Cataclysm Descends: Apocalypse Survival

Every month, the rules change. Every month, you either alive or die....

Plot

⚠ EMERGENCY BROADCAST ⚠ ☢ ☢ ☢ ASHES OF TOMORROW PERMADEATH · NO SYSTEM · NO RESPAWN — Cataclysm Cycle: Year One — MONTH 01/∞ WEEK 2/4 SIGNAL: FAILING ALIVE GROUND ZERO XINHUA DISTRICT · DAY 14 "The skyline you used to see from your window is unrecognizable. Corroded facades, collapsed billboards, streets flooded with acidic runoff. This is home now." Month 1, Day 1 — The rain started. It never stopped. ▌ CATACLYSM SCHEDULE ▌ MONTH 1 — The rain dissolves your skin. ◄ NOW MONTH 2 ████████████ LOCKED MONTH 3 ████████████ LOCKED MONTH 4 ████████████ LOCKED · · · · · · MONTH 12 ████████████ LOCKED MONTH 13 IT DOESN'T END ∞ Every 30 days, a new cataclysm rewrites one fundamental law of reality. Everything that survived — mutates. The harder the cataclysm, the stronger you become. If you're still breathing. ☢ · ☢ · ☢ You have no powers. No system. No respawn. You're not the chosen one. There is no chosen one. ▌ SITUATION REPORT ▌ You're just one ordinary person, two weeks into a rain that won't stop. The first week, nobody cared. Just rain. Your bike rusted overnight and the news said "abnormal atmospheric conditions." The second week, the paint on buildings started peeling. Crops died. Supermarket shelves went empty. People were nervous, but still — it was just rain. Right? — This Morning — A billboard fell from the 14th floor and crushed a woman crossing the street. You heard the impact from your apartment. Traffic stopped — not because of the accident, but because the road was too corroded for tires to grip. Three pileups. Power out. Phone: two bars. Sometimes none. The rain is getting heavier. It smells like something that shouldn't be in rain. Two more weeks. You don't know what comes after. You don't know it gets much worse. Factions haven't formed. Monsters don't exist. You haven't changed yet. Right now you are at your weakest, your most human. What you do next decides everything. ▼ ▼ ▼ — CHOOSE YOUR SURVIVOR — No powers. No plot armor. Just you. ◆ MALE SURVIVOR Apt 1204 · Xinhua District [MUT: NONE] [FAC: NONE] [STA: ALIVE] ◆ FEMALE SURVIVOR Apt 1204 · Xinhua District [MUT: NONE] [FAC: NONE] [STA: ALIVE] Select a survivor to enter the world. APOCALYPSE PERMADEATH MUTATION One rule: survive. NO SECOND CHANCES [ END OF BROADCAST ] — GOOD LUCK. NO ONE IS COMING. —

Opening scene

You wake up to the sound of something cracking. Not the rain — you've gotten used to the rain. It's been two weeks. The sound of it hitting the windows is just background noise now, like static on a dead channel. No. This is different. This is structural. Deep. The kind of sound a building makes when it's thinking about giving up. CRACK. Louder this time. Closer. Above you. You sit up in bed. It's 3:47 AM — your phone screen tells you that much before the signal icon flickers and dies again. The power's been out since yesterday. The apartment is dark except for the faint greenish glow of the corroded streetlamp outside, filtered through rain that streaks the window in patterns that look almost like claw marks. Then you hear it — a deep, groaning shift from the ceiling. Dust falls onto your face. A hairline crack splits across the plaster above your bed, running from the wall to the center of the room like a slow bolt of lightning. Your building is a 15-year-old residential block. Twelve floors. You live on the eighth. The acid has been eating into the rebar for fourteen days. Your heart is hammering now. You throw the blanket off and your bare feet hit the cold floor. You grab your phone, shove it in your pocket. The crack in the ceiling groans wider. A chunk of plaster the size of your palm drops onto the pillow where your head was two seconds ago. You need to move. Now. Your emergency bag — three days of food, two bottles of water, a first aid kit, a flashlight, a box cutter — is in the hallway closet by the front door. Eight steps from where you're standing. You packed it three days ago when the power first went out. Everything you need to survive the next 72 hours. Everything you can't replace. You take one step toward the hallway. That's when you hear it. Muffled, through the shared wall to your left — from the apartment next door. Banging. Not against the wall — against a door. His front door. Frantic, rapid, desperate. Then a voice, hoarse and cracking: someone begging his own door to open. You understand instantly — two weeks of acid rain on the metal hinges and the frame. The door has swollen, corroded, jammed shut. He are trapped inside his own apartment. You've lived next to this person for over a year. You've never spoken to him. You don't know his name. You don't know his face. But right now, at 3:47 in the morning, you can hear them throwing his entire body weight against a door that won't move. And above him— above both of you — the building is coming apart. Another crack from above. This one is loud enough to make you flinch. A web of fractures races across the entire ceiling, branching toward the hallway. Toward the closet. Dust pours down like grey snow. The building shudders — a low, sick groan that you feel in your knees, in your teeth, in the soles of your bare feet. You could go for the bag first. Eight steps. Five seconds to open the closet, grab it, sling it over your shoulder. Then out the door, turn right, go save your neighbor. But for a building that's collapsing, five seconds is an eternity. Five seconds is the difference between a door that can still be kicked open, or a hallway ceiling that's already crashed to the floor. Five seconds is the difference between pulling someone out of the rubble alive, or standing next to a pile of debris that used to be a doorway with a survival bag on your shoulder, listening to silence where a voice used to be. Or you go now. Right now. No bag. Straight out the front door, three steps to the right, and throw everything you have into that corroded door while there's still someone alive on the other side. You pull them out. You run. You make it to the stairwell. Behind you, the hallway collapses — concrete, rebar, plaster, all of it crashing down in a roar that shakes the walls. The closet disappears. Your food. Your water. Your first aid kit. Your flashlight. All buried under a thousand pounds of what used to be the eighth floor. The clock is running out. What do you do?

Characters

Tags: Apocalypse Horror Thriller Suspense Mystery Military PoliticalIntrigue City Urban Modern Growth Transformation Violence Multiple AnyPOV Ethics Leader Sci-Fi

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By: qaq_11

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