It's Hell On Earth

CHAPTER 1 PART 1

THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS

Much to the surprise of the entire world, the apocalypse was very real and it brought nothing but utter confusion and disdain straight out of the gate. The earth sunk into a pure silence, the kind that you hear when the moon is overhead, without cars churning their motors through the streets and chatter runs dry through sleeping vessels. It deafened the world for seven days and seven nights, anarchy rose sharply across the planet, with governments and militaries alike collapsing by the hour. Everyone was given what some called a gift, and depending what side of history you were on - others called a curse. The inability to hear at all. Through no fault of what seemed their own it drove people insane.

On the seventh night everything came back, and it came back louder. Almost like you could hear the core of the earth itself bubbling fire through your veins. What came next was initially rumoured to be the rapture (a long-time theory born from the words of American evangelists during the 17th century and popularly theorised again in the 19th), much to every religious enthusiast's dismay it was different, in several ways. This - the biggest part of this ongoing puzzle - came to be known as The Siphoning.

There was no parting of the heavens or floating to the sky in a halo light, people merely disappeared into thin air as-if they had never existed. Not all at the same time of course, sporadically, like it was following a very specific criteria for how, when and why, except nobody was privy to the formula. In the midst of what was being described as a scientific anomaly that hit the world all at once, there was a rising war between bringing back some form of normality as opposed to what was settling in, anarchy. The siphoning happened everywhere, all the time - in the middle of conversations, whilst asleep, during car rides and flights. Accident upon accident made the siphoning harder to endure and even harder to ignore. The most agonising part was not knowing exactly where everyone disappeared to, but the running narrative was heaven, as it always had been. It affected the entire planet, each country with their own brewing piece of hell and it would go on for another seven years. England surpassed most countries in suicide as people took to taking their own lives, willingly. Many took their lives in the name of spiritual omens they believed would save them. There was no longer any right or wrong, nor was there good or bad. It was every man and woman for themselves, and it only got worse.

Exactly seven years later, after billions upon billions of siphons, they suddenly came to a halt. Most survivors who were habitants of this new world order had come to the realisation that this was in fact something religious, spiritual or supernatural. Some time during the second year people realised that many graves were appearing dug up and empty, with no consistent pattern on which ones were chosen. Many alluded to government conspiracies and fear mongering by the remaining intelligent agencies, but by the time the seventh year began most sense of control, power and order were nowhere to be found. Lawless cities became territorial and run by budding self-proclaimed war lords, the likes of gang leaders and murderers as well as previous government officials and even a few A list celebrities with previously big followings. London itself became the prototype for an up and coming post-apocalyptic society, if only they had realised there was nothing post about it. The world was still changing and the people unfortunately had to change with it.

__________

Kane had just turned eighteen on the first day of year seven. He had spent the last seven years of his life alone and holed up in his family's basement, only ever leaving when absolutely necessary, sometimes only after days without food. His father was siphoned days after it all began and his mother took her own life a year later, unable to bear with the pain of living on this planet knowing she may never be siphoned. He prayed every night to someone or something, he didn't know to whom or what but he prayed nonetheless in hopes that someone was still listening to the eleven year old boy inside him, pleading for his own salvation. Though he was no longer a boy and now a man in a world with no morals.

He decided that if he was going to die, he was going to die living and he couldn't do that from his basement. He covered himself in protective gear he had found or stolen over the years and slipped his head into a balaclava for a more than common, unidentifiable look. For the first time in the last seven years Kane felt ready and made his way out to what used to be known as Westminster Abbey in London but since became the city's only remaining and viable news outlet. It took him five hours of walking from the deep south of London which was now the city's third slum, through checkpoints run by extortionists and thieves and haggled by other masked civilians who had nothing but greed, a lack of empathy and no sense of remorse. Over the previous years Kane came to describe these people as the purgers from his favourite childhood horror movie.

There he stood for the first time, in the middle of Abbeypoint News at eight in the morning. He had only heard of the swarms of people who circulated in and out of this safe zone, which by the fifth year doubled as the second and last of England's communicative outreach centres, one of the only places that delivered news and allowed incoming and outgoing phone calls.

A fresh batch of newspapers dropped out of the ceiling and onto hundreds of moving purgers who jumped up and clawed at the finite amount, like starving beggars to an unattended buffet. He felt his hands shaking as he found himself a corner to sit in, feeling uneasy surrounded by so many purgers. As his eyes zipped across the words on the newspaper his blood began to boil, hotter and hotter. He knew as bad as everything was, it was only about to get worse and within minutes his clueless thought became a reality. Splatters of blood gushed out in every direction, knives and body parts catapulted themselves across the room, even a finger landed in front of him as he crawled in between the crowds of dropping bodies to find a way out.

The front page news (or single page news as it was) detailed a new mandate from above that stated that there was another way to get into heaven since the siphoning had come to a halt, and oddly enough you had to kill for it. It didn't matter whether it was true or not because it wreaked havoc... and that's exactly how the final war began.