Prologue: The Collapse
The world ended with a message Simon almost deleted as junk mail.
Three coffees deep into a Saturday, Simon worked through a cluttered inbox when a subject line caught his eye: ARE YOU READY FOR THE END? He clicked on the email—one of several with similar warnings. Each sounded like a half-baked conspiracy, warning him to stockpile supplies before some looming catastrophe.
He might have laughed—he nearly did—until the stories began piling up. People vanishing. Strange lights over cornfields. Cities falling quiet. At first, it was just chatter on fringe forums. But then the news sites crashed under the weight of the curious and the terrified.
By that afternoon, the National Guard had erected barricades across Davenport. The distant crackle of gunfire underscored the urgent wail of sirens. Simon sat by the window of his third-floor apartment, watching the blur of red and blue lights weave through the streets like threads pulling apart everything familiar. He thought of the day—was it only three weeks ago?—when Joanne from HR had glided through the office, arms loaded with folders. Now she was probably a thousand miles away, part of some panicked exodus—if she was lucky.
His eyes drifted to the empty playground across the street. It had always been oddly comforting to hear children playing there, their laughter a counterpoint to the grinding adulthood inside his building. Now, only the wind moved the swings. A single plastic shovel lay forgotten near the sandbox. The world felt absent—even of its ghosts.
The power blinked twice, then staggered back to life. He felt absurdly grateful for the clattering hum of his old refrigerator, for its insistence that some things, at least, were still within his control. He flipped open his dying laptop. One of the last open tabs displayed a scribbled jumble of words: PROTECTIVE CUSTODY, LOCKDOWN, WHITEOUT ZONES. He’d found it on a buried thread the night before—a mix of government jargon and unverified leaks. He didn’t know what was real anymore.
He thought about calling his parents in rural Iowa, but the lines had been dead for days. He didn’t even know if they were still alive.
Instead, he reached for a pen and a legal pad and wrote, in capital letters:
LIST OF ESSENTIALS
Batteries
Bottled water
Then, below the second item, he added what he could not admit he needed most:
Time.
