6 Months After the Beginning

  The warm glow of the television flickered softly in the dim living room, casting gentle shadows across the walls. The only other light came from the soft hum of the computer screen on the nearby desk, its pale blue RGB adding a coolness to the air. Outside, the one streetlight on the mountain had long since gone dark having been shot out years ago bye a child elmore, leaving the world beyond their home in deep, inky silence. But here, within the walls of their house, love filled every corner, wrapping them in a protective warmth. Tonight was special—Edward's second birthday.

  Elmore sat on the worn but comfortable black pleather couch, his arm around Ash as they watched Edward play with his new toys, his laughter bubbling through the room. Despite everything—despite the strange and chaotic world outside—there was peace here. Ash smiled at their son, her face lit up with joy, and Elmore could feel his heart swell as he watched them, feeling as though this small moment in time was all that mattered.

  The day had been spent in quiet celebration. They had woken early, eager to make every second count, knowing how much this day meant to all of them. Elmore had gone into the woods early in the morning to gather firewood for cooking as the power has been out for a few days and to check his traps scoring a racoon, making a small campfire in the backyard where they roasted food and baked bread in the simplest way they knew. The rich smell of flame-kissed meats and vegetables with hard bread still lingered faintly in the air as they sat together now, relishing the calm that blanketed their home.

  The entire day had been devoted to Edward, every minute filled with love, laughter, and the kind of simple joy that children bring into the world. They had spent hours together, telling stories, playing with makeshift toys elmore had built from scrap electrics and wood. They where doing everything they could to create memories for their son. It had been a perfect day, untouched by the madness that had come to define the last six months. Edward’s eyes, full of wonder and innocence, were bright as he smiled and babbled throwing out what words he knew and rough houseing the whole time. Like a goofy baby yelling mommy help “mummy ellll!!” when he hung himself upside down off the couch, unaware of the darkness lurking just beyond the edges of their small world.

  There were no interruptions, no urgent news broadcast, no sudden flashes of the strange powers people were beginning to experience. For today, at least, the world had left them alone.

  As the hours had passed, Elmore found himself wishing this moment could last forever. He held Ash a little tighter, his eyes lingering on her profile as she gently stroked Edward’s hair, smoothing down the spiked of hair that framed his lean face. Her love for their son radiated from her, a palpable thing that filled the room with warmth and light, despite the cold outside.

  They had given Edward everything they could today. As he ran from one toy to the next, as he laughed and smiled, jumped off things and talked up a storm of nothing. Elmore knew they had done right by him. The boy would never remember the strange things happening in the world—the building collapses, the chaos in the cities, the sudden bursts of power that had gripped humanity. He would only remember the love of his parents, the warmth of their home, and the laughter that filled it. He would only read about these things or be told of the world before.

  The small table in the corner still held the remnants of their humble feast—plates with crumbs of bread and bits of roasted vegetables. It hadn’t been a grand celebration by any means, but it had been perfect. The food tasted better than anything they could have imagined, seasoned by the fire and the love they had poured into the dish.

  Elmore’s gaze drifted back to his son. Edward was now curled up between them, his small body warm and heavy with the sleep that was beginning to overtake him. His tiny hands held tightly onto one of his birthday toys—a carved wooden cube that Elmore had carved for him the week before. The toy was rough, slightly uneven in places, on each face was a different carving and to most it looks like a spiked pinwheel but to elmore it was elder futhark staves (Norse Runecraft)*. but Edward adored it, holding it close as if it were the most precious thing in the world.

  *Elmore learned elder futhark and the whole of Norse culture ,religion, lore, magic, rituals,divination.(Not real magic just the way it was done) in prison from a shaman who was facing life behind bars.

  The shaman looked like an orangutan. ginger and hairy big beard old navy man. Cole. One of his best friends before all this. Never joining the faith but just one instance of Elmore exploring a part of his mut ancestry.*

  The television murmured softly in the background, the volume low enough that it blended into the hum of the room. They weren’t paying attention to it, not really. The world outside, with all its strangeness, seemed so far away in this moment. It was as if time had slowed down just for them, just for tonight.

  As the evening grew later, Elmore leaned in and kissed the top of Ash’s head. She looked up at him, her eyes shining with the same quiet gratitude and love that filled his own heart. No words were needed; they both understood the importance of this day, of this moment. They had created something beautiful today—a memory that they would all carry with them for the rest of their lives. Even with Edward being young it will leave an impression forever.

  This was the happiest they had been in months. Perhaps the happiest they had ever been. The world outside had been forgotten, at least for a little while. It was just the three of them, wrapped in the safety of their love, ignoring the shadows that lurked at the edges of their lives.

  As Edward’s breathing deepened and he finally drifted off to sleep, Elmore and Ash exchanged a quiet look. This moment—this perfect day—would forever be burned into their hearts. It would become a memory they would cling to when the world around them became too much to bear.

  Because deep down, Elmore knew that this was the last of those days. The last time they would feel this kind of peace. The last time they would truly be able to forget the storm that was coming. And though he tried to push the thought from his mind, it lingered in the air, a quiet reminder that no matter how much love filled their home, the world was changing.

  This would be the happiest day they would ever have. And it would be the last of its kind. Simple, ageless, slow.

  After Midnight

  The clock had just struck midnight when Edward was safely tucked into bed, his tiny body snug under the blankets, his dreams untroubled. Ash stood by his side for a moment, brushing a stray lock of hair from his brow, making sure he was protected, safe, and loved. Only then did she and Elmore finally exhale, sitting together in the quiet calm of the house after a day filled with joy. The world outside was distant, forgotten. At least, until the faint sound of footsteps echoed through the darkness.

  It started quietly—a few faint shuffles on the gravel path, then the unmistakable creak of the front porch being walked on. The sound was muffled by the front door, but the intent behind it was clear. Elmore’s eyes shot to Ash’s, and without a word, they both knew. It was happening. A group of looters had come, just like they'd heard about happening in other towns.

  Both the front doors groaned under force from outside, and the footsteps grew louder. There had to be at least a dozen of them, maybe more. Elmore quickly grabbed Ash by the arm, his voice low but urgent. “Go to Edward’s room. Lock the door. Don’t come out, no matter what happens.”

  Ash’s eyes widened with fear, but she nodded, moving quickly to the door, the sound of the lock clicking into place behind her. Elmore’s heart pounded, and he moved with the same sense of urgency, his hand reaching for the only weapon he had left laying around—a battered, old aluminum baseball bat. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do it was better than nothing he just wished he didn't have to hide his swords. Or that his shotgun was too far away.

  The front door swung into the wall fully open, and the looters spilled inside, their faces shadowed by the dim light but no mask to be had. There was anywhere from ten to twenty of them, their rough voices filling the house as they began to tear into the living room and the kitchen, grabbing whatever they could see almost in a panic.

  Until One of them—a man with a wild look in his eyes—spotted Elmore first. Standing there bat at the ready in front of the door to his child's room on the other end of the living men pouring in to the living room in front of him and into the kitchen on his left.Without hesitation, the man lunged at Elmore, a rusty knife clutched in his hand. Elmore barely had time to think. His instincts took over, the bat swinging down in a fluid motion, catching the man right in the temple. The crack was sickening, and the looter dropped instantly, dead before he even hit the floor.

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  And then, just like before, everything slowed.

  Elmore’s mind locked into place, his thoughts sharper than they had ever been. It was like every lesson, every fight, every physical experience he had ever known was downloaded into his mind in an instant. He analyzed the remaining men in a heartbeat. He saw the slight limp in one man’s leg, the way another kept shifting to his left as if his right eye was weak. Weaknesses. Vulnerabilities. He saw them all. First marking his targets in his mind seeing that there is nine of them in front of him an unknown amount in the kitchen. And right as he takes his first step every time he's ever swung a baseball bat flashes through his mind unlucky for them his big ass played baseball in Middle School.

  Before any of them could react, Elmore was moving, faster than a man of his size should be able. nowhere near a flash but fast enough that coupled with his precision it was disgustingly efficient. His 6-foot-tall, 400-pound frame cut through the group like Paul Bunyan raising a forest to the ground. The first man went down with a brutal swing to the chest, the bat shattering ribs and puncturing the heart in one motion. Another came at Elmore from the left at the same time, but Elmore pivoted with the swing, slamming a fist into the thugs' throat, collapsing their windpipe with a single, precise strike. As memories of hundreds of fist fights flash into his mind in an instant as his knuckles connect with crushable tissue.

  He moved like a force of nature—ducking, dodging, weaving between blows as though he’d been trained for this his entire life only there is still a limit to the human body so he may be weaving between the attacks but that does not mean that they're not connecting he's just choosing and picking which ones to take. Every step was calculated down to weather he be stepping on an enemy's foot or planting a leg to trip another, every attack deadly, violent, brutal. The looters were disorganized, reckless, and they paid for it with their lives. One by one, they fell, slowly wearing him down.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Elmore saw one of the men break away through the kitchen doorway , heading toward the bedroom—toward Ash and Edward. He saw for just an instant grids over reality a parabolic Arc measuring distance velocity weight air resistance as in the Frozen moment he saw what seems like a ghostly image of the bat leaving his hand and colliding with the enemy only to perform exactly that motion the next instant. His arm swung back, and with a primal roar, he hurled the bat with all his strength. It spun through the air end over end, slamming into the man’s face with a sickening crunch, shattering his jaw and dropping him instantly.

  The bat was gone, the grid was too, but Elmore wasn’t done.

  His hands, now his only weapons, became instruments of pure, sanguine violence. The air filled with the sound of fists connecting with bone, of bodies hitting the floor. He fought with an intensity that bordered on savage, his mind locked into a single, driving purpose: protect his family. It felt nothing like an out-of-body experience except with all the benefits as though he knew when to turn his head so that an enemies fist only clipped his ear before slamming their face into the door handle embedding it in their skull.

  The violence became a blur, each hit more vicious than the last. He wasn’t just fighting to stop them. He was making sure none of them would ever threaten his family again. His fists broke ribs, smashed faces, sent bodies flying across the room. The sound of flesh meeting flesh, of bones snapping under pressure, filled the house. It was war—a war Elmore had no intention of losing.

  And then, suddenly, it was over.

  The last man standing, barely able to walk after Elmore had shattered his hip with a swift kick, stumbled toward the kitchen. Blood poured from his mouth as he fumbled forward stumbling, his breath ragged. Elmore watched the man lose his balance and fall out of the two-story back window leading to the backyard, slamming into the ground with an audible exhale of air and a faint crack rolling the 100 or some feet down the steep backyard until he gets to a flatter spot before dragging himself further down the hill into the weeds and breyers and trees, broken and beaten but alive—just barely.

  Silence fell over the house. The only sound that remained was the soft, distant crying of Edward from his room, the commotion having woken him.

  Elmore stood in the middle of the carnage, his chest heaving, blood on his hands. The house was in ruins. The bodies of the looters lay scattered, motionless. But Ash and Edward were safe. That was all that mattered.

  For a long moment, Elmore just stood there, the weight of what had just happened pressing down on him. As he felt the last few minutes carved into his psyche like a diamond chisel on titanium forever marred.

  Aftermath

  Elmore stood in front of the bedroom doorway, his hand resting on the handle of Edward’s bedroom door. The house was heavy with silence, the air thick with the stench of blood and violence. He leaned his forehead against the door for a moment, gathering himself before calling out softly, his voice thick as syrup, his words simple as they were, had to be forced out, his mind caught in so many loops that even speech seems excessive.

  “It’s all clear,” he said, just loud enough for Ash to hear. “But stay in there... I need to clean up first.”

  A soft, almost broken reply came from behind the door. “Okay.”

  The word, barely more than a whisper, carried all the fear and relief she must have felt. Elmore swallowed hard and stepped back. He needed to clean this up—quickly, quietly—so they could try to pretend, even for a little while longer, that life was still normal.

  He began with the bodies. One by one, he dragged them out of the house, through the closest door two, and into the back yard onto a pile near the border of the woods . The silence was deafening as he worked, his muscles straining under the weight of the dead. He was methodical, careful not to leave a trace inside the house. He couldn’t bear the thought of Ash or Edward seeing this. They had already heard too much.

  When the last body was piled outside, Elmore set off deeper into the woods, searching for the one who had escaped. He found the wretch eventually, crawling weakly through a briar patch on his way to the creek hoping for escape, unaware of Elmore’s approach. There were no words. Elmore knelt beside the man, placed his hands on the man's head,as the man stiffened up in fear feeling a hand grab his hair it ended with one swift motion, snapping a man's neck isn't easy like in the movies you get a few cracks you feel the muscles pull against your hands eventually they stop moving but you can still see the face in the eyes the life doesn't leave them immediately. The body crumpled into the dirt what few inches were between it and the cold Earth, and Elmore stood, staring down at the mans form slowly dying and executioner's death for a moment before grabbing the man by the ankles and dragging his corpse back to join the others.

  With the bodies piled high, Elmore built the pyre. He tossed wood, dry leaves, anything that would burn, onto the mound of corpses, then Elmore went into the basement and grabbed a bunch of old oil cans and dumped them all over the pile, and proceeded to stick a few metal pipes in between the limbs for airflow deep inside and finally lighting a spark. The fire caught quickly, the flames licking hungrily at the dead, sending thick smoke spiraling into the night sky. He stood there for a good long while, watching as the blaze consumed them consumed by the reality of what he just committed unable to tear his eyes from the bodies as The inferno slowly turned flesh to Ash and Ash to pull away in the wind.

  What he didn’t notice—couldn’t notice—were the faint, shimmering waves of energy that began to seep from the pyre. Wisps of light, barely visible, drifted toward him, wrapping around his body, sinking into his skin without a trace. Elmore felt nothing out of the ordinary, though a strange, distant hum seemed to linger in the back of his mind as he walked back toward the house some hours into the morning.

  Once inside, Elmore went straight to work the first rays of light upon a new day illuminating his efforts. He mopped the blood from the floors, scrubbed the walls, tidied the chaos that had erupted from the looters’ invasion. Everything had to be perfect again. Order had to be restored, no matter what it took. The house had always been a sanctuary, a place where they could retreat from the world’s madness, and he wasn’t about to let that slip away. It may have already bathed under a river of blood for him but once clean his son will see none of it and his wife will only ever remember the echoes of men screaming and bones shattering.

  He moved the only two pieces of technology that still functioned—the computer and the television—into the master bedroom. The living room door had been shattered, hanging limply from its top hinge and the handle smashed but now clean of blood, and the window in the kitchen was open when he fell so no broken glass. It was mostly safe now. But the computer... that was different now. Elmore had noticed the change a month ago. It no longer needed to be plugged in to run, and the internet connection it maintained was untraceable, limitless. The data storage capacity was beyond anything he could comprehend. It is labeled 1000 (GPB) or something called a geopbyte. After some googling it's something like 1 GPB is equal to a million times the whole of human information.

  He ran his hand along the sleek surface of the glass side, marveling at the impossible. "This might be the only thing left," he muttered to himself. The programs he’d been running—ones that quietly downloaded vast amounts of information, entire databases, even archives of the internet—were still functioning. The computer had become their only real connection to the outside world, and somehow, it had evolved. Just like so many other pieces of technology nowadays.

  Satisfied that the house was as clean as it could be, Elmore cleaned off the bloodstained baseball bat, the weight of it still lingering in his grip. He looked at it for a moment longer before setting it aside, the events of the night still replaying in his mind, a haze of vivid violence and instinct.

  Eventually, Ash emerged from the bedroom, cradling Edward in her arms. The boy was still fast asleep, his tiny hands clutching onto his little wood block. She gave Elmore a tired, grateful smile, and without a word, the three of them retreated to the master bedroom for the night. The door was shut, locked, and barricaded behind them.

  As Elmore lay in bed, exhaustion settling into his bones, something inside him shifted. A strange sensation unfurled in his chest—a warmth, like a pulse, spreading through his body. He tried to ignore it, tried to focus on the soft breathing of Ash and Edward beside him, but the feeling only grew stronger. A dull ache followed, starting in his temples and spreading downward, like his body was fighting against itself.

  He slipped out of bed, careful not to wake them, and stumbled out of the bedroom through the living room and into the bathroom. His hands trembled as he gripped the sink, staring into the mirror. His reflection blurred, distorted, and nausea rolled through him. He bent over the toilet, vomiting, the world spinning around him. When he finally straightened, gasping for breath, leaning over to the bathtub he turned the water on, splashing it over his face.

  But the ache didn’t fade. If anything, it intensified, radiating through his body. It was like something foreign was fusing with him, merging with his very essence. He clutched the edge of the tub, trying to steady himself, but the pressure in his mind grew unbearable. His vision flickered, and for the briefest moment, he saw it—impossible shapes and colors, Infinity, a spider web of lines, symbols, patterns, filling his sight and then quickly after quivering and shaking did the lightning threads of reality explode out and turn into a hazy fog before locking into different places in his mind's eye feeling await slam into his chest feeling everything like a heart attack before he saw the webs return to his eyes starting at the borders spiraling and cascading towards the center of his vision before locking in place and then reorganizing themselves into something that looks eerily similar to a heads-up display in some futuristic artificial reality video game.

  And then, just as quickly, it was gone along with it the pain and the insanity.

  Elmore stood there, panting, his heart racing in his chest. He didn’t know what had just happened, but one thing was certain: something had changed. Deep inside him, something had awakened, and though he didn’t yet understand it, he knew the world would never be the same.

  And tomorrow, the world would begin to know it too.