The day the world falls
There won’t be any warning
No one on the outside will be prepared and it will be chaos.
This is why we are training you, Son.
For the day the world falls,
Only you will be able to protect and preserve humanity.
“No… No, no!” Cedric Vargas mumbled in his sleep, “Make it stop, please!”
He tossed and turned in bed as he was trapped in another nightmare. It wasn’t just a nightmare, it was more of a collection of memories. Memories he wished he could forget, it’d been three months now. But no amount of time could just erase all of his trauma. He remembered his parents voices repeatedly telling him how the world would end soon, and he remembered their icy cold eyes staring intently at him with ambition and nothing but the highest expectations for him.
His training regimen was harsh and excruciating. Two hundred push-ups. Two hundred sit-ups. Two hundred squats. Twenty kilometer runs on the treadmill. Then came the worst part: sparring with both Mom and Dad who apparently were experts at it. All of this at least three times a day, every single day, for over eight years.
Every time he got flipped over during sparring and he landed flat on his back on the hard concrete, he was forced to hold back his tears. Crying in front of Mom and Dad was unacceptable, they wouldn’t allow it. Then he’d have to stand back up, dust himself off, get back into a position ready to attack and do it all over again.
He was midway into being flipped and pinned to the ground again when he realized this was just a dream, and he woke up as soon as he felt his back hit the concrete once more. Quickly sitting up in his bed, drenched in a cold sweat that seeped through to his sheets, and he was panting like a dog. Clutching his chest where his heart was pounding, he couldn’t calm down on his own anymore.
So Cedric called out for his aunt. “Re-Regan? Aunt Regan!” There was no answer. So he screamed at the top of his lungs, “AUNT REGAN!!!”
Suddenly footsteps approached his room from down the hallway. Then his bedroom door swung open forcefully to reveal a middle-aged woman with long brown hair messy from just having gotten out of bed standing in the doorway. She immediately walked over and sat down on his bedside, hugged him and stroked her fingers through his own messy but blonde hair.
“Sssshhh… Hey, hey, buddy, it’s okay,” she said. “Was it another nightmare?” Cedric nodded in response, his breathing starting to slow down. Aunt Regan continued, “Well, everything’s going to be okay. You’re safe now. They can’t get to you here. Remember that.”
She hugged her nephew even tighter, gripping her fingertips into the fatty parts of his arms, which hurt a bit but Cedric had learned it was her love language. He let it happen for the next several moments while he regained his composure, and then he told her that he was fine now and she could loosen her grasp on him because her hugging was hurting him.
“Oh, my bad,” she replied apologetically. Then she stood up and said with a smile, “Well, I guess I’ll meet you downstairs for breakfast,” she then looked all around his bedroom floor and mentioned, “By the way… I don’t mean to pile on, but didn’t I tell you last week to clean up this mess?”
Cedric almost had another panic attack. He too looked along the floor and noticed all of the dirty clothes and crumpled-up scrap papers from past homework assignments piling up so much that he could barely see the red carpet anymore. Red that reminded him of blood. Blood that always fell from his wounds during training. But he didn’t freak out, instead his posture just slumped over in bed as he slapped his own forehead with his hand.
“Um, can’t I do it after school today?” Cedric asked his aunt as she started to walk out of the room.
“Half now, half later. If you want to eat breakfast, alright?” Aunt Regan replied as she left to go take a shower.
Cedric didn’t argue. He got out of bed, opened the window curtains to let in the morning sunlight, began to pick up his dirty laundry that was just scattered along the carpet and tossed them into his already overflowing hamper. He then went for the balled up papers, stuffing them into his backpack, figuring he may need them for future school assignments. This process took about fifteen minutes before he got dressed into some fresh clothes for the day. By this time he got hungry and so he grabbed his backpack that was now full to the brim and rushed downstairs.
Sitting at the breakfast table, he saw his little sister Elena Vargas was already in the kitchen and she was making herself some frozen toaster waffles from the freezer. She was standing in front of the counter where the toaster was cooking, a plate of stacked heated waffles was next to it, and she appeared to be watching some YouTube video on her smartphone. As this happened, she let the current batch of waffles burn before Cedric smelled smoke and had to rush over and unplug the toaster before his sister set the whole house on fire.
“Jeez, Elena, you got to pay attention around these things, you know that?” Cedric said as he had pushed his sister aside, but she appeared clueless as to what had just happened. She was only nine years old, so Cedric thought she was just easily distracted. But the look on her face was full of shock and fright, which made him ask, “Hey. You okay?”
“Sorry. It’s just… this weird video online,” Elena began, “They’re saying something about a really bad disease going around in the U.S., and it seems to spreading fast all over the world.”
Cedric’s heart dropped into his stomach. “What are you talking about?”
“Look,” Elena scrolled her finger across her phone screen to rewind the video she was watching and held it up to show her big brother as he bent down to see it better.
The video took up the whole screen and depicted footage from a body camera from a group of several cops from somewhere in the western United States. This footage clearly showed a man who looked tattered and torn, his skin was grayish brown, and a part of his left forearm looked like it had been bitten off by a wild animal. The same man was on all fours on the street, and he was eating corpse of a dead person. A voice from another man, most likely one of the cops, shouted at the beaten-looking man to stop what he was doing or they’d open fire, but he didn’t listen. He just kept devouring away at the corpse lying in the middle of the street, even after the cops started firing at him. The scary part was he didn’t die, shot after shot after shot. At least three in the legs, nine in his back around his chest and stomach, two in each shoulder, and several more scattered about. It wasn’t until the man finally took a break from his snack, stood up, turned around, and began running like a crazy person toward the cops that a few bullets struck him in the head into his brain and he fell over and stopped moving.
This wasn’t a cartoon or an act. If this was a prank of some kind, it sure was a really good one. One thing was for sure, too, that it had the kids’ attention by the throat.
When the video ended, Cedric took a huge inhale and realized he had been holding his breath for God knows how long at some point during the video. Elena lowered her phone as she faced the screen back toward her, looking down at it before looking back up at her brother and saw that he was just as shocked, confused, and terrified as she was about this. Maybe more.
“What… What they hell was that supposed to be?” he finally broke the silence after a minute or two.
“Well, I heard before about this things called ‘the undead’,” Elena started, “And how it meant ‘the end of the world’, something like that. I know that there are a bunch of scary movies about it out there, but Aunt Regan won’t let me watch them. She says they’re not appreciate for me.”
Cedric knew that she meant appropriate instead of appreciate, but what grabbed him more was how she was talking about the end of the world. Did this mean everything Mom and Dad said was true, was right? That life as they’d known was going to cease to exist? Was doubting his parents the right move? A bead of sweat dripped down from his forehead to his chin, and that was when Aunt Regan walked in, having just gotten out of the shower, with a towel around her shoulders, and commented on the lingering burnt waffle smell in the kitchen.
Before he could think about it any further, Cedric was snapped back to reality, and looking at his family, as Elena walked up to Aunt Regan and asked her to keep making her waffles for her, he forgot about the stress and fear for a while. He smiled dumbly when Aunt Regan asked him if he was alright, and then they all ate the rest of the waffles together.
After breakfast and leaving the house to go to school, Cedric held Elena’s hand as they walked down the sidewalks of their neighborhood. Their schools were right next to each other, so they took the same route together every day for the past couple of months.
About three blocks down, they quickly met up with Daniel Moss, Cedric’s first best friend since starting high school in the middle of his senior year. Daniel was among the nicest, genuinely compassionate people Cedric had ever known since getting away from his Mom and Dad. He had this wacky positive energy that lightened up a dark room just by entering it, and his goofiness and sense of humor made him their grade’s class clown, but he still possessed enough seriousness to be the shoulder to cry on or the ear that listens fully to whatever problems you may have. In addition to all this, he was also openly gay.
Daniel lived around this area, and he waved his hand up high in the air above his head once he saw them coming down the side of the road. He began walking alongside the two siblings once they reached where he had been standing, and together they talked about trivial things like books and studying and that kind of thing. Until Elena decided to break all ice and asked Daniel if he had seen the same video she showed Cedric not even an hour earlier.
“Oh, that? I didn’t see it on YouTube, but I did see some of what they showed on the news channel this morning,” Daniel replied, “To think a prank like that managed to make national news in a matter of hours.”
“So you think it’s just a prank?” Cedric asked, unsure if he was going to like his answer.
“Well, yeah, but still, wouldn’t it be kinda cool if it was real?” Daniel joked.
He didn’t like that answer. Cedric’s eyes widened as he stared at Daniel and his grip on Elena’s hand tightened to the point his knuckles turned white and she was telling him that he was hurting her.
Daniel took one look at Cedric’s face and realized his mistake. “Oh shit, dude, I’m sorry. Guess I forgot for a quick sec. Are you okay?”
Cedric nodded, not certain if he could say he was fine without his voice quivering and sounding scared.
They were about two blocks away from the schools when they realized something was off. They were in the centered part of town now, which was usually bustling with people, but there wasn’t anyone in sight. No pedestrians, no passing cars, nothing. Everyone seemed to had just vanished.
“Hey, where is everybody?” Elena asked all of a sudden, breaking the silence.
Out of nowhere, they each heard that a dog had started barking. It was a fierce, aggressive kind of bark, and it wouldn’t stop once it begun. Like it was trying to ward off an intruder already on its premises but didn’t dare get close to bite them, thinking its bark was enough to scare them off.
It wasn’t.
The three kids slowed their pace for a moment, looking around in all directions from the nearby roads and sidewalks to even peeking inside the windows of nearby buildings. Not a soul.
All of a sudden, a man stepped out from an alley that was in front of their path and stood on the sidewalk blocking them as he was no more than ten paces ahead. This man had purplish gray skin, and he stumbled slumped forward like he weas having trouble walking. His mouth was hung open, and his clothes were tattered, torn, and bloodied. But what was more alarming was how he had bite marks all over him like he had just been attacked and half-eaten by a wild animal.
Cedric, Daniel, and Elena stopped in their tracks as soon as they saw him. A chill ran down all of their spines as their eyes grew wide, staring at the man who didn’t notice them at first, but when he did, he charged right at them with his mouth opened even wider than before to reveal his mangled teeth. It was unnaturally wide now as though he was ready to take a bite out of the kids he was sprinting towards, and even his running was unnaturally fast as his arms didn’t swing at his sides in a normal way. They just flailed around.
Daniel and Elena froze, but somehow, Cedric didn’t. The whole time he had been staring at the man, it made him think back to when he was around eleven or twelve, when he was still a prisoner and a test subject for his parents. His instincts kicked in, acting upon them, and he took a step forward before punching the man in the side of his head so hard that he was sent flying across the street and crashing into a brick building on that side. The man’s body made an indent in that building where he had smacked into it, causing it to crumble and crack around him.
Jeez, guess I still haven’t outgrown that part… Cedric thought inside his mind.
Daniel then said, “Whoa, dude, where did that come from?”
“That… that man looked like he was going to hurt us,” Cedric replied.
“For all we know, he could’ve just been looking for help. Did you see how mangled and battered he is? He probably needs medical help,” Daniel said back.
“Um, you guys?!” Elena then spoke up while pointing her finger across the road at the man.
Both boys looked in that direction and saw that the man had pulled himself out of the indent with most of his bones broken and cracking dangerously loud as he stood all crooked and bent. His gaze fell upon the kids again.
“We should run,” Daniel said.
“But—” Cedric tried to come up with a counter, but he was interrupted by Daniel who said, “NOW!” before he grabbed Elena’s hand and they began bolting back in the direction of their neighborhood.
By the time they made it back to the street their houses were on, it was just as empty as the town commons. They rushed all the way back toward Daniel’s house, which was the closest, but as they did, Cedric glanced behind him and was terrified to see that the man was following them, and he wasn’t alone this time.
Four or five people, both male and female, of different ages and ethnics, had joined the one man in the hunt. These people had a similar appearance to the first man. Purplish gray skin, ripped up clothing, covered in blood and bite marks. They appeared out from behind other homes, and they began sprinting after the three kids like they were helpless little prey at the bottom of the food chain.
Eventually, the kids made it to Daniel’s front porch, Daniel shoved the key into the doorknob to unlock it and they ran inside. Daniel then locked and bolted the door with all three of its locks, and the three of them took a minute to catch their breaths.
“Should we… should we call the police?” Elena asked after a moment.
“Only if they’re still out there,” Daniel replied.
“Oh they’re out there,” Cedric said with no remorse, “I can see them from here.”
He was right. All three kids looked out the window next to the door and saw that there were more strange-yet-similar-looking people wandering aimlessly around the neighborhood. These people all made moaning and groaning sounds so loud that the kids could hear from inside the house. Suddenly, a dead man’s face tilted sideways and peeked in through the window as he was already on the porch and began bashing his head on the door from the outside. This scared the kids enough that Daniel finally agreed to call the cops.
“My dad’s a cop. I’m sure he’ll come help us,” Daniel said.
But as soon as Daniel dialed 911, it was a recording saying that the line was busy. Just as he told Cedric and Elena this, they all heard a woman screaming from outside. They went to the living room window at the side of the house where the scream came from, and what they saw was a young woman from next door being attacked by a purple-skinned man with a huge bite mark on his right thigh. He was on top of her as though he was trying to rape her, but instead he bit her hard on her neck, so hard that her blood gushed out like a large spray. And he kept biting her even after she stopped moving.
Elena started to cry loudly, her eyes bawling tears and her cries caught the attention of the man outside the window. He stopped eating the young woman and was about to turn around toward the window, but Cedric and Daniel both covered Elena’s mouth and eyes as they all ducked down below the windowsill to hide. They stayed there for a few minutes before either of the boys dared to look out again, and when they did, the man was gone, and the young woman’s skin had turned grayish purple.
She should’ve been dead stiff, but then her fingers twitched before her upper body lifted up off the ground while her head and neck leaned back and her knees bent all the way up so that the bottoms of her feet were flat on the ground. Cedric and Daniel watched in horror as she slowly and creepily got back to her feet and stumbled away from Daniel’s house.
“Undead…” Daniel whispered, “Holy shit!”
The world could go out with a bang or a whimper
But either way, everything and everyone will be gone.
This is why we trained you, Son.
For the day the world falls
Is not just the end; it is also the beginning.
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