet, there were no mutants to be sighted here. The reason may have had to do with what encircled the entire city from dozens of miles from the center: An enormous wall, taller than any building Drake had ever seen in his life. It seemed to be covered in or made of giant plates of rusted, scrap iron.

Steve finished what he was saying in the background, “We’re in it. Project Ark is a city surrounded by a fifty-one-storey tall concrete wall, don’t let the scrap metal cover fool you, designed to protect it from most external threats. The inside houses half a million people, supplies to last a while, 290 square miles of land, 61,000 acres of which is farmland, all normal facilities you’d find in a city from hospitals to a power plant, and is the last large-scale base for humanity to survive in. Its name is ‘Rencia’…”

MAYHEM ON EARTH: Volume 1. / End.