The Third Omen

PART ONE: THE VIRUS

People really thought mankind could stand on its own without nature's help. That their strength was enough to defeat any sort of dependence to it. They thought these were all feasible stages, which we could control and go through with harmlessly, but little did we really know it wouldn't end until each and every one of us was reduced to ashes.

Nothing fancier or more dignified. Just ashes.

Clearly, we looked like a bunch of laughingstocks when we finally realized how little we were against such strong forces that went beyond our reach. Forces from which we depended. And had humans only taken nature for what it was—and not just for what it granted—had we been more careful with what we experimented and wished for, had we only stopped for a moment to question what we were doing, I believe none of this would've happened.

The world would be okay.... He'd still be with me.

Six months it took to destroy a four and a half billion years old planet. All because of our ignorance. One would think Earth's death had to be ignited by something much stronger than humans—something that didn't take only two hundred thousand years to develop—but the simplicity of continuously wrong decisions in the worst possible moments caused lethal chain reactions.

No one took enough precautions, no one really thought things through, and it came across as rather shameful to know I was born one of those beasts—a human. 

It seemed normal to question why we hadn't killed each other by now, but the reason was fairly simple. It didn't require any rocket science to know we're like cockroaches. Survival is programmed inside of us, and so that's why two omens of our complete, final extinction weren't enough.

We received a third one.

The few of us left all over the world have named it differently throughout the past month, but there was only one title that truly fit its standards. They decided to call it the Virus. Lethal, poisonous, consuming, the infection had enough power to turn even the sanest person on Earth. Their mindset morphed into the one of a cannibalistic beast—a smart, witty one, nevertheless.

Of every single thing that could've gone wrong, it had to be the worst one.

Now, well, now we were stuck with the Wendigo fever—as some may call it. How ironic. Who would've guessed a mythical creature could come to life in the shape of our final destructor? Who would've thought that the simplest action of a handshake with someone whom you trusted, who'd always been in your life, was enough to kill you if they were infected, too?

And we weren't even talking about physical death anymore. That didn't happen; you stayed in the state you were infected in, locked inside your own body where you'd eventually go insane.

The desire of feeding in human flesh and toying with people like they were your puppets was simply too strong to fight. At first, you could see everyone resisting, trying to beat the Virus, escape from a dead end road, but it came as an impossible task. They all failed, succumbing into the drug-like effects of the Hunger and psychotic personalities that came with it.

Typically, idiots tagged them as zombies at first. It seemed like the only explanation they had for a sudden apocalypse was that, where the only rule was kill or be killed, but they were all wrong. These weren't dead people rising from the ground. Something had created them—the creature living inside of them, at least. Neighbors, brothers, parents...friends, they were all alive.

They never got killed, just turned.

After a while, people came to the realization that the terminology being used was stupidly wrong, and so they named them properly for what they were, for what we now know them for.