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Post by geekyteacher on Jul 7, 2020 8:59:34 GMT -6
Records of G-Day Video Log Kevin Douglas; EDF Recording 4 Years After G-Day “I was a cop before Genesis Day,” Kevin Douglas is an older man with salt and pepper hair, both on his head and mustache. He has a stern look about him, despite his sunken in eyes with bags around them. According to the information at the bottom of the screen, he was 45 at the time the video was recorded, “A lot of people seem to forget the apocalypse started before the clankers started showing up. Though I don’t blame them. Unless you were on the ground like me, Dalton and his lot did a great job covering things up and keeping the extent of the danger to a bare minimum. Claiming it was a cult and making a big show of ‘searching for the truth,’ while sending out guys like me to do the dirty work of containing them.” “I was stationed back in Miami. Of course, the irony was not lost upon me that the apocalypse started in Florida. I’m sure if we still had the internet that that would make for a lot of real funny memes. I remember the ‘cult’ killings and people just dropping dead for no explainable reason. They split the force up into two different groups. Now those guys and gals on the group dealing with SUBDS had a lot of trauma to deal with considering all the dead bodies and devastated families that they had to deal with, but those of us out on the streets dealing with the messes left behind by all the ‘serial killers’ and ‘cult’ killers that were coming out of the woodwork at the time was a whole ‘nother experience. He pauses to wipe at his eyes and take a deep breath before continuing,
“I was out on the beat with my partner – this was back when we still did regular patrols because we thought it could be of some use – when we got a call about an attack. Not an unusual call to get back in those days. My buddy and I were speculating about what it would be as we started on our way over toward the place the call came from. Morbid humor was the only way to get through most of our shifts with all the death that was around. When we got to the place the caller had specified, we could see a figure hunched over something before we even got out of the car. The dude was shaking something fierce and must’ve been tweaking out on something. “We got out of the car. The guy didn’t turn at first. It was only when we shone one of our flashlights on him that he turned around. It was the most gruesome sight I’d ever seen in all my years on the force, and that was saying something. There was blood running down his chin – clearly still fresh, not even dried at all – and the worst part was he had some of the guy’s windpipe hanging out of his mouth. It was absolutely disgusting. I had no idea what we were dealing with and neither did my partner. We tried to communicate with the guy. I called on him to step away from the body and put his hands up. He must not have been all there mentally because his response was to snarl like an animal. I was getting unsettled at this point. We were dealing with a guy who had appeared to have attacked a person and started eating the body. That was something that you didn’t see every day, even in Florida. I was trying to decide what to do next when the guy started to make a move toward us. He moved slowly at first before picking up speed. I was reaching for my gun when my partner put him down quick. “After the media got a hold of that one, I remember the internet lit up like a goddamn Christmas Tree. Not only were they dealing with another Florida story, which was always ripe for jokes and memes, but then we also had some corners of the internet that lived for stories like these ones. ‘It’s zombies! I knew it!’ yelled every idiot who ever hoped for a zombie apocalypse. Remember a few years back when there was that bath salts case, and everyone went crazy over that one too swearing up, down, left, and right that we were dealing with an honest to goodness zombie fucking apocalypse. I swear, there were parts of the internet where everyone was so prepared for zombies that when it didn’t happen that way they got majorly bummed out. But I remember it spread across the whole internet. That stupid Zombie Survival Guide sold out on Amazon because everyone wanted to find out how to ‘protect’ themselves from the oncoming wave of zombies that were going to kill us all. It was crazy. Especially considering that guy turned out to not even have NIR – when they did an autopsy his brain chemistry was normal compared to what we’d later find with NIR. Either he was so tweaked out on drugs that he started eating an already dead man’s windpipe, or he was just some Florida cannibal who decided to take advantage of all the people dropping dead and being murdered on the streets. Either way, he won the award for ‘Craziest Florida Man’ story and temporarily got the internet’s panties in a twist over a zombie apocalypse. We would’ve been so lucky. “That was back before things got really bad. Back when the government could still easily cover things up since it was only in one state, and really mostly confined to a single city. I couldn’t believe when Dalton went on TV to tell us all how we had to stay strong in this time of crisis. It wasn’t until the ‘cult’ spread nearly to the border with Georgia and Dalton ordered the whole damn state to be walled off that he or anyone in his administration did anything about Florida other than make nice platitudes and hope that the problem would go away with enough images of flags and blood drives. So his popularity was already pretty down in Florida, and needless to say, after we found out the dirtbag was doing everything he could to spread Genesis, he’s lucky Adam and the clankers got him before anyone else did. I don’t know how well they’d sell, but I’d seriously consider making ‘Don’t blame me for the apocalypse, I voted for Bolton’ bumper stickers if we still used cars.” __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ EDF Video Log: Humans vs. Clankers Katrina Satler 4 Years After G-Day
Katrina Satler and her piercing green eyes and fiery red hair makes her return to the log of the apocalypse,
“Lt. Satler, tell us about your experience with Genesis Day. You mentioned you and your unit managed to fight your way out of the village you were in. What did you do after that? Did you attempt to look for other survivors?”“Well we tried to radio out to any nearby units, but our gear was fried. Those early clankers and their damn EMPs. I don’t know if that was a purposeful design choice or a happy accident for them, but it certainly made life pretty damn difficult, especially in those early days when no one knew what was going on and no one knew just what Genesis poisoning looked like or how it occurred. “We did eventually find another group of survivors, but there were still only a few dozen of us staring down a whole bunch of them, the clankers, that is. After we ran into this other group of survivors, we all decided to work together, pool our resources, and try to create a little safe zone in the days before we had official green zones.” “Try?”
“Well I said before we weren’t too knowledgeable about how Genesis spread. We thought the only way it could spread was an infection, but we turned out to be wrong. We also didn’t know anything about NISBD or NIR at the time either. We were only being able to distinguish clankers.” “So what happened?”
“Well we didn’t realize we needed to scan any refugees or quarantine them away from any technology. We just asked where they were coming from. But that ended up biting us real hard in the ass when one of the men in our little safe zone developed a real bad case of NIR. Ended up taking out a good chunk of the people while also alerting every damn clanker in a 15-foot radius about our location. I only just made it out of that one with my life.” “Where did you go after that?”
“I’ll tell you that after that I traveled by myself. I’d lost all of my platoon and wasn’t in the mood to trust anyone else after what happened. So I mostly wandered – tried to make my way towards a port to see if I could make my way back to the US, but overseas travel was just a dream in those first days. My friends and family in the US might as well have been on the moon.” She stops to wipe away a tear that has started to form in the corner of her eye. The man interviewing her speaks up,
“Are you feeling okay? We can cut off the interview here if it’s upsetting you.”
Lt. Satler’s face resets to its usual expressionless look, “No I’m fine. Where was I? Oh yeah, so after that, I figured I’d have to do the best I could where I was. I spent the worst years of the panic hunkered up in a little hut I made. I was pretty much just in survival mode. Find food, get water, and avoid being killed by any clankers. Once overseas travel was possible, I got on the first boat back to the US. I thought my 2 years in hell were over, but once I got to the US, things were only marginally better here. Then I heard about EDF and figured I could put my skills to good use.” “Thank you for your time, Lieutenant.”
“You’re welcome.” The video ends there.
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Post by 9idrr on Jul 7, 2020 21:22:34 GMT -6
Well, gt, you're sure keepin' it interestin'.
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Post by texican on Jul 9, 2020 22:45:17 GMT -6
GT,
Could chapter, but what is happening in America?
Texican....
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Post by geekyteacher on Jul 11, 2020 12:29:24 GMT -6
Thank you for the kind comments! We'll be finding out about America soon enoughEDF Information Poster 4 Years After G-DayKnow the Signs of NIR NIR or “Nanite-Induced Rage” is one of the first signs of nanite poisoning. Be on the lookout for heightened levels of rage, aggression, and paranoia. Also be aware of any strange changes in personality or behavior. If you see these signs, isolate the person for a minimum of 24 hours with no human or machine contact. If there is no improvement after 24 hours contact your local EDF Branch for more information. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Psychological Report on Genesis Dr. Patrick Lee 4 Years After G-Day
“While there are many who think the only two results of Genesis poisoning are NIBD (Nanite-Induced Brain Death) or clanker, there are many preliminary stages and differing paths that can occur as a result of poisoning. Some individuals retain brain function but lose all sense of reality with the world. These individuals become erratic and highly paranoid. They believe that they are about to be attacked and can sometimes attack those around them out of fear. However, this is not the same as NIR (Nanite-Induced Rage), which is a case where an individual loses all sense of self preservation and attempts to hurt themselves or others. NIR, more often known by the colloquial nickname Rage Head or Rage Monster is best demonstrated by what occurred in Miami. These individuals become more animalistic and lose their higher-order brain function, descending into a subhuman state in which they are compelled to attack any humans around them. However, the worst cases are when individuals are compelled to commit suicide by the nanites that are in control of their brain. Examples in the Tokyo Massacre or Sydney Mass Suicide show the terrifying results when this affliction affects a whole town or city. There are some who do not think this last one should be discussed for fear of inspiring copycat attempts. However, the large number of towns that had this occur shows that it is not a normal human behavior. “If you know of anyone suffering from these afflictions, take extreme caution. Attempt to restrain the person if possible, but do not risk your own health or safety to do so. If they cannot be restrained for any reason, they should at least be isolated. If possible, trap them inside of a secure room and ensure that nothing enters or exits the room for at least 24-48 hours. When possible, report these cases to the proper authorities. Do not attempt to cure an individual suffering from one of these afflictions yourself. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ EDF Log Dr. Suzan MacKay 4 Years After G-Day
“If you want to know how it spread so damn fast, I blame all the rumors. In the early days before we knew a whole lot about Genesis poisoning and what it did to people, there were a whole lot of crazy stories. Individuals could be reasoned with, they knew who they were, they still had control over themselves, they had memories of themselves or their loved ones. Do you know how many families thought they could reason with their family members? Now, to be perfectly clear, all those people who thought that Genesis poisoning was like zombies or a robot apocalypse were being absolutely ridiculous. The poisoning didn’t spread through bites or scratches, at least in the early days, and it wasn’t like Adam was building huge waves of evil robots to come and conquer us. What I’m trying to say is it wasn’t SkyNet or anything. The issue was Genesis spread more like a usual virus – proximity to nanites could activate ones in the air and attach to people nearby. That was why it was important to treat it like a virus and avoid close proximity to infected or burn any items that came into close proximity. Though we didn’t know that then. We probably could’ve saved a whole lot of people in the early days if we had. “The usual problem was just people being mauled or killed by their mindless family members that were on their path to brain death or clanker status. Dear god, the stories I heard of family members desperately begging their loved ones to stop as said loved ones tore them to pieces. Rage heads are absolutely mindless – they’ll keep charging at their target until their target is dead or they are. They’ll rip themselves to pieces just trying to get at their target and nothing another person says or does can stop them, other than of course killing them. They’re still as vulnerable to blunt force trauma and bullets as a human but try telling that to desperate family members or friends. And desperation drove so much of my job. It was by far the hardest part of it. Families and friends wanted so desperately to be told that their family members or friends would be better or there was something that we could do to help them. But there wasn’t then and isn’t now. The best we could do was give their loved ones a quick and painless end, but that wasn’t something we could very well tell people, otherwise they wouldn’t have reported their loved ones to the EDF when they showed signs of NIR. Hence why we pretended there was something we could do to help people, but that just fueled more rumors. It was really a lose-lose situation. And whenever I lied and told a family that their beloved family member would be coming back when I knew damn well that they were going to get a bullet in their head ate away at my soul. I’ll tell you; I was never happier to be reassigned to a job on the front lines when shit hit the fan after Israel and all its neighbors went nuclear on each other.”
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Post by texican on Jul 11, 2020 23:31:25 GMT -6
GT,
The start of the battle.
Thanks for the chapter.
Texican....
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Post by cutter on Jul 12, 2020 10:50:27 GMT -6
I'm liking this format. It's different, and a good way to keep a perpetual cliffhanger going. Nicely done.
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Post by geekyteacher on Jul 13, 2020 13:36:14 GMT -6
“We told you so” Banner on r/MiamiConspiracies the day after Genesis Day Diary Entry Unnamed Survivor 4 Years After Genesis Day
“October 1st, 2021. That’s a date right up there with September 11th, 2001 or December 7th, 1941. Dates that changed the world. Dates that will live in infamy. Genesis Day. Not the first day of the apocalypse, but a sign that humanity was facing something worse than some random cult or a wave of unexplained deaths and suicides. Now it’s usually New York or Detroit or San Francisco that get all the glory – or maybe the opposite of glory – when we talk about Adam and the clankers, but it was a worldwide phenomenon. The Three Gorges Dam in China, Israel and its neighbors going nuclear on each other and blowing themselves off the map, Taiwan nearly going nuclear. And whatever happened with the Koreas. Not to mention the destruction of just about every major city worldwide, either by clankers or by humans. Everyone was affected by it in every country and place. It’s no surprise that it just about destroyed the whole world as we knew it.” _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Survivor Testimony Eric Kovack ; EDF Recording 4 Years After G-Day
“I was in New York City on G-Day. In fact, by bad luck I was right at the center: Yankee Stadium. It was the first day of the postseason and it was a beautiful Friday evening. The stadium was absolutely packed since it was such a huge game. It seemed like an average day; minus the fact it was a bit warmer than usual for October. But we weren’t complaining about that at the time since we didn’t know yet that it was from all the fires down in Florida, or how much worse the weather would get. No one wanted to think about that. We’d been bombarded with so much bad news that most people want to relax, chill out, and drink a beer on a Friday evening. Especially with all the rumors flying around about the end of days. “Anyway, where was I? It was during the 9th inning – bottom of the 9th to be exact. They were playing against the Red Sox and they were an all-star team for the season. The game had been close with the lead trading the whole evening. Paxton had been pitching a good game, but the Sox had a great set of hitters. Gary Sanchez was up to bat, two strikes on the board, bases were loaded. When the pitcher threw the ball and Sanchez smashed it out of the park, the home crowd went wild. People were standing up and cheering, stomping their feet, some even jumping up and down. It turned out to be the perfect distraction. I don’t know if Adam was planning to attack at that time already or not, but it was perfect timing. Between the noise and movement, no one was paying attention. “If it hadn’t happened right in front of me, I wouldn’t have believed it. I was up out of my seat cheering when something caught my eye. Three people near the front of the section started doubling over. My thought was that they’d had too much to drink and had gotten sick. But then something much worse and completely unbelievable happened. It seems more dramatic in my memory than it probably was in actuality – they started violently convulsing, then started clawing at their bodies. It got the attention of more of the people around them, but then the truly terrifying thing happened. With no warning, their skin melted off to reveal silver and bronze bodies, glowing red eyes, and sharp silver claws. Despite their human shape, everything about them was unsettling.Their clothes hung off of them in rags. What I remember most was the unnatural way they moved. It wasn’t exactly a limp, but they had a strange gait like animals trying to walk on their hindlegs. When it happened, my first thought was it some sort of viral marketing stunt. At first no one, myself included, was quite sure what was happening. But that went out the window when the three creatures started ripping out the throats of anyone within their reach. A young couple who couldn’t have been older than 20 were right behind the three bastards that were tearing through the row. They were frozen in fear until the dude started screaming. That got the attention of the clankers, and they turned around. God, I still remember the veins and tissue in their mouths as they let out a loud whirring sound. The couple tried to run, but one of the things grabbed the girl by her hair and pulled her into its mouth. The dude tried to help her, but it was no use since it was three against one. Screams started erupting from all around the stadium as more people started keeling over and shifting into clankers. The camera focused on one section and everyone could see what was happening on the jumbotron. People started losing their minds, trying to push and shove everyone around them as it became clear that the stadium was turning into a killing field. The clankers started moving up towards where I was, mowing down people like the world’s deadliest version of the wave. Luckily, that gave me some time to try and formulate a plan. I also got lucky that the things were down at the bottom and I was about ten rows up. “I saw that the section in front of me had cleared out and no clankers had moved into the area. Boy did I get lucky. My genius plan was to make my way to the exit as quick as possible. I wish I could say I had some bold idea on how to save those around me, but at that moment my mind was focused on not becoming a cyborg or a corpse. I managed to slip by the clanker at the end of the row and joined the crowd that was fleeing toward the exit. I was surrounded on all sides by screaming, panicking people (which I was one of, to be honest), but the ones I’ll never forget were a father and his two little boys on my right. The dad looked to be maybe in his 30s – pretty young guy with dark hair and glasses – and his sons looked to be maybe 8 and 4. We all rushed towards the exit, trying to get away from the sounds of chaos and screams coming from inside the stadium. But when we got to the doors, they were barred, and, to make matters even worse, a group of clankers was hot on our heels and had followed us to the barred doors. We were trapped and completely screwed. “People started getting desperate, banging on the door and trying to shove past each other as the clankers got closer. To my right, I saw the dad trying to hold onto his sons’ hands as the crowd closed in and the things kept getting closer. Just when it seemed like all hope was lost, three big guys at the door were finally able to force it open with a combined shoulder ram from all of them. Ironically, once that happened more people in our group probably got trampled to death than killed by clankers. The crowd turned into a wave of trampling feet. I’m sure it was just a case where people were just trying to stay alive, but I couldn’t believe how little concern there was for other people once those doors opened. It truly became a dog-eat-dog, every man for himself free-for-all. Anyone who couldn’t get out of the way or keep up with the pace of the crowd disappeared under the feet of the mob. To my right, the dad was trying to stay ahead of the crowd and hold onto his sons’ hands. I could see him losing his grip as the crowd got closer. At this point my mind was back on helping others, so I tried to move over to the right to get between the horde and the family, but every time I tried to push over to the right the people pushed back. I kept trying to make my way over as I saw the hand of the younger boy slip out of his dad’s hand and the little boy disappeared underneath the stampede of feet. [sniffles and a pause]” “I couldn’t get there in time. I tried to fight back against the crowd, but that poor little boy got trampled. I still have nightmares about it. I just can’t stop thinking about that final image. I got out with the rest of the crowd just ahead of the clankers. I knew I needed to get to safety, and that meant getting out of the city because now shit was about to hit the fan. It was only a matter of time until the clankers spread through the whole city like the plague that they were. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ PANYNJ Response David Tanner 4 Years After G-Day
“Everyone always wants to ask, ‘Why didn’t you shut down all the bridges? Why didn’t you shut off the ferries?’ Do you know how much logistical support that takes? We were operating at full capacity. No one was letting Florida slow them down or change their plans. Sure, stocks went down, but there weren’t exactly a bunch of signs of the apocalypse that were going to stop people from shipping things – hell, people were buying more supplies to prepare themselves for what they thought was gonna happen – like how that stupid zombie survival guide sold out after that one frickin’ cannibal in Florida decided to take a big bite out of a corpse before the cops put him down. “Not to mention the fact that the clanker attack on Yankee Stadium happened without any warning. It wasn’t like the rage heads spread across the country and then turned into cyborg, android things. Instead we just had it hit us one day with no warning. After G-Day, I did my best to stop the flow of traffic, but that got in the way of citizens trying to flee for their lives over the bridges. People could sense the shit was hitting the fan and they wanted to get out while there was still time. I couldn’t blame them for that. You didn’t need to see it from the air or on a satellite to see traffic was backed up practically from one end of the island to the other. “I know some people blame us for letting clankers out of the city, but it’s not like our one island would’ve deterred them from spreading across the country anyways – the whole Easter Seaboard was under siege less than a week after G-Day between the clankers from New York and the ones that spewed up from the South after the Florida Wall fell. In the end, I think we did our part to try and get as many people to safety as possible before Dalton and the military ordered us to blow all the bridges. If I have any regrets, it’s that we didn’t evacuate more people in time. Those poor folks who got left behind were completely trapped after the military dumped mines around the island and shot anyone attempting to leave. And when the government fell, it was too late for anyone left on the island. It’s only now that we’ve had any sort of attempts to reclaim the island and it’s not like we’ve found many survivors.” __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Informational Pamphlet EDF 5 Years After G-Day
Clankers. Grinders. Blasters KNOW THE DIFFERENCE
An important part of surviving the apocalypse is knowing your enemy. I know what you’re thinking, ‘Aren’t all these cyborg things the same?’ Unfortunately, the answer is no. And not knowing that difference could be deadly in an emergency!
There are three different kinds of Adam’s cyborgs you can expect to deal with:
Clankers: Your standard issue cyborg from Adam. Vicious, ugly, mean. They emit electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) to short out electronics. The first wave of any attack by Adam. Can be taken out with most weapons, but they must be completely disassembled or they will repair themselves.
Grinders: The next level of cyborg. Take your standard clanker and give it some steroids and a pair of tank treads to crush anything in its path and you have a grinder. Unlike clankers, it takes heavy weaponry and strategy to take down these suckers. After clankers have weakened a city, grinders come in to destroy whatever’s left. Treat them as a serious threat and handle them with extreme caution. Do not underestimate these bastards.
Blasters: The suicide bomber of the cyborg world. Take a clanker, stick an explosive onto it and give it an objective of causing as much destruction as possible. Like with grinders, treat them with extreme caution – they move slowly at first, but once they lock onto a target, they charge at high speeds toward whatever they’ve locked on to. They can also be used for stealth missions. Some models have been seen that move low to the ground like walking landmines. Extremely deadly and dangerous. Always be aware of your surroundings at all times in case blasters are present.
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Post by texican on Jul 13, 2020 17:36:10 GMT -6
Three types of clankers to be eliminated and one blows himself up.
Thank GT for the chapter.
Texican....
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Post by geekyteacher on Jul 16, 2020 8:29:04 GMT -6
Records of G-Day Around the World – China Xi Ping 5 Years After G-Day
Xi Ping is another familiar face of the apocalypse. He has stern eyes that are dark colored along with short black hair. According to the information at the bottom of the recording, he was aged 29 when this was recorded,
“In China, we thought that we were isolated from the rest of the world. We were the Middle Kingdom and we had no need to interact with the rest of the world – we were above everyone else, after all. I was a student at university when Genesis was first introduced to the public. We were naturally skeptical of the claims that Dr. Albert made. His talk of editing human genes was something that sounded like it came from a science fiction book, and we didn’t require it as we were already superior to the rest of the world. Then of course androids began attacking cities and that really sounded like science fiction.
“The government in China proclaimed that we would not listen to the lies from the West. All Chinese citizens were tasked with attempting to create a superior nanite device. Something that would put Genesis to shame. Of course, we’d later find out that was all just a cover-up by the government. Much like the President in America, our leaders had heard about the potential for Genesis to be the largest spying network in history. How could a government that was always looking for better, more efficient ways to spy on its people resist? Though we later found out that our leaders were even more zealous. Rather than after offering it as a new health craze or disguise it as a vaccine, nanites were placed directly into the main water sources for China. So almost the whole population had Genesis in their veins when the day came, but most did not know it. It was only by sheer luck that some of us found ourselves immune when Adam brought G-Day to China.
“October 2nd was an important day. I was beginning my final year of university. Everyone wanted to discuss what happened in America. We had all been following events in Florida – at least what was being reported on it by the State media. Some individuals using cracked, non-censored versions of the internet were searching for more news, but many did not want to be associated with them for fear of government reprisals. There was a lot of talk about what could’ve been responsible for it. Then we heard about New York. This led to speculation about what really happened. People melting into robots, it was just too absurd. We all agreed that it must’ve been America trying to fool the world, and that felt like the end of it. After all, nothing like that could ever happen in China was what we all agreed on.
“Over the next few days more news started to be relayed about America. The androids or as they were starting to be called clankers, had started swarming out of New York and the defensive barrier around Florida was beginning to crumble. Some people were saying America was doomed and China would soon be the sole superpower in the world. But in certain circles, rumors were starting to spread – rumors that the government had infected the whole Chinese population with Genesis in secret. We later found out that rumor was true. The other rumor that was spreading was that the clankers would come to China, or that they were already here and people with NIR had been covered up and carted away for extermination, but some had slipped through the cracks and that now they were being spotted in small villages in the vast Chinese interior.
“It took less than a week for those rumors to become reality. October 6th was China’s G-Day. In America, it was New York and in China it was Beijing. I was at university in class when we heard screaming and sirens in the street. When we went to see what the cause of the commotion was, we saw our very first clankers. Beijing was the largest city in the world back in that time, so our clankers were even more numerous. There was a small army – at least 1000 clankers marching through the streets and slaughtering anyone in their way and destroying everything else.
“Panic swept through the classroom. What were we going to do? We were trapped in our building and there was no way we could get through the army of clankers on the street. I was struck with a thought that if we couldn’t get out, we needed to stop the clankers from getting in. We had no weapons, but we had many materials to effectively barricade ourselves in. I decided it would be best if we got more students involved, so I went to the next classroom. While they were not sure about helping at first, I explained to them that there was no way we would be able to fight, so we had to stop them from getting in. That seemed to convince them and they joined me in blocking off our hallways with tables, chairs, bookshelves, and anything else we could find. We felt we had an effective barrier and tried to decide how to deal with the clankers when they reached our building.
“As we worked on this, we heard the sounds of the clankers breaking into the building. Everyone was trying to figure out what to do as we heard them getting closer. I can still remember how all the electronics stopped working after one of the clankers emitted an EMP – thus we were left in a dark building with no way to call for help. It was at that moment we heard a strange whirring noise that we’d later come to know very well. Then we heard the banging on the door behind our barrier. Panic quickly spread through the group as the wood of the door splintered and split. It was extremely unsettling – I still can see it. The unnatural way that it moved, the fact it looked so human, but was so clearly not. Once it sensed us, it suddenly went berserk, clawing and scratching at the barrier while continuing to let out that terrible whirring noise. It might’ve been anger, or maybe adrenaline, began to course through my veins, pumping me up to do something to this horrible creature. I grabbed the nearest object I could use like a club – it was the leg of a desk. I charged toward the clawing creature and began to smash at it with all my might until its head was knocked to the side. I thought that was it, but the body kept moving and clawing. I kept swinging my improvised weapon, knocking off the clawing arms, but even that did not stop the beast. It did not stop until I had knocked the torso completely off the legs.”
Xi Ping stops speaking and stands pensively for several seconds, as if to gather his thoughts,
“The victory was not long-lived. Quickly more clankers took the place of their fallen brother. I quickly began handing other improvised weapons to those around me. Without combined effort we were eventually able to subdue the attackers long enough to have a minute to reflect. We were well guarded at the moment, but we would not survive long without some sort of organization. Unless the government came quickly to our aid, we would run into problems with food and water very soon. Obviously at the time we didn’t know yet what was happening in the rest of the country and the problems the government faced with not only the largest population on the planet, but also one with such a high density of clankers because of the decision to poison the entire country.
We decided someone needed to take a leadership role, and somehow that fell to me. I immediately decided that we needed to get food and water because we had no idea how long we might be holed up. I knew that food and water were stored in the basement, which meant three floors potentially littered with these strange clankers, I elected to lead a team to the basement. I asked for volunteers to go with me, and two young men named Zhang Wei and Li Wei both volunteered to join me on the mission. We armed ourselves with the meager weapons and supplies that we had, then moved our barrier aside to make our way to the basement.
Once we were out in the hall past our barrier, we slowly began moving toward the stairs. I was afraid that we would be at the most vulnerable in such a small space, so I elected to go down first. Everything seemed to be quiet until we got down to the first floor. Sounds of chaos from outside were pouring into the room because the front door had been broken down. Even worse, the floor was littered with corpses of students who had not been so fortunate as to have a place to hide. One called out weakly to us, but I knew there was nothing we could do. As we were moving to the basement stairs, three clankers came through the broken front door. I still remember their grotesque appearance – they were covered in blood and still had bits of flesh hanging from their bodies where it had not fully melted off. The smell was horrific. In the blink of an eye, they were nearly on top of Zhang Wei and me, while Li Wei was more nimble and able to dodge out of the way. I barely got my desk leg up before the clanker charged into me. I almost got a swing in but wasn’t able to aim it properly as the clanker attempted to take a swipe at my jugular. While I was able to stop it from getting to my throat by holding it back with the desk leg, I wasn’t able to disable it. If not for Li Wei taking a swing and knocking it off balance, I might not be here today to tell my story. Together we were able to take out one of the clankers.”
He pauses for a moment and tears begin to form in his eyes,
“But while Li Wei had been helping me, Zhang Wei had been attacked by both of the clankers. They’d teamed up against him and overpowered him. Then, as Li Wei and I were rushing over to help him, one of the clankers took him out with one quick slice to the jugular on his neck. I was filled with rage. I wanted to tear the clankers apart. But before I could, Li Wei held me back. He said there was nothing we could do for Zhang Wei now. We got lucky that the clankers appeared to focus on something else out in the street and moved away from Wei and myself, so we were able to get our supplies and get back to the bunker. I was still in shock and didn’t even think about why they had left so suddenly. It would take several more years to find out. In the meantime, our small group was able to somehow hold on until we were forced out of our bunker, but while we were momentarily safe, the whole world collapsed around us."
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Diary Entries Samantha Hurst 0 Years Before G-Day - 1 Year After G-Day
“October 1st: Today Mom and Dad couldn’t talk about anything other than New York. I don’t know what they’re so concerned about. We’re in Minnesota, there’s no chance that any of this affects us. Oh well, maybe there’s at least a chance that Mom and Dad take me out of school. I heard them discussing starting to stock up on food.
“October 5th: Dad came home from the grocery store today with dozens of cans of food. He asked me to help him put them all in the basement so that we have them in the shelter. I asked Dad if he honestly believes that this is going to affect us. He told me that it’s better to be safe than sorry. It all seems like a bit much to me. Like, I give it almost no chance that this actually gets to Minnesota. It’s pretty pointless to store all this food. Or Mom deciding to start planting a garden. I was gonna talk to both of them about how ridiculous they’re being, but there was something in both of their eyes. It was a strange look that I’ve never seen before. Maybe it was fear but beyond the usual levels, like cranked up to 11. I’m not sure what it was, but it made me want to help them without giving them any attitude.
“October 7th: School dismissed early today. Lots of talk about what’s happening on the East Coast. Florida has been deemed a lost zone and now the clanker-robot things are streaming into Georgia after the barrier got blown up. There’s lots of talk about an emergency wall around DC in case they get that far north. I noticed all my teachers had the same look as Mom and Dad did. When I got home, Dad and Mom were both still prepping. It was crazy for them to miss so much work. It’d never happened before in my life. The only other time I’d seen it happen was when I was sick. Otherwise they were always at work. They both had that look as they went over the supplies that they’d been out getting during the day. Mom bought wood boards and big nails to put over the windows and door. Dad came home with gallons and gallons of bottled water that he added to the basement’s supply. This is all getting so out of hand. What’s next? Radiation suits?”
“October 9th: When I got to school today, I didn’t see my friends Jackie or Suzan anywhere. We’ve been friends since kindergarten, so I couldn’t believe they hadn’t said anything to me about not being in school that day. I found out the reason why when someone told me their parents’ had fled west the night before. They must have only left with the clothes on their backs and whatever they could grab because neither of them said anything about their parents prepping the way mine have been. Though if their parents were watching the news every night, it’s no surprise they packed up and left so quick. That’s what’s on every channel, it seems like at least. Mom got sick of hearing it and finally asked Dad to change the channel or turn it off, which is crazy since both of them have had the TV tuned to the news religiously since New York. Dad tried looking for news on other channels, but that was all there seemed to be to say. ‘Go! Take your family and run now before it’s too late!’ It’s no surprise so many people are just up and running. That or buying out the store if you’re my parents. It’s crazy that it’s only been a week since New York and people in the Midwest are already losing their shit. I’d expect it from the East Coast, but the military will be able to stop it before it gets anywhere near here, right?”
“October 13th: Even fewer students in class. I’m surprised Mom and Dad are still sending me to school – they seem like they’re ready for bombs to start falling any moment. But I guess there’s part of them that still wants to believe that things are normal, or that will be back to normal soon. Dad even went back to work, but that might’ve just been because he was running low on days he could stay home. I don’t get it. Dad had the news turned on when Mom was out for a little bit, and everyone says the army will stop these robot clanker things long before they get anywhere near us. I heard Mom and Dad discussing it after they thought I was asleep and they both seem to believe that that’s what’s going to happen. Or at least maybe that’s what they want to believe will happen.
“October 14th: Everyone at school couldn’t stop talking about clankers today. Before they were only in New York, Florida, and Georgia – only on the East Coast, but now they’re saying that they’ve been seen as close as Indiana and Ohio. We watched the President’s speech today where he said that we would do whatever we had to stop the clankers spreading and called on us all to do our part. I noticed more and more substitute teachers at school and teachers having to cover for other teachers. We’ve been getting sent home early pretty much every day because there aren’t enough teachers at the school. I’ve noticed more students are gone too.”
“October 15th: Holy shit, everything’s gone insane. Mom and Dad pulled me from school today. There was a big battle in Detroit and the clankers completely decimated the army. Nothing seems to make sense anymore. There’s talk that the clankers could be in Minnesota in the next few days. Mom and Dad were boarding up the windows of the house when our next-door neighbor came over saying he didn’t feel well. Everything seemed pretty normal with Mom and Dad trying to get him to go to the hospital, but then his skin melted off. I’d never seen a clanker up close before and it was freaky as f*** the way it moved and went for Dad’s throat trying to tear it out. Dad got real lucky that he had the hammer in his hand and was able to swing it before what was our next-door neighbor got to him. We rushed into the house and boarded the door before we ran down into the basement and bolted the door. Mom and I checked that Dad was okay. He had a small scratch on his arm, and wasn’t sure if he’d be okay. Listening to the news when Dad was watching, the only other thing than to go west was no one knew for sure how the thing they were starting to call Genesis poisoning spread. I guess we’re lucky we never got the treatment. Who would’ve known our Rabbi telling us it wasn’t in line with our religion might’ve saved our lives.
All of that reflection was put on hold at the point we heard someone, or something, banging on our front door. Mom, Dad, and I froze and listened to the banging. I was sure we were going to hear the door break down. Dad must’ve felt the same way because he stopped looking at the scratch and picked up the shotgun he’d put into the shelter. I don’t even know when he learned to use that thing. He and Mom are both schoolteachers. I don’t remember him ever raising his voice or using bad language, and now he was wielding a shotgun like some kind of old-timey gangster.
Luckily for all of us, Dad didn’t need to. There was the sound of the wood on the front door splintering, but after that the banging slowly faded away. Mom and Dad were both on edge for the rest of the day and long into the night. I could hear them talking about how they were sure that it would be back soon. They spent a lot of time being sure the back door was extra barricaded with more nails and boards over it since it led out into the backyard.”
“October 31st: We’ve been down in the bunker now for over two weeks. Things are getting scary outside from the sounds of things. I’ve never heard so many gunshots before in my life. At first I thought it was fireworks, but that made no sense. Now it’s gotten to the point where I hardly even notice them anymore. The scary thing is that so far as I know clankers don’t use guns. It’s people out there who are destroying each other. I remember in history class one of my teachers told us that during the Black Plague society broke down hard. Parents abandoned their kids, neighbors turned against each other looking for whatever they thought caused the Plague and looking for some sort of cure or something that would save them. And here we are destroying each other after a month. We’re all a little on edge down here in the bunker, so I guess it makes sense that everyone’s on edge up above. The power went out. Dad says it must be all the EMPs that clankers emit, so all we have is the gas generator that Dad and Mom bought when they were prepping for lights or power. We’ve got fuel, but who knows what we’ll do after it runs out. No running water either, so we have to use the bottled water for everything. God, I can’t imagine what it must be like on the outside with the way things are down here where we prepared for it.
There have been a few times when Dad has thought he was going to have to use the shotgun that’s been sitting out. At first I thought it was clankers when we heard the door get broken down. I barely knew what kind of sound they made. But I knew they didn’t talk, so when we heard whispering, I knew it couldn’t be them. Then I heard the voices of our next door neighbors (on the other side from the one who turned clanker), the Williams’. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. There was the soft voice of Mrs. Williams,
“I saw them boarding up everything. They must still be in here somewhere. I’m sure we’ll be able to find all that stuff they stocked up.” This was the same Mrs. Williams who babysat me as a little girl when my parents were working late. She was a big lady who’d always had games and treats when I was little, and here she was trying to steal our stuff.
“They’ve got to be around here somewhere.” That was Mr. Williams, he was a big man with a big bushy mustache. I’d always thought of him like a big teddy bear – he didn’t seem like the type who could hurt a fly, but here he was talking about robbing me and my family.
“But what will we do if we run into them while we grab their stuff?”
“Don’t worry, I can take care of that.” The statement is followed up by the sound of a gun cocking.
Oh sweet Jesus, how bad can it be out there if our next door neighbors were discussing robbing and killing us after having broken into our house. All for the food and supplies we’d stored up. I looked over at Mom and Dad – they both had similar expressions, but then Dad’s turned to anger. He grabbed his shotgun and loudly cocked it,
“You two have 10 seconds to get the hell out of my house. Otherwise I’ll blow both of your goddamn heads off.”
I was shocked. I’d never heard Dad talk like that before. The Williams’ must’ve felt the same because we heard them scurry off. After that, Mom or Dad always had the shotgun nearby in case they decided to come back.
Dad’s been trying to see if we can get the radio to work and hear more about what’s happening in the outside world, but so far he’s had no luck on that.
“November 30th: Another month down here in the bunker. Things are starting to get tense. Mom and Dad have been yelling at each other more than I’ve ever heard before in my life. The generator went bad and stopped working, so we’ve had to use candles to have any light or heat. Our supply is for 5 months, so hopefully we’ll be okay. But there’s been so much banging and crashing in the world around us. Dad put extra barricades around the door that leads out to the backyard after we heard banging and prying on the storm-cellar door. The worst part was it didn’t sound like the Williams’ this time. It sounded like we were surrounded by clankers, and the constant whirring has been putting us all on edge, especially Mom. She thinks it’s only a matter of time until the clankers or whatever else is out there gets in. She keeps telling Dad we should make a run for it to make it out west. She says something’s going to go wrong or someone’s going to break in and that the government’s not going to come rescue us (if they still even exist)
“Dad said that Mom didn’t know what she was talking about and that we’re much safer in here with our food and supplies than out on the road (if we even have a car or anything left out there.) That led to a big argument – they tried to keep their voices down, but I could still hear them from the other room when they thought I was asleep.”
“December 5th: Mom and Dad are still arguing. They’ve never argued this much before in my whole life. We’ve got a big problem – without the generator, it’s starting to get almost to freezing down here and the candles can only do so much. Even with my thickest winter coat on I’m still shivering. Mom still thinks we should try to go west, but Dad won’t budge. Their fight got to its worst last night. Mom said Dad wanted us all to die because he hated us and himself. She said if he were a real man that he would be out scavenging so that we all wouldn’t freeze to death here when we could try to make it west. Dad didn’t say anything, but this morning I’m pretty sure Mom had a black eye since she was holding something over it and Dad went outside to see what it looks like. I begged him not to go, but Mom said not to worry, and everything will be okay. She says things can only get better now. Dad will go out and find out things aren’t so bad. We’ll be out of this bunker before New Year’s. After that we’ll go on an adventure out west.”
“December 12th: Dad still hasn’t come back. Mom won’t say it, but neither of us thinks he’s coming back. Mom can’t stop crying. Hugging her helps her feel better – I hope- and also keeps us warm. The temperature keeps going down. It’s already down to 20 degrees in the bunker, and that’s with the improvised space heater Dad made before he left. Mom and I wrap ourselves up in blankets to try and keep warm, but we still spend most of our time shivering. I just keep looking at the calendar. Mom keeps saying that everything will be okay by New Year’s, maybe even Christmas. ‘Don’t worry, Sam-Sam,’ She says, using the nickname she hasn’t used since I was 4, ‘Everything’s going to be alright. I won’t let anything happen to you.’”
“December 20th: Mom still can’t stop crying and neither can I. We’re afraid all the tears are going to freeze to our faces from how cold it is in here. The temperature is down to 12 degrees – Mom’s trying really hard to hide it, but I think she’s getting desperate. She says Dad’s gonna come in any minute with good news and supplies. I wish she was right, but I don’t know if it will happen or how it could if it did. But she keeps telling me everything will be alright, ‘Don’t worry, Sam-Sam. Everything’s going to be alright. I won’t let anything happen to you.’”
“December 25th: Merry Christmas, though we’re Jewish so not exactly as big a deal. Though I’m so used to it that it doesn’t really matter. Mom heard shuffling around near the door last night and started insisting it was Dad and that he was back. She rushed to the door and was trying to get the barricade undone, but I can only guess her hands were too cold because she couldn’t get it open before the noise went away. Mom was screaming for Dad to come back. I tried to get her to stop, but she was absolutely hysterical by that point. She slapped me hard on the cheek when I tried to stop her and continued screaming for Dad. I was in shock. Neither of my parents had ever hit me before, even when I was being a brat and probably deserved it. I left Mom to herself after that. She spent the rest of the day by the door crying and screaming.”
“January 1st: Mom spent the rest of the time by the door crying. All yesterday on New Year’s Eve she was insisting Dad would be back today. When I woke up this morning, it was suddenly colder than it’d ever been before in the bunker. As I was wondering why, I found out the reason. I saw the storm cellar door was un-barricaded and open. I called for Mom, thinking that maybe she was outside by the door, but there was no response. The other thing I noticed was the dark gray snow falling in from outside. There was a small pile of it near the entrance that had piled up. The door must’ve been open for at least half an hour with the amount of snow that was on the pile. I climbed up the storm cellar staircase and looked out on the world. It was bleaker than I’d ever seen before, even by the standards of a Minnesota winter. The sky was completely gray, and it wasn’t just the snow inside that matched the sky, but the big piles and drifts outside as well. The world wasn’t fixed, and the new year hadn’t done anything about it.
“I stood at the door after calling for Mom two more times. Now I’m sitting on the storm cellar stairs. Gray snow is piling up all around me. I know Mom and Dad will be back. They promised…everything will be okay…nothing bad will happen…everything will be okay…nothing bad will happen. I keep waiting to see the familiar figure of my parents against the snow. Don’t worry Sam-Sam…nothing bad will happen…everything will be okay…”
Author’s Note: Samantha’s Diary was found in the wreckage of Minneapolis during Operation: Atlantic
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Post by texican on Jul 17, 2020 22:20:14 GMT -6
Being away from the cities has been preached and preached for a reason.
Thanks GT for the story.
Texican....
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Post by geekyteacher on Jul 22, 2020 16:24:48 GMT -6
Tales of Year 1 Jacob Torbay; EDF Log 4 Years After G-Day
“Sure, New York was G-Day 1, and for a while it seemed like it was just the East Coast.” Jacob Torbay is a very large man. He appears to be at least 6’ tall. He has a thick beard of dark hair. He has the look of a drill sergeant with a stern voice and demeanor to match, “At least at first, we thought the clankers spread like your usual apocalyptic disease - a patient zero, spreading through contact or open wounds, all that usual zombie shit. Probably influenced by all those geniuses on Reddit who thought they knew the real story.”
He makes a series of obscene hand gestures,
“Bunch of fucking idiots if you ask me. Just imagine if we'd known sooner that G poisoning spread a whole lot more like a computer virus -maybe we should have guessed given its source -but anyway, anyone who had gotten that damn Genesis shot was susceptible, and that was 100 million plus in the US alone. At first, we didn’t know if NIR and NISBD were part of a progression or if rage heads and dead heads (pardon the horrible pun) were a part of the same tree or a completely different branch of the fucking tree. We later found out NIR and rage heads became clankers, but NISBD and dead heads were their own separate thing. Probably for the best otherwise we could’ve had zombie clankers walking around. Suck on that one, internet.
“Your fully robotic humans – clankers, grinders, blasters – they barely have any humanity left. Once their skin melted off – such a good visual metaphor, really – there was no going back. Really, credit to Adam here, it knew exactly how humans had prepared for a plague. All of our carefully thought out plans assumed we could catch it early and contain it in one place, like Florida. But what we didn’t account for in our great plan was if the plague was already all around the country before we took our first action.”
He shakes his head before continuing, “But Adam knew what we’d planned for, so at first it made us think maybe we could keep things under control. Maybe we could stop it from spreading. Sure, it eventually ‘spread’ from New York to Pennsylvania and Florida to Georgia, but it felt like we were keeping pace with it. Places like DC built walls around themselves trying to keep it out. I’m sure Twitter was on fire about that. I’d have loved to see all the trending tags. But it turned out all the people walling themselves off or fleeing west with all their earthly possessions weren’t really doing anything, because anywhere there was Genesis, it was one signal away from being crawling with clankers. Though it would’ve been much better if we’d learned that before the Massacre at Detroit or the one in San Francisco at the Golden Gate Bridge three months later. If you’d told me there’d ever be mushroom clouds over the US, I’d have thought you were insane and told you to take the day off. That was about the time in the US that we realized how fucked we were. Per my friends from overseas, each country had its own ‘Oh f***’ moment. Everyone who survived that knew we were facing an extinction level event at that time. The fact we bounced back at all is a true goddamn miracle. If you’d asked me in 2024 if we’d make it to 2025, I’d have doubted it. After all, with the numbers people estimate we lost 75% of the population in 3 years. And every one of us the clankers got could turn right back around and get more of us. It was pure chaos. That’s the best way to describe the past 4 years of human existence, really.”
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Tales of Year 1: Detroit Darren Davis 4 Years After G-Day
The next log entry begins with Darren Davis staring blankly ahead of him. He is a man missing a chunk of skin on his nose with large scars all over his face, making him look much older than the stated 35. He has cropped brown hair and blue eyes that produce a vacant-looking stare akin to shellshock. He begins to speak,
“I’ll remember that day for the rest of my life. October 15th. The day we thought we’d stop the clankers for good, but what turned out to be a bloodbath for us. I was in the military, but so far we’d just been used to ensure crowd control and do small jobs. But everyone kept asking when the army was going to get out there and save the country from all the goddamn clankers. I guess after hearing it enough times Dalton decided to make a big show of force, sending every unit that was available to Detroit. There’d been a defensive perimeter on the East Coast, for all the good that ended up doing since Genesis poisoning couldn’t be held back by physical barriers – just the clankers it produced, though we didn’t know that yet at the time.
“Either way, Dalton decided since the Eastern perimeter had been broken it was time for the military to turn them back from the Midwest or turn them to dust trying. He made sure to mention that it was our great national duty or whatever, the big gasbag. From what we know now, it was his fucking fault for the massacre on both ends. He sent us in underprepared to fight clankers that wouldn’t have had nearly as many numbers if he hadn’t willed everyone and their goddamn grandmother to get a Genesis shot, which meant everyone from Maine to middle of nowhere Montana could become a clanker at the drop of a hat.
“The problem we had at Detroit was we were sent in completely unprepared. We built a perimeter to funnel the clankers into our firing range, but that was with the assumption that inside the city was a secured safe zone. And we barely knew about grinders or blasters – there wasn’t much we knew about any of it back then. If we had, we would’ve had a better idea about the usefulness of our perimeter barriers anyways. The weather wasn’t our friend that day either. It was already snowing, even though it was only early October. Now snow that early’s not unheard of in Michigan, but this wasn’t a light dusting, it was heavy, gray snow. The kind we’d get very used to as the crisis wore on, but at the moment it was a bizarre, unexplainable spectacle. So that meant we were in our winter gear, which wasn’t always the easiest to maneuver in. We figured we had enough ammo and supplies, and our strategy was simple: Get the clankers into the kill-zone and then shoot ‘em like fish in a barrel until they were all nothing but scrap. Simple enough, right? I mean, what could possibly go wrong?”
He lets out a harsh, bitter chuckle and motions to the missing part of his nose and the large vertical set of scars across his face,
“Ya know, we have a term FUBAR in the military for just such a situation. That stands for Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition for all you laymen out there. It Started on a bad note because of the bad weather. We were having to try and reinforce defenses and put up barbed wire and pile sandbags in pounding snow. It didn't help when Dalton showed up to “boost our morale.” So much fucking controversy about his talk of postponing elections because of the crisis (not to mention conspiracy-nuts creaming their pants with talk about his role in it), so what does he decide to do? Show up in a fucking war zone right before major combat operations. And the fact he decided to stay and watch the battle. What a fucking brilliant idea that turned out to be, am I right? But where was I…oh yeah, so we were building and reinforcing the barricades while the media and the President were both being huge distractions, plus our cold-weather gear was making it a bitch to get things done and we had that gray snow nearly to our shins. And that was all before the first clankers showed.
“We could tell they were coming because of those EMPs they emitted. Just small, local blasts, so when our equipment stopped working that was the sign to get everything ready. I was one of the people responsible for mowing down the fuckers as they entered the kill-zone. Now from what I heard from some of my buddies, it wasn’t great on funneling duty since clankers don’t take instructions. Well and the snow made it a bitch to maneuver. The strategy was to get their attention and draw them in. They had their network, so they could quickly communicate and converge on their targets. And we took advantage of that – get one’s attention and it’d do the rest. If you’re wondering, and I’m sure you are, we didn’t send guys out there on their own to be live bait. We gave ‘em a jeep and told ‘em to haul ass toward the kill zone the minute a clanker got them in its sights.
“That’s where the funnelers had some initial problems. I feel like the higher-ups should’ve been more prepared for the snow. It wasn’t like they couldn’t find out about it and try to get the jeeps a little more snow ready. So our funnelers could only haul so much ass, which caused two problems: the clankers got to them before they could get to the pick-up point or they flipped over and had to try and bail. We lost a lot of good men and women. And then we had to send others out to try and rescue them or decided they had to fend for themselves, so you were risking more soldiers or morale. I ended up going out to rescue an overturned jeep. As crazy as it sounds, it’s probably why I’m here talking to you today.
“My squad and I were sent out to help out a squad who’d overturned. Luckily, they weren’t too close to the clankers, so there was still a good chance to get them back in one piece. It was slow going because of the snow and the constant checks for clankers since they had to be done with no electronic assistance or monitoring. We were slowly making our way to their location, but we were afraid we might get blocked out by the snow. By the time we made it to their location, it’d been at least 15 minutes, And in that time, snow had piled up around them – the only reason we knew we were in the right location was the movement of the soldiers who’d managed to make it out of the overturned jeep. We got over to them and started digging them out. One of the soldiers who made it out told me they’d been hit by white out conditions, so they couldn’t see the clanker that they’d nearly crashed into and took a turn too hard, then toppled over. They weren’t sure if the driver was okay, so we started trying to get him out. But that was when everything went to shit.
“We heard whirring noises all around us, and we looked up to see we were surrounded by half-a-dozen clankers. I’d never seen them up close in person since I hadn’t been on the front lines until the front line came to us. They looked more unnatural in person – the way they moved, the way some of them still had parts of their original skin attached in places. And the noises they made – that whirring was something TV reports could’ve never conveyed properly once you heard it for real. For a second, I froze in terror until my brain refreshed on what I was supposed to be doing: saving my brothers and shooting these clanker bastards. I readied my weapon and let loose two quick bursts of fire. They hit the clanker square in the chest and it staggered back, but that wasn’t enough to put it down. I fired again with two quick bursts, like we were trained to do (another problem – when you’re in a group quick bursts of fire can work, but not nearly as well when alone). My buddies were firing at the other clankers and having about as much success. What happened next was proof that miracles can happen. The clanker closest to me started charging. One of them got right up in my face and it managed to do this right here.”
He gestures to the missing chunk in his nose and the large set of scars across his face, “I was probably about five seconds from being another corpse on the battlefield. And that might’ve been why at that point I lost my mind, closed my eyes and held my breath, then squeezed the trigger and held it, just praying to whatever deity’s the right one to not let me die. When I opened my eyes, I was alive and so were the injured people behind me, so that prayer must’ve been to the right deity because it worked. Also, by some stroke of luck, I’d managed to blast the clanker to parts. Its arm was crawling toward its body when I ran up and crushed it under my foot. My buddies had noticed my success and used it to take down the other five clankers. We were able to help the injured driver out of the vehicle. We were on our way back to the main area when things somehow went even more to shit.
“Trudging through the thickening snow was already hard enough, and the snow was coming down so bad that we were pretty much dealing with a white out. And since we were in a war zone, there were loud noises everywhere around us. It was so bad that we practically couldn’t hear the jeep that shot out of the seat of white, barreling straight at us. It took the driver a good few seconds to see us, but when he did he quickly jerked the wheel as we were trying to dodge out the way. He went careening sideways, the car losing traction on the snowy ground. It barely missed us and turned onto its side. I ran as quickly as I could over to the jeep. The driver was alive, but badly injured,
‘Clankers…clankers…they’re everywhere.’ Was all he was barely able to wheeze before he passed out.
“I asked him what he meant, but he was out cold. As I was trying to wake him up, there was a sound in the air. I realized quickly it was screams – screams from dozens of people that were rapidly getting closer to us. I remember wondering why it was moving towards us from the city. As I was pondering that question, I got my answer.
“A group of other soldiers from the operation were running towards us. At first their torn-up clothing and injuries made me think they were clankers. But so far as I knew, clankers made a whirring noise that couldn’t be easily confused with the screaming of humans. Plus, they didn’t run the way that this group was, at least based on what I’d just seen. The men ran up to us and told us to run. I asked one of them what was happening – or what had happened. I could barely understand what he said at the time – he was in too much of a panic. At that point, I decided it would be a good idea to run. Later on, I found out exactly what had happened. The shooters were picking off clankers in the kill-zone when they’d gotten word that there was movement on their 6. I say it like it was some organized thing. It was more panicked citizens running for their lives out of the city into the militarized zone. Detroit was suddenly swarming with clankers – coming out of every building, transforming on every street – and now they were all barreling straight toward the encampment. The soldiers at the base were caught completely flat-footed. Our whole strategy was to secure a safe-zone on our side of the barrier and now that’d been compromised by 100,000+ clankers suddenly on our side of the defensive line. Soldiers turned around as quickly as they could, trying to get all of the forces focused on wiping out the new threat, but it was hopeless. It was like the French in World War II. They were so afraid of Germany invading again that they built a huge line of weaponry and bunkers on the border – they called it the Maginot Line. They thought with such a strong defense that Germany would never try to invade them. What they didn’t consider was that Germany could just go around the line and attack the French from behind. We made the same mistake – and just like the French, we never considered in our plan what to do if our line was circumvented. So the whole strategy blew up in about 10 seconds and the 100 some odd men and women weren’t nearly enough to take on that many clankers. That’d never been anywhere in the plan, just like the French never considered what to do if the Germans just went around their highly fortified line.
“What followed could only be described as a bloodbath. Most soldiers did their best to hold off the clankers, but some turned and ran. The ones who stayed behind had some of the greatest attempts at valor possible in those early days of the war. One solider when she ran out of ammo decided to try and bash clankers in the head by using her rifle as a club. From what I heard, she got in a few good shots, and might have even managed to take some of the bastards with her before she got overtaken by the swarm. Another one decided to try and commandeer a jeep to start mowing down the clankers that way. He made it into the driver’s seat, but before he could put the pedal to the metal he got overwhelmed too. I’m sure there were lots of other soldiers who tried to go down fighting, in my mind more than the number who turned tail and ran away. Their attempts at valor are appreciated now, whether they were or weren’t at the time I don’t know.
“At about this time, I think the media and President realized this wasn’t going to be the smashing victory that they were expecting. Media types had been getting footage of us making the barrier and preparing for battle – a lot of them just standing in our way as we tried to work. There were probably more news vans than there were jeeps. Hell, I even remember a few news choppers flying around getting aerial shots of the preparations for battle. It was a complete madhouse – plus the President attracted them like flies on shit, so that didn’t help either. I heard stories about the vans trying to make a break for it once the clankers showed, but just like our jeeps, most of them ended up swarmed by clankers or went and overturned themselves by trying to go too fast on the snow-covered ground. The real sign though that things were completely fucked was when the President tried to make a break for it in his helicopter. It was just starting to get off the ground when it got surrounded by a whole swarm of clankers. They were like those ants that live in the Amazon from what I heard, though much less coordinated. By sheer number they were able to pile over each other toward the helicopter. By this point it was a fair ways off the ground, but the clankers were relentless. They kept swarming on top of each other until some of them were able to grab the helicopter. And somehow despite EMPs and the news crews running – somehow someone still got footage of the helicopter getting pulled down and the clankers swarming the crew – including the President. I guess it was a fitting end – the President had tried so hard to get everyone on Genesis, and then it came back to bite him hard when Detroit started swarming with clankers. Still, I shudder to think about those last moments completely surrounded by clankers with no protection.”
“Meanwhile, while all this was happening, the FUBAR level was only going up for the troops as well. Genesis poisoning started causing soldiers to turn on each other. Let me tell you, it’s bad enough facing a swarming mass of clankers, but what’s even pants-shittingly worse is when the person right next to you starts shifting. Just imagine, one minute you and your friend are dismantling clankers together and the next minute his skin has melted off and he’s trying to tear out your throat. Some soldiers were able to ignore it and shoot their best friend, but a lot of soldiers tried to reason with their former friend and got mauled to death. And once the mob of clankers reached the firing line, soldiers got torn to shreds. We didn’t know how to combat them yet and the Nadia Square wasn’t even a twinkle in the eye of humanity yet. The ones who were able to get away from the wave of claws looked like the ones we met outside the firing line. Clothes torn up, big gashes in their skin, a lot of them just barely alive because of the adrenaline pumping through their veins. I remember hearing the death rates at the hospitals after the massacre were horrific.”
“At this point we weren’t sure what to do other than run. I wanted to stand and fight. The plan was obviously completely blown to shit. Even worse, at that point the blasters started showing up. Everything that was left standing went down. My squad told me it sure as hell wasn’t a good idea to go back to a collapsing city that was being blown to pieces. They decided it would be best to put as much distance between the clankers and ourselves as humanly possible. I wanted to go back, check on the other troops and find out what happened to the higher ups, but at that point my squad let me know they wouldn’t let me essentially commit suicide. They told me I could either move with them willingly or they’d knock me out. At that point I decided we’d lost and it would be better to get away with our lives, so that was how my platoon and I started on our journey out west.
“I think the only reason we didn’t end up like San Francisco was because Dalton was there on the battlefield. Maybe after his helicopter went down the top brass didn’t want to be the ones responsible for doing that to an American city. Maybe they weren’t so desperate yet to beat the clankers. Or maybe it has something to do with the man who was sitting in the Oval Office after Detroit and how he got there that made everyone realize we were dealing with a situation that could very well lead to the collapse of our nation and the extinction of our species. Either way, we veterans of Detroit can tell you that the government learned all the wrong lessons that day, and we’d pay for it big time down the road.
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Post by 9idrr on Jul 22, 2020 21:16:36 GMT -6
May I never be in a place where the FUBAR level is goin' up.
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Post by texican on Jul 22, 2020 21:32:26 GMT -6
GT,
It is definitely FUBAR....
Texican....
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Post by geekyteacher on Jul 27, 2020 11:06:34 GMT -6
Tales of Year 1 Sandra Cain; EDF Video 4 Years After G-Day
“I was a pilot during the crisis. What I remember was after New York, all of our flights out of the East Coast filled up, but for a lot of the rest of our team, it wasn’t that different. We weren’t having to do our flights round the clock or deal with the airports that turned into madhouses. No one was threatening to shoot someone to get on a plane, at least not yet on the route that I flew. That would come later, but that was back before air travel became a distant memory of the past. But you wanna know when the whole country went crazy? Look no further than Detroit. Before that, the government was doing a pretty good job of pacifying the nation. ‘Don’t worry,’ they said, ‘We’ve got this under control. The military will have these clankers wiped out before Christmas.’
“After people heard about Detroit, saw the pictures of an American city fall and the military get torn to pieces and the President of the United States have his helicopter pulled down and then be mauled by the clankers, the whole frickin’ country lost it. I’ll leave someone else to talk about people who tried to flee by car, but for planes, airports became battlegrounds. I’m talking people fighting each other to try and get onto an airplane. I remember one of the attendants at the gate who told me a story of a time that happened. The gate was already complete chaos with people attempting to get on any flight they could. Things were starting to break down. So many TSA agents were fleeing west that the few who were still showing up to work were completely overwhelmed. And the airports were packed – imagine how crowded they get during major holidays like Christmas but imagine that every day of the week. It was completely uncontrollable and lots of people were getting into the terminal with no ticket or going to the gates for the wrong ticket. After all, flights out west were so full that tickets were usually going for at least 3 or 4 times their value. Now my friend at the gate was doing her best to try and keep order, which wasn’t easy on a normal day at the airport, so you can imagine how it was when people thought their life and the lives of all their loved ones depended on getting on a plane as soon as possible. At that point, some short guy in filthy clothes and shaking like crazy started shoving into the line. At first people were frustrated and tried to defend their place, until they noticed the guy in question had an AR-15 rifle that he was brandishing at anyone who tried to get in his way. He started demanding that he needed to get onto the flight right away. When my friend tried to call security, it turned into a fire fight between the airport guards and the man. The crazy man started firing like wild at the guards, who tried to keep civilians safe, but a lot got caught in the crossfire from his erratic firing. He didn’t end up getting on the flight after taking a bullet to the head, but dozens of people were badly wounded or dead from his wild firing into the crowd. We started placing heavily armed guards at our gates after that nutjob, and he wasn’t the last one who showed up with an AR-15 and tried to shoot their way onto planes. This was not humanity’s shining moment is what I’m trying to get across.
“Things onboard the planes weren’t much better. Everyone was on edge at this time. People were ready to snap over the smallest little thing. There was more than one time where two people got into a fight over luggage space or seat placement. Now having been a pilot for as long as I was, I was used to people going a little crazy while flying. Airports can be stressful places and then you’re on a metal tube that’s zooming through the sky tens of thousands of feet in the air. Now add in that people were scared for their lives and it was a perfect storm. I tried to keep order on the plane – I talked to the passengers constantly. I told them that everything would be alright so long as we stuck together and tried to help our fellow man. Now I’d love to say that that calmed everyone down and got the plane under control. I’d also love to say women onboard threw themselves at me as a way to say thank you. But neither of those is very realistic. But I hope I got at least a few people to calm down and try to present the best of humanity rather than its worst. And even I got worn down eventually. Pilots are only supposed to fly 30 hours a week and no more than 100 hours a month. But the bigwigs who were in charge of the airlines saw a way to get more money. They started having flights around the clock – we were flying out west nearly 24/7. Maybe some of the bigwigs thought that they were helping desperate people, but a lot of them were just blinded by their greed. But pilots had the same issues as everyone else. Lots of people stopped showing up for work once they thought that it was the end of days and it was time to pack up and flee. So those of us who were left had to pick up the slack. I was putting in at least double the time a pilot was supposed to be flying. And I wasn’t the only one in that boat. We started trying to arrange a schedule between ourselves so that we’d all actually be able to get some sleep so that we didn’t end up crashing a flight due to exhaustion. It wasn’t pretty, but we managed to make it work. And when flights eventually started getting grounded, it wasn’t because of pilot error.
“Now I’m sure there were many great people like me or my friend who tried to keep order, but unfortunately times like the crisis bring out a lot of horrible people too. Especially when people who were barely qualified started offering their services with private planes. I heard some stories of the worst kind of people when that happened. The stories there – ‘pilots’ who wouldn’t accept men, children, or old women, or others who charged outrageous amounts of money for their ‘services.’ Even stories of pilots who would gather large crowds of people to see who would go the furthest or offer the most money to get on the plane.
“Of course, this eventually backfired pretty dramatically and karmatically. One guy decided to get a crowd of 50 folks together and started trying to auction off the 3 seats on his plane. This was when people were getting really desperate. Clankers were showing up everywhere. By this point every state east of the Mississippi River was infected, and every major city had people desperately trying to get out before the government quarantined them off and sent in the B-52s. And even worse, there were fewer flights available then than there had been before. We’d lost even more pilots, either to Genesis Poisoning or fleeing from the clankers. And we’d had to ground a lot of planes after one too many crashes. Though, like I said, those weren’t due to pilot error, which I will continue to brag about because we were being asked to work under ridiculous conditions. It had to do with when a person on a flight shifted into a clanker while it was in the air. Their EMPs dropped a lot of planes after they fried the mechanics of the plane and stopped it from flying properly. It took more than one fully loaded plane with hundreds of people going down before the bigwigs thought that it might be a good idea to take planes out of the air. Not to mention more than one near miss since air traffic controllers were in short supply same as security and pilots, so more than one flight nearly crashed into another. One time I saw a plane nearly land on the same runway that another plane was taxiing off of – to give you an idea of how chaotic things got without air traffic controllers to direct all the take offs and landings that were occurring with the increased schedule. The crazy thing was people were so desperate that it didn’t slow down anyone. But desperate people will also do anything. So this guy started trying to keep jacking up his price (back when money was still worth something), and decided to choose whoever could offer him what he wanted. But some folks who couldn’t get on realized that they outnumbered the pilot in question and decided to rush him. This led to the whole crowd joining in and the pilot in question got thrown out of his plane and trampled by the crowd. He wasn’t the last. Talk about karma, if you ask me.
“It was around that point that I decided to quit the piloting business and make my way west with my family, like all my friends kept telling me. They turned out to be right, because the very next flight I was supposed to be piloting went down from a mid-flight clanker shift-attack. Now I know that all sounds horrific, but a lot of people were holding things together after Detroit. We still had a government and some institutions that were holding the country together, even if it was just barely. That held together until San Francisco, at which point everything broke down and humanity entered the survival years.”
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Tales of Year 1 Zack Walker; EDF Video 4 Years After G-Day
“You want one word to describe the period after Detroit? Chaos. If you want it in multiple words, it was pure motherfuckin’ chaos. That was when everyone started trying to get anywhere they thought was safe from clankers, and for most people that meant packing up whatever they could into their car and heading anywhere that wasn’t where they were. For every person that had some kind of plan for what they were doing, there were a dozen who were in pure panic. Imagine what happened at the airports but multiply it by thousands of more people on the roads, especially since people at the airports didn’t have giant metal battering rams that weighed thousands of pounds. And with everyone trying to flee the cities, highways ground to an absolute halt. Cars were backed up for miles, and all the crashes didn’t help with that either. There was a story of one guy who decided the best way to get through traffic was to just try and ram through other cars. Not only did that idiot only slow everything else, but he managed to start several fires and injure countless people, too. And it wasn’t like we didn’t already have more than enough of those. Though he wasn’t the only person who tried to do something stupid. I saw lots of people who were driving unsafely. And things got even worse because of the road rage.
“Everyone was panicking and that made people angry. With traffic at a complete standstill, lots of people got out of their cars and started walking, which pissed off the drivers behind them. They were moving faster than traffic, but by abandoning their car they were also making the traffic even worse for anyone who was behind them. I saw more than one case where a person got out of their car and started fighting with another person on the road. Or someone who did the same thing after minor fender-benders. But this was even worse because it seemed like everyone was armed to the teeth, so just about every argument ended up with someone pulling a gun and someone getting shot. I wish I could say it only happened once or twice, but it was one of the most common reasons why we got calls. We tried our best to reach people who were injured, but the blocked roads were no easier for emergency vehicles to navigate than they were for other cars. Plus a ton of geniuses decided to try and drive on the shoulder, which just created another lane of blocked traffic and blocked our ambulances from getting to the people who were injured. So with no clankers whatsoever, the roads out of every major city and between all the cities in the country were completely backed up to a standstill, and more humans on the road were dying from gunshot wounds or heat exhaustion than anything to do with the android apocalypse that caused everyone to decide to try and flee at the same time. That was something that our roads were never designed for, and it explains why, until the EDF showed up, our old roadways were littered with millions of abandoned cars or worse than abandoned.
“The roads out of Michigan were the worst by far. Detroit was the epicenter of the panic, so practically everyone was trying to flee the state as fast as they could. In the days after Detroit, every highway in the state was completely backed up. It made any summer holiday traffic look completely insignificant by comparison. And when news got out about how bad the airports were, that only encouraged more people to try and pack everything into their car and leave that way. It probably looked like Manhattan after G-Day when all the bridges were backed up for miles. And anyone who didn’t have a car, or thought the roads were too backed up, decided to try and hitchhike. There were hundreds of them along the sides of the roads. Some with signs, some flashing big wads of cash, and others just walking along with their thumbs stuck out. Really, they were making more progress than the cars, and there weren’t many people who were willing to pick up someone hitchhiking. Too many rumors then about how Genesis poisoning spread – and the fact that it could spread with no physical signs meant that everyone was suspicious of everyone else. I thought the chaos was bad enough when there were minor incidents of people shifting in their cars or on the side of the road, but that had nothing on what was about to happen.
“Grand Rapids was the worst chaos that I’d ever seen, and even with everything that happened after in the aftermath, it still ranks pretty high on the chaos list. Millions of people all seemed to have the same idea: Grand Rapids is on the edge of the state and the opposite side of Detroit, so if you wanted to get away from the chaos, the best place to go would be there. Of course, by that point all cities had become giant death traps, but not a whole lotta people knew at that point that cities needed to be avoided like the plague, and yes, I realize the irony of using that phrase when discussing the apocalypse. Traffic was lined up for miles around the city – every major road in and out was completely packed with cars. Everyone was honking and screaming, maybe thinking that that would somehow get traffic to move faster. I was responding to several calls about deadly fights in the traffic when there were disturbances from up near the city. Just like Detroit, Grand Rapids was suddenly swarming with clankers. They’d all shifted in the city and then started making their way out towards the highways after they’d finished off the city. With all the cars stuck on the highways, the clankers were turning it into a slaughter. The EMPs stopped any valiant efforts to run them down. So most poor people were left to just cower in their cars as the things just swarmed everywhere. Or some folks who tried to shoot through their windshields to get the clankers. Those were the ones who just exposed themselves first to the bastards, but it didn’t take long until clankers started tearing cars apart – enough of them ripping and tearing at a door could quickly take it off and leave the people inside exposed. Imagine that chaos in every big city across the country over the next two months. Shockingly, people still thought cities were the place to go for a long time, probably because all the media could say was to flee west with no information about what to bring or what to do about the fact that the roads were completely blocked. Eventually people learned to avoid the big cities after far too many incidents like Grand Rapids – there were so many copycat incidents across the country that I don’t think they can even be counted. Even worse, there were so many rumors flying around during the height of the panic about what cities were safe. Once again, it wasn’t helped by pundits on TV discussing the rumors and giving them an air of legitimacy that someone who was panicking would be glad to listen to without thinking about how these mythical cities were somehow being spared from the plague that was racking the rest of the country and bringing us to our goddamn knees. There were dozens of them floating around that this place or that was completely clankerless, which only led to people trying to flock to that clankerless city only to run into a bunch of the bastards. They were like lambs to the slaughter.
“It was kind of amazing how the rumors spread back in those early days. There had to have been dozens of cities that rumors said had no clankers. They were supposedly safe zones where everything was OK. You gotta wonder how that all started. Were there people who honestly believed it or where they just trying to convince themselves? Our whole society just wanted so badly to think that there would be some quick fix, but apocalypses don't work like commercials for the latest medication. Probably lead to more deaths than anything else in those early days. That and the people who were panicked enough to believe it and try to follow the rumors that they heard.”
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Post by geekyteacher on Aug 5, 2020 20:19:30 GMT -6
Tales of Year 1 Joseph Duvall; EDF 4 Years After G-Day
“In the early days, fires were everywhere. Planes and cars crashing caught fire and set other ones too. Blasters blowing up cities. They were especially bad in Chicago where they tried to burn up the clankers, though they know a thing or two about fires. Not to mention all the burning bodies. Anyone who was suspected of having NIR got shot and torched. And that only got turned up once we realized that anyone who had gotten Genesis could become a rage head and then a clanker. Even though NIR and Genesis poisoning weren’t contagious, people still felt the need to burn the bodies. It seems ridiculous now – I mean, once you disassemble a clanker it’s not coming back, but how could people know that at the time? And I think some people wanted to do something, anything to try and feel like we had control over the situation, and we could do something to stop it.
“The US had more fires than anywhere else – at first it was burning bodies in Florida, then it became burning buildings in places like Detroit, New York, Chicago, the list goes on, and then later it was from camp fires lit by survivors in green zones; that’s not to mention the out of control wildfires that burned across parts of the west and central plains. I’m sure if you looked at the planet from space it would’ve been lit up like a Christmas tree from all of them. It’s no wonder that the climate is as screwed up as it is now. At first all the burning bodies in Florida heated things up – it was the hottest October on record in some places like New York. But in less than a month, all that ash settled into the atmosphere and started cooling things down. Hence having nearly a foot of snow in Detroit on the day of the battle. Plus, it made the snow gray from all the ash mixing in. We still get that to this day. And it only got worse after what happened in San Francisco. Nuclear winter is a bitch, and it only added to what was already happening. Then the Middle East blew up and did to the rest of the world what San Francisco did to the United States. That might explain why our winters last so long and cold and summer is so short. But hey, I guess at least we figured out a better way to screw up the climate than all those fossil fuels we were burning before the war.
“After the US government fell, that really got every government that was still around panicking in a way that they hadn’t before. The panic was already global, don’t get me wrong. We saw what happened in Beijing, though given how the Chinese government responded, that may not be the best example. But it was actually in Europe where things got the worst. Who could forget the images from Paris after they decided the best way to handle the crisis was to start torching every homeless person in the city? God, those images of people on fire. It still gives me nightmares to this day. And needless to say, they probably killed more people than the clankers did, at least in those early stages. And that was before what happened in the catacombs.
“Talking with one of the survivors, I never could’ve believed a government could’ve been worse than ours in the US or the one in China. But the apocalypse does that to people – it seems to bring out the worst in a lot of folks, but the best in others. And things only got worse once the power went out. Those local EMPs were bad, but as the crisis got worse, eventually the whole grid went down. Preppers and folks who had generators were able to keep their power on a bit longer, but that required fuel and that their generator didn’t just attract blasters or some other form of electrical disturbance.
“To put it in perspective how bad things got, imagine a power outage that doesn’t just last a few hours or even a few days, but lasts weeks and then months. A lot of people think that power is just lights, and most people also think of perishable foods when there’s talk of a power outage. But it’s so much more than just those obvious things – without power there’s no clean running water and no sewage sanitation, along with no lights and rotting food. If people had a lot of canned food then they were able to get by a little better, but that was only the preppers, which wasn’t as many people as some reports make it sound. And that was just the first week. As time went on, things only got worse and worse. Without power, medicine and food couldn’t be delivered to people who needed it. And anyone without supplies started getting desperate. People who needed medications started dying. The whole fabric of our society was based on having power. After those first few weeks, banks stopped functioning – when money was still worth something, of course. I remember back when people were waving around huge wads of cash thinking that that would be their salvation, but when it became clear that society was breaking apart and the government was about to collapse, suddenly money started looking like nothing other than the pieces of paper that it was. You couldn’t get a car or plane ticket or any sort of salvation with money at that point. And that led to the riots, which set more fires and destroyed any buildings that the clankers hadn’t gotten. At that point it became clear to most of us that whatever was holding the fabric of society together had ripped apart.
“While most people saw the breakdown of society as a bad thing, that didn’t stop some people from trying to take advantage of the situation. The crazies who’d been fantasizing about having no government went crazy as society was falling apart. Do you remember that CCTV footage of an old woman getting her head beaten to a bloody pulp by some group of idiots in masks? All because she decided to go out and try to get her valuables out of the bank’s safe deposit box before they collapsed. Now I’ll say that I understand some people were just doing what they needed to do as society was collapsing. But some people, like those kids, took it as a chance to add to the chaos. Remember when that psycho in Miami was eating the body – the one who got everyone thinking we had a zombie plague on our hands? Well it was even worse when sociopaths, serial killers, arsonists and criminals saw society breaking down and decided that was the moment to go out and take advantage of it. Add onto that folks who only acted like civilized human beings because they feared the consequences like going to jail and that only added more fuel to the fire.
“Looting was rampant in those early days -the people who were raiding grocery stores weren’t anymore right, but at least they were taking things they needed to survive. But others who were stealing from electronics stores or robbing banks – they were just taking advantage of the breakdown of society. But of course, even in grocery stores things got chaotic fast. People were killing each other over something as small as a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread. There was the CCTV footage that spread over the internet of those two women who both pulled guns on each other over the last gallon of milk and then got shot by a third person who took the milk they were fighting over – the irony of course being that without refrigeration that gallon of milk wouldn’t last very long anyway, so committing murder over it was pretty extreme. But people were in a panic, like a snowstorm, hurricane, and earthquake were all hitting at the same time, and when that happens even normal people start to think differently than they would if there weren’t a crisis. I still think though it’s pretty amazing (in the worst possible way) how badly society broke down so quickly. Same with the riots. Desperate people not sure what to do and thinking the world was gonna end anyway, so no reason not to, I guess. The roving squads of self-appointed ‘clanker hunters’ didn’t do anything to help the chaos either. Especially since just about all of those psychos turned out to just be looking for an excuse to kill anyone who they didn’t like or people who got in their way. Who would’ve imagined before G-Day that roving militias would take over Phoenix. Even though they had no idea that Genesis poisoning didn’t present any “symptoms” because it’s more of a computer virus than a disease. So all those people who thought they could spot a clanker did a whole lot more harm than good. Though the government and the media certainly didn’t help with that when both of those institutions were still standing.
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Tales of Year 1 Cheyanne Palmer; EDF Recording 4 Years After G-Day
“‘Go west! Go west!’ I doubt there’s been any time since Manifest Destiny that those words were repeated so often by so many goddamn people. What kind of brilliant advice was that? It was completely useless. It was just telling people to pick up and run without making a plan, with no idea what they would do when they filled up the SUV and just tried to get to the nearest interstate heading west. Besides, we realized going west meant nothing – clankers could show up anywhere, so all it did was get people even more worked up. And we saw enough times that people who are panicked do things that are very stupid and dangerous. I mean, maybe not as bad as the people who were left behind who formed their own roving death squads that killed innocent people left and right, but people just flooding onto highways or cramming into airports. Hell, even the train stations turned into madhouses. Any way people thought they could get away, they tried it.
“Meanwhile, what was the government saying? At first it was all, ‘Remain calm, the military will save us. Nanites are easily contained.’ So the media was whipping paranoid folks into a frenzy while the government was trying to lull everyone into a false sense of security. That was until Detroit. Then after Dalton got murdered, we realized that he was downright sane compared to new President Douglas Walters. I guess after they couldn’t claim the military would save us all and Genesis was nothing to worry about, they decided the next best thing was to claim the clankers were just some crazy plot by China or North Korea to attack us. We’re lucky Adam took out most countries before more of us could go all Israel and the Middle East on each other. Because I’m sure there would’ve been more mushroom clouds over the US with that crazy line Walters was peddling. And it meant the country was in the perfect place for Adam and the clankers to break us into pieces.
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Post by texican on Aug 6, 2020 18:44:03 GMT -6
GT,
End of the world by humans turned into viscous robots. A different type of zombie.
Thank you for the chapters.
Texican...
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Post by geekyteacher on Aug 23, 2020 9:45:26 GMT -6
Footage from the Oval Office President Walters; Senator Biss; General Simon 0 Years After G-Day
The footage in this video is dimly lit. It’s difficult to initially tell how the video was recorded, though in retrospect Adam and the nanites are the most likely culprits. There is no date on this log, but I would guess that it takes place sometime in the month after Detroit but before San Francisco based on its place in this log.
The dim lighting makes it difficult to initially see who is in the room. After a second it becomes clear it is Vice-President, or rather President Matthew Walters. He sits behind the Resolute Desk with a grim look on his face. His white hair casts a shadow over his face and there are deep wrinkles etched across his forehead. There is a map spread out over the desk – it’s covered with pins placed in different locations. The two biggest are on New York City and Miami with a third larger one on Detroit. General George Simon, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is in one chair on the other side of the desk while Senate Majority Leader Daniel Biss sits in another chair on the other side. Their faces are equally grim,
“This is a disaster,” President Walters says, looking up from the map at the two others across from him, “New York and Miami are completely gone. And now with Detroit, not only have we lost another city, but we lost the President. People are losing faith that we can handle this situation. Reports are saying that looting is up 100% across the country. People are killing each other in the streets, grocery store shelves are empty, and there’s mass chaos across the country. What the hell are we supposed to do?”
“We could evacuate all the cities in the country and try to create a perimeter around them all.” General Simon suggests.
“How do you recommend we do that? That’s millions of people. It’ll back up every highway in the country even worse than they already are. And where would we put them all?” Walters says,
Before Simon can respond, Biss jumps in, “What we have to do, Mr. President, is restore the American people’s confidence. If we can show them that things are under control, then the looting and panic will cease.”
“How do you recommend we do that? That was the whole point of Detroit and look at how well that ended.” Simon says, his salt and pepper mustache drooping down as his lips curl into a frown, “It’s not a viable option anymore. We have to save as many people as we can.”
“We didn’t know how it worked before Detroit. Now we do.” Biss responds, then turns to the President again, “Sir, we have to do something, and I think this is the best choice. We wanted Detroit to be our last stand, but we weren’t prepared. Use what remaining military might we have to get this situation under control, or everything falls to pieces.”
The President looks at the two men, “I will not be known as the man who lost the country to these vile things. And I will not let their murder of my predecessor go unpunished. We’re going to stop them one way or another.”
“With all due respect sir, I think our resources would be better spent on helping the country survive a combination of a plague, a natural disaster, and a cyber terror attack. What about modifying the plans we’ve created for each of those scenarios and using that as a basis for our response? At this point, we should cede what’s lost and focus on shoring up what isn’t.” Simon says, looking at the President and then at Biss, as if waiting for him to respond.
“Why should we cede any of our country to them?” Biss says, pounding his fist on a nearby side table for effect. He doesn’t seem to realize how ridiculous it looks, “We need to blow these motherfuckers off the map.”
The President looks from Senator Biss to General Simon, “How do you recommend we do that, General?”
“Well Senator Biss isn’t wrong that the first thing we need to do is restore order. We may need to declare martial law and we need to do something to stop the media from whipping the public into a frenzy. But the most important thing we need to do is stop with outlandish statements like this is the doings of China or North Korea. It’s dangerous and irresponsible to keep pushing a story that could risk us being the victims of an unrelated retaliatory attack. Especially North Korea. They’ve gone completely silent, so we have no idea what’s happening or what they’re saying there. We need to treat the people of this country like adults and tell them the truth even if it’s hard. Somehow what we thought was going to save us is trying to kill us, and they need to act, just like we do. And I think the first thing to do for that is to abandon the cities. They’ve been attracting the most trouble from these things. Then, we need to move people to other safe spaces where they can defend themselves with our help. And…”
The President cuts off the General by putting his hand up. His face is the portrait of calm, but when he speaks, his voice is icy, “Thank you, General, but I believe there is a better course of action.” He opens a drawer of his desk and rifles through papers until he appears to find the one that he was searching for. He takes it out of the desk and grabs a pen from the corner of his desk. He puts the sheet of paper down onto the desktop and quickly scribbles on it. He then hands it to the General, “These will be your orders moving forward.”
The General scans the paper and his face goes ashen. He looks several shades paler and he speaks, “Mr. President, please reconsider. This course of action is far too destructive. We won’t have a country to re-inhabit if this goes…”
Once again, President Walters cuts the General off. His voice has the same icy quality as it did before, “General, these are your orders. They’ve been signed and delivered from the President himself. Not only that, but this is what President Dalton wanted to be done in the event of a failure at Detroit. So please, be sure that they are executed faithfully by you and those under your command. That’s an order. Is that understood?”
There’s a long pause before the General responds, “Yes, Mr. President. Understood, sir.”
“Good. You are dismissed, General. If anything is needed for executing the plan, let me know.”
General Simon salutes and exits the Oval Office. The video continues with President Walters and Senator Biss sitting quietly for a moment,
“I think you’re making the right choice here, Mr. President,” Senator Biss says, “The Omega Protocol will save this nation.”
The President puts his fingers on his temples, “I hope you’re right. This crisis is making the Civil War, Great Depression, and World War II look like a cakewalk. If this plan works, I’ll be remembered as one of the greatest Presidents of all time. If not, there may not be a country left to remember me.”
He rubs his temples, “Daniel, I need you to talk to the media. We need to keep people on edge. If they actually start asking questions and trying to uncover information about what’s happening, it could let everything go public. And I need one more thing.”
“What is it, Mr. President?”
“I need you to find Jennifer Wexton. President Dalton was looking for her before his death. She’s gone completely missing ever since her husband committed suicide. We need to get information about this crisis. Also, Daniel, if anything happens to me, we can’t have the Speaker become President. I need you to execute the plan. If Omega doesn’t happen, it will ruin everything we’ve been working for.”
“You can count on me, sir.”
“Thank you, Daniel. In one week, we enact the Omega Protocol. Let the people who need to know know.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you, Daniel. I’ll see you in the morning. I’d like some time to think.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr. President. You know you can always speak with me. We will succeed or die trying.”
Senator Biss stands up and walks out of the Oval Office. The video continues for several minutes as President Walters looks over the map and continues to rub his temples with his fingers. This continues silently for several more minutes before the video cuts to black without a sound.
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Manifesto – People’s Independent Liberation Frontier (PILF) 1 Year After G-Day
“People of America, wake up! The government cannot save you! The media is lying to you! Reach out and grab the power that’s right in front of you! We offer you true security. For too long, Americans have been losing their winning spirit. We’ve let others take the lead. We’ve trusted false gods and accepted good sounding lies instead of the truth. We thought we could do better at being God than God himself. We’ve relied too much on others and not on ourselves. We’ve spent too much time trying to spread our values abroad and not enough time on those at home who need help. We’ve lost our country to foreigners who do not deserve what they are receiving. Our country has lost its way and there is one clear perpetrator to blame for what has happened to our country.
“The government has told us that they’ll keep us safe, but that’s not possible. New York, Miami, and Detroit are just the latest examples of the government showing they are more about keeping us complacent and content rather than actually caring about us. They’d rather be whores to their true masters than do the jobs the people have entrusted them. The media has gladly abandoned their duty to do the same thing. Look no further than the calls that we are ‘domestic terrorists’ for freeing people and letting them be the masters of their own destiny. And so we say that the only way people will be able to survive is if we band together against the threats that are becoming more numerous every single day. And, unlike the government, PILF is willing to stand up for what we believe in. We have brought peace, freedom, and prosperity to an American city – one that was tearing itself apart in fear of the government’s failure to protect them. This is proof that PILF can do what others cannot! Join us before it’s too late! The government and media are working together to spread the Genesis plague to permanently keep themselves in power at the extent of we the people. They wish to wipe out all those who are strong and independent enough to stand up to them.
“Some say our methods are too extreme. Our work in Phoenix speaks for itself. The people are safe. No clankers exist within our borders and never will (Author’s Note: Phoenix fell within a year during the Aftermath like many early Green Zones). We let people be free and independent. There are no kings here, just every man being the ruler of his own destiny!”
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Post by texican on Aug 23, 2020 19:13:11 GMT -6
GT,
Appears there will be nukes for the robots.
How about vehicle mounted EMP weapons or sonic weapons?
Thanks for the chapter.
Texican....
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Post by geekyteacher on Aug 30, 2020 11:07:55 GMT -6
Footage from Around the World Paris Armand Piere 1 Year After G-Day
“Before Genesis, Paris was known as the City of Lights. After the events of G-Day, it became known as the City of Flames. When the first clankers began appearing, Paris was already suffering from a crisis. Our economy was weak, and our leaders had lost the popular support of the people. As a result, we French were doing one of the things we did best – Protest. These protests covered up our initial cases of NIR. Arguably, it only fueled more protests as it felt the government used it to crack down on protests that led to more protests. It was during one of these protests that the first clankers attacked. It was on the Champs-Elysee and created quite the furor. The government was unsure what had happened at first. There was a lot of talk about what it could’ve been. A terrorist attack was how the government tried to spin it. Slightly more believable than the cult nonsense they tried in the US, but still had the effect of focusing our efforts in the wrong place. I suppose I can understand. No government that wanted to be taken seriously back in those days would’ve admitted we were facing something that sounded like a science-fiction story. Only the biggest conspiracy nuts believed back then that androids or cyborgs or whatever were going to take over the world. The real question though is why governments seemed to be caught as flat-footed as everyone else. With intelligence coming from all over the world, how could they have been caught just as by surprise? I wasn’t in the government in any capacity, so I can only speculate on the subject. Perhaps the issue was the United States didn’t want to share the real information. Dalton had reason to keep the information secret with his plans to create a spying ring around the world. Letting other countries know – even the US’s closest allies – would have revealed the highly unethical behavior and that could’ve ruined his whole plan. Or maybe other governments had word on clankers appearing in other places but didn’t want to believe it – who would’ve wanted to believe such a thing was possible? Humans turning into robotic killing machines, destroying everything in their sight and uncaring of what they once were – who could imagine such a thing other than some science-fiction writer? Though that’s probably why society broke down so quickly and so completely. Nobody was prepared and went into pure survival mode once all the pillars of society broke down.
“In France, the initial reaction from the government before San Francisco was similar to the United States. Deny whatever was happening while quietly trying to figure out a way to contain things. In the US the plan was to wall off parts of the country, but that wouldn’t have been accepted in Europe. The EU had ingrained in everyone the idea of open borders – being able to travel anywhere with minimal barriers. When England wanted to wall off the tunnel it set off huge protests on both sides – and those were some of the worst in the history of either country with how quickly they turned violent. I remember reading about the clashes between pro and anti-EU folks who both apparently took up the walling off of the tunnel as the cause célèbre for both sides. It brought out huge crowds for both camps. They set up for the long haul with tents, like they were coming for a camping trip or something. Though it seemed like there were always groups yelling and screaming and waving signs at each other round the clock. At least that’s how it looked on the news footage I saw. I felt like things were already so chaotic in Paris that I didn’t need to try and go to more chaos. And then both sides ended up getting mauled by clankers as it was. From what I heard, a few of the protestors were in the early stages of NIR, so it was only a matter of time until they came down with a bad case of rage. And somehow rage heads have a way of attracting clankers. So the protestors who were able to get away from the rage heads that were going crazy in the crowd ran into the clankers, which led to just about all of them getting slaughtered. The ironic thing is that walling off the tunnel wouldn’t have stopped Genesis because it didn’t care about water. The only advantage islands had was more control over the population. But the protests over the tunnel were kind of like Detroit for Europe; it showed we were rapidly getting to ‘uncontrollable plague’ status on our way to the apocalypse. All I know is the images of those protestors getting mauled by rage heads set off something in Paris because that was when city officials just went from burning dead bodies (another thing we later learned did nothing) to actively burning anyone who they thought might be infected. And that turned out to be the poor and homeless who were out on the streets. The images of people with flamethrowers torching people probably would’ve caused more outrage, if not for the fact that Paris was already dealing with rage heads and the first clankers.
“I’m sure that’s why going underground made so much sense to so many people. It was the same logic as those ‘preppers’ in America who’d been preparing for the end of the world back in the 1960s by building bomb shelters in their backyards – what better way to make it through the end of the world than to go underground and re-emerge once the danger had passed and everything was returned to normal? The problem was that in a city like Paris with its massive catacombs, everyone went to the same place instead of down into their own bunker. If only one or two groups had decided to try and make their way into the catacombs, maybe it would’ve been manageable, but instead we had nearly the whole city making their way underground – there were families, the young and old, anyone and everyone who could make it and thought it’d give them a better chance to survive. And the government was too strained by the crisis to effectively manage this mass exodus. There was no possible way to monitor everyone who was going into the catacombs and at this time we had no understanding of Genesis poisoning anyways. All we knew was that something was causing people to freak out and then their skin melted off. It was a disaster waiting to happen. So it was no surprise in retrospect when it struck, it was more a question of the magnitude.
“Once they sealed the catacombs, it was like lighting the fuse on a bomb. For one, the catacombs weren’t made to be a living space – actually quite the opposite. They were dark and musty and only stopped from flooding by numerous pumps. Once the pumps stopped working as power went off, flooding became an issue – like in Subways in Chicago, but much much worse. Disease also spread through the inhabitants of the catacombs. And, due to the gas that filled the catacombs, all it took was one spark to set everything alight. Despite all of this, at first there was still a semblance of order and society. Even though space and overcrowding were serious issues, people tried to respect each other’s boundaries. Groups traded food and supplies with each other. The initial thought was that even though society was breaking down outside, that didn’t mean that people had to act like animals inside. That dynamic held, at least at first – it almost seemed like despite all the chaos outside, that maybe, just maybe, things would work even with all the problems. But the same problems affected us as the rest of the world – we were unprepared for a crisis that would last months or years. No one was prepared for that and after two months below, cracks started to show in the underground society. It started small – as food started to run out, people started to guard what they had more fiercely and trading between groups started to become non-existent, and minor squabbles started to break out between some neighbors over very minor things – a missing flashlight here, or a bag of chips there. No one at the time knew the symptoms of NIR, so we didn’t think of that as things escalated and people started practically coming to blows over a sleeping bag that was in the wrong place. Once the electricity shut off for good, there was a complete breakdown. The catacombs began flooding, which pushed everyone even closer together and that only exacerbated the existing problems. And this was all before the first person shifted.
“The underground ‘society’ – if you could call it that at that point – was already in full breakdown mode and NIR only accelerated that. Suddenly squabbles were turning into fights and people were ending up dead. There was nowhere to really dispose of bodies other than into the water -ironic for a burial site, I know. That only helped spread more disease from so many fresh corpses in the already cramped quarters. Then the first rage heads appeared. That was hard enough to deal with in an environment where one errant spark could set off an explosion. We tried our best to fight them, and it seemed like we were keeping things under control, but then the first ones started shifting into clankers. Take all the problems from rage heads and then add in that one errant clanker spark would kill us all to get an idea of how things were. So even though at this point there were still a large amount of humans, they had to fight without real weapons – no guns or metal weapons could be used for fear of sparks. Hell, even with the stone weapons that some people made, there was still that fear. And that wasn’t really sustainable – it was hard to kill clankers with stone weapons because their bodies were so resistant. And that was before clankers started outnumbering humans as more and more people died. Eventually things got really dicey down there – the remaining humans got desperate. They were facing the same struggles as everyone above while living in a dark, disease and clanker-ridden hellhole. And the government had completely sealed off the entrances to the catacombs before they abandoned the city, so the worst part was the folks down there were completely and utterly stuck.
“Around that time, things got even more desperate than they had been already. Like the folks above, they thought fire would clear out all the clankers. They must’ve remembered the gas – why else would they have lived by flashlight and then darkness for months if they hadn’t? Or maybe madness and cabin fever got to them and they didn’t care. No one knows who started the first fire or even how they did it. Was it a spark from a clanker or maybe a gun or metal weapon that hadn’t been previously seen? Was it someone in the early stages of NIR who thought that it would keep them safe and didn’t remember all the explosive gas around them? Either way, when that first fire was set, it spread across the whole catacombs and lit all the gas down there alight in the snap of a finger. Who knows if there are any survivors or anything left down there after the explosions that it set off blew open the doors of the catacombs? All we know is that’s one mystery no one wants solved.” ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
India Munsar Nagi 4 Years After G-Day
Munsar Nagi is a well-known figure. As the video begins, he is sitting in a chair like in his last appearance – the caption on the video states that it is about G-Day in Mumbai, the city Nagi hailed from before his move to the United States after the founding of the EDF. Even while seated, his broad shoulders show he is a large man. His full beard and short black hair are both speckled with large amounts of gray from his time leading the resistance with the EDF.
“Mumbai was the largest city in India in the time before the Panic. It was a financial center filled with young professionals and packed with people of all stripes. Like in many other parts of Asia, we were unprepared because Genesis was distributed as a vaccine without them letting us know what it actually was. When we got our first cases of NIR, it largely went unreported. After all, crime was common and with 12.5 million people, who was going to notice another brutal murder or even a string of them? People other than myself of course, but I was a city official then, following the rate of crime with a passion. I was noticing the trend with the cases of people brutally murdering each other and asking myself what could possibly be causing them when the answer came knocking at my door. Or should I say more accurately, flooding through the streets.
“I was in my office late one night when I heard screaming and gunshots outside. It sounded like a riot was happening. At that moment, the lights in my office shut off. I figured it was a city blackout. They were common in Mumbai, especially during the summer months. I got up and went to the window. The streets were full of people running and screaming. That was unusual. Usually during a riot, you didn’t see such a thing happening – it was usually in one area. And there were clearly fires burning in different parts of the city, even though this was taking place well after dark, I could see the plumes of smoke rising from buildings throughout the city.
“My office was on the second floor of the building. I waited by the window watching what was happening on the streets for several minutes. I was transfixed by what was happening before it occurred to me that whatever was happening could very well be moving towards where I was based on the movements of the people. At that moment, I moved to the door of my dark office. I didn’t want to get caught in any violence that was occurring, but I’d learned that when people were acting the way they were, that meant trouble was coming and I didn’t want to be stuck in my office if something horrible was about to happen. When I got out to the street, the crowd was just as thick as it was when I’d first heard the screaming and seen people in the street. I could tell instantly this was no riot – no riot I’d ever seen before had caused what seemed like half the city to exit their homes at 9 PM and run for their lives. I tried to make my way into the street, but the people were clearly in a panic, pushing, screaming, and shoving. I nearly got knocked off my feet, but was able to get into the crowd and started running toward my home.
“As we were running, I continued to wonder what the cause of this could’ve been. At that very moment, I got my answer. There was a strange whirring sound – something that would become a common sound in the future, but one I’d never heard before. It was coming from the back of the crowd, several feet back from where I was. It was a strange, robotic sound, but I couldn’t speculate on what it was for too long unless I wanted to get knocked over and trampled by the crowd like others who had lost their footing or slowed down too much and been pushed down.
“As the mob continued, I broke off from the crowd into an alleyway. I could hear the whirring getting closer and people at the back of the crowd looking behind them – their eyes were wide with fear and they let out screams of panic. That was the moment I saw my first clanker. I’ll never forget the look of them. Their blood-red eyes and metallic skin, usually with bits of old flesh hanging off of them after they first shifted. As I was taking in these strange creatures, a young woman at the back of the pack tripped. Forgetting my own safety, I rushed out to help her. At that moment, I realized that it wasn’t just one or two clankers, rather there was a large group of them that had been chasing the people through the streets. The closest of them still had half his human face remaining. He gnashed his teeth and lunged at us both. Luckily for us, I spotted a pole nearby and quickly put it in front of us. The clanker impaled itself on the pole, though that seemed to only momentarily stun it, but that gave me time to help the woman to her feet. As we started to run, the other clankers in the pack caught up to us. They were unnaturally fast, despite the fact that they looked constantly unbalanced as they moved. We were nearly to the building of my apartment. I told the woman to follow me and rushed with her to my building.
“We got inside and I slammed the door shut a few seconds before two of the clankers crashed into it. I quickly barred the door, but I was sure that wouldn’t hold them for long. Not after seeing one of them impale itself on a metal pole and then get back to its feet and keep running again after only seconds. I speculated in my head about what these creatures were and where they’d come from but realized that time was of the essence and we needed to get moving again as I heard the scratching and banging on the door from the creatures outside. The electricity was still out, so I rushed over to the stairs and motioned for the woman to follow me. Seeing that her options were the clankers outside or the strange man who’d helped her, she moved over to the stairs. Luckily for both of us, I only lived on the 4th floor. When I got to the apartment and the woman followed me in, I barred the door there too. I knew the main door could only hold so long. Down in the streets, there was still panic. I could see it all – people fleeing, others looting and destroying. The city was quickly turning into an inferno as more plumes of smoke were rising up across the city.
“I knew that we couldn’t stay in the apartment for long. There wasn’t much food or water. And between the clankers and arsonists we would be under constant threat and at risk of being forced out very soon. I asked the woman her name. She told me it was Nadia and she was a young professional new to the city. I explained to her my thought – we had to get out of the city, and quickly. She stated that she wanted to stay with me. Together, we gathered supplies we thought would be useful. I had an idea for where we could go that could be safe. The last thing we would need would be some kind of weapon to defend ourselves. I had a cricket bat in my closet. Not much, but it would have to do.
“With our supplies all packed up and bat in hand, we set out. The streets had only gotten more chaotic in the time we’d been inside. I guess we got lucky on the way out – the door was broken down and my barrier swept aside, but we didn’t run into the clankers that had been chasing us. That was the only luck we had, because everyone on the streets was in a panic, running anywhere they could. As we got out onto the street, we had to stick together as we made our way towards the water. The beach was filled with people running towards the water. Some were trying to get onto boats while others were looking for anything they thought would float. It wasn’t clear where many of these people thought they were going. They just wanted to be anywhere clankers weren’t. There were bodies floating in the water from people who had tried to swim out into the sea without removing any of their gear. I saw groups capsizing boats by all trying to climb on them, which doomed everyone already onboard to a watery grave. Near the surf, there was even a half-naked young girl who was fighting the older man who was trying to pull her forward. I couldn’t tell whether or not he was her father or not based on the way she was desperately pulling and struggling to try and get away from the man holding her arm. I wanted to do something about it, but at the moment there was a whirring sound getting closer.
“The heads of the first clankers popped up above the dunes of the beach. There were at least two dozen if not more of them that made their way onto the beach. The people nearest to the dunes had no chance and were slaughtered by the oncoming clankers. At that moment, it was even more clear that we needed to move quickly. Along with my companion, we shoved our way to the water. Our only way to survive was to get off the beach and to an island off the coast. There was an abandoned boat near the water – there was a hole in the bottom and what appeared to be blood on the sand around the boat. I didn’t want to think about what could’ve been the cause. I thought about how I could fix the hole when I felt a tap on my shoulder. My fingers tensed on my cricket back and I was prepared to swing it with all my might when a familiar voice called my name. It was one of my coworkers from the office, Yaha. He told me to follow him.
“On a secluded side of the beach, there was a small rowboat Yaha, Nadia, and I got in and set off toward the island. I looked back at the chaos on the beach. People were being slaughtered as they tried to make their way to the water, and many were still desperately trying to get away from the clankers. At that moment, I vowed that I would avenge my people from this wretched plague of machines if I survived long enough to get the chance. But first we had to set up a safe place to make sure we’d get the chance to do that.
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Post by cutter on Aug 31, 2020 12:57:55 GMT -6
Loving this story
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Post by texican on Aug 31, 2020 18:27:13 GMT -6
Mandatory vaccines is a way to depopulate the population. Georgia Stones?
Thanks GT for the chapter.
Texican....
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Post by geekyteacher on Sept 9, 2020 15:21:45 GMT -6
Video Footage – Battle of San Francisco 1 Year After G-Day
The video footage begins with a disclaimer – the white text flashes on the black background. It reads “3 months after the Battle of Detroit, the military made a stand against the Genesis virus. Future generations will hopefully be able to learn something from this.” It is unclear to me who uploaded this footage or what the meaning of the disclaimer is. I suspect it was someone close to the military based on what follows.
The next shot is of soldiers standing at attention in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. Snow is falling even though before the crisis San Francisco was usually sixty degrees Fahrenheit in December, when the battle took place,
“Soldiers, this is your finest hour! Our reports indicate that there are approximately 2 million NEHs (Author’s note: Nanite-Enhanced Human) inside the city and 100,000 in the surrounding area. We have set up a perimeter around this area for protection. The plan here is simple: You will take your position inside the defensive structures that we’ve set up to combat these monsters. The positions we’ve constructed are at strategic points along the battlefield, so once you’ve taken your position you can sit tight. When we give you the signal, your orders are simple: open fire on every single NEH that you see and annihilate everything that’s not human.”
“Yes, sir!” is the response from the assembled soldiers.
“On my command, everyone should turn on your network.” The general at the front says, “This will allow instantaneous communication between units, plus global position tracking and constant feedback from command with updates and information of importance. It’s our secret weapon against these bastards. On my mark. Turn on and synchronize with your unit in 5…4…3…2…1…”
There’s a loud pinging as hundreds of receivers turn on and synch up at once. All the soldiers are wearing eyepieces that glow green as their network boots up and synches with the other nodes on the network,
“Now let’s go out there and win this one for the USA!”
A cheer goes round the crowd as they break into their units and make their way out of the perimeter. The defensive encampments litter the area around the perimeter stretching as far as the eye can see. An aerial view will later show these stretch all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge.
Suddenly the video feed switches to another perspective. Based on the viewpoint and the fact that the video on the feed is green, I assume it’s coming from the eyepiece of a soldier. There are sounds of talking and laughing as the feed initializes. The laughter stops with a yell from someone off screen. The soldier turns and focuses on a lone clanker in the distance. The soldier and those around him stop in their tracks. The soldier whose feed we are watching speaks first,
“There’s one of the bastards now.”
“What’s it doing out in the open all by itself?” Says a voice from off-screen.
“If I had to guess,” A gun enters the view of the eyepiece – it is clearly aimed at the clanker in the distance. There’s the sound of the safety being slid-off, “Target practice.”
Several rounds of semi-automatic fire rip through the air and then through their intended target.
Bullets slice through the arms and legs of the clanker and it falls to the ground in pieces,
“Careful, we don’t want to attract all of them to us.”
“Oh come on, that’s pretty much our job. Sit in a box, fire at the crowds of clankers that are attracted to our position, rinse repeat, rinse repeat until they’re all dead or we are.” He laughs bitterly at his statement.
“We should report it in, just in case.”
“Hey, whatever you want, goody two-shoes. Just don’t narc on me because I took business into my own hands.”
“Whatever,” There’s a pinging sound and the other soldier raises a hand to his ear, “Command post, this is A-Squad. We found a lone clanker, I mean NEH. Took it out without incident…Yes, I understand. I’ll relay the message, sir.”
He turns to the others,
“Bosses say not to waste anymore bullets until we’re in position for resupply.”
“Resupply? It was one damn clanker. What do they think’s gonna happen?”
“After Detroit, Paris, and Mumbai, do you really want to ask that question? Or take the risk for that matter?”
“Come on, let’s be honest that all these bastards have are numbers. I used maybe 10 bullets there. I don’t believe that 10 bullets is going to be the difference between wiping out all these suckers and a horrible afternoon of being ripped limb-from-limb by a crazed former human robot bastard thing. What’s the threat of these when we know all their tricks?”
“I don’t want to even address the first part of what you said. And I feel like the guys at Detroit probably said the same thing, so maybe stop running your mouth. We need to get to our firing position. The operation starts in 30 minutes and we’ve got the longest walk to make.”
The footage cuts again. The next shot is darker and grainer. It appears that it came from inside of a bunker. In the darkness it’s unclear who we’re watching in the video at first. It’s not until one of them speaks that I realize it’s no longer footage from A-Squad,
“Command post, this is B-Squad Leader. I’m spotting about 100 NEHs on the horizon. What’s the word from A-Squad? Is there a problem we need to know about or are the numbers heavier than expected?” There’s a short pause before B-Squad Leader continues, “Confirmed. B-Squad Leader out.”
“What’s the word?” The voice, probably that of another member of the squad, comes from behind B-Squad Leader,
“A-Squad’s turned off their communications. They’ve gone completely dark.”
There are three controlled bursts of gunfire in the background, “Great time for them to take a fucking nap! We’re gonna be up to our fucking ears in clankers soon if they don’t get off their asses and do their goddamn jobs!”
More bursts of gunfire ring out from the background. They’re getting more frequent and less controlled as time goes on. B-Squad Leader’s eyepiece begins to bounce up and down as he runs to the nearest firing location. A gun enters the view of the eyepiece as he sets his sites on the horizon. There’s a familiar loud whirring noise as the eyepiece comes into focus. Clankers fill the horizon, swarming over each other as they move forward toward the firing bunker.
“Holy fucking shit,” B-Squad leader says before laying down several bursts of fire from his weapon, “What the hell is happening out there? Look at those bastards go! Good god, I’ve never seen them move like that before. What’s got them going on turbo all of a sudden?”
The voice from before cries, “Boss! There’s something out there! Something fucking huge! I’ve never seen anything like it before. Dear god in heaven!”
“Hold it together, man! Keep cool and remember the plan!”
The bursts of firing get more erratic. B-Squad Leader motions for another soldier to cover his position and then moves over to the soldier currently going into hysterics. He looks at the soldier and then out into the field – it’s hard to make out at first, until there’s a pinging sound and the image from the eyepiece zooms in and focuses. There’s a huge figure on the horizon from this direction, heading straight towards the bunker. The HUD Report jumps up with another pinging noise. The words Scanning pop up onto the screen and a red box appears around the large shadowy figure. After a few minutes, the display begins to flash the word Unidentified.
“Command Post, are you seeing this? Huge unidentified thing – maybe an NEH – heading directly for our position!”
“B-Squad, this is Command Post. Hold your position and open fire immediately!” comes over the radio.
B-Squad begins firing their weapons on full automatic. These are no longer the controlled bursts of fire from before – this is full on spray and pray firing. The large figure is riddled with bullets ripping and tearing at it as they make contact. A cloud of dust and snow starts to form as the group continues firing their weapons, eventually blocking the figure from view.
“I think we got it,” The leader says, “Command post, it appears that the unidentified threat is down. Repeat, the unidentified threat appears to be down.”
After the B-Squad leader finishes speaking, his partner yells, “Aw hell fucking no! I’m making sure the bastards are all dead!”
The camera feed turns to the solider who’s now pulling a pin from the grenade strapped to his jacket. He holds it for a second, then tosses it out the firing hole and covers his ears,
“Just what on Earth do you think you’re doing?” He yells, anger in his voice, “My order was to resume normal firing! That’s a direct violation of what I just said.”
“Oh, lighten up, boss.” He says, uncovering his ears for a moment, “I’m just making sure all the clean-up is done properly. And that should be done in 5…4…3…2…1…”
He’s cut off by something whizzing into the bunker. Before they can even realize it’s their own grenade, it explodes. The whole screen goes blindingly white, so bright I have to shade my eyes watching it. When the light goes out, all of B-Squad are on the floor. None are moving, but there’s a pained moaning coming from the leader of the squad. The footage has a large vertical tear from what I assume is a huge crack on the recording lens. There’s a pinging on the network piece,
“This is A-Squad Leader! Turn off your network! For the love of God, turn off your net-augh!”
The pinging goes quiet, and the pained moaning from B-Squad Leader ends.
The camera switches to an overhead view of the battle. The Golden Gate Bridge is swarming with clankers – an image that would join the pantheon of iconography from the war.
Radio chatter bursts across frequencies,
“This is D-Squad! We’re being overrun!”
“Clankers all around us! Block the firing hole! Reinforce the walls! Do something!”
“Somebody please help us!”
The defensive bunkers quickly become coffins as the grinders tear them apart and clankers swarm them. The video footage switches between many different perspectives for the next few shots. One soldier attempts to shoot himself, but is quickly overrun and torn apart by clankers. Those who were able to kill themselves were probably the lucky ones. Hell, even getting swarmed and killed by clankers would be better than being ripped in two by a grinder,
There’s chatter from what I assume is the Command base, “What the hell is that thing?! Its taking all of our fire like it’s nothing. What are we supposed to do?”
“We’ve gotta break out something to stop it before it’s too late.”
“Sir, we’ve shot at least 50 rounds and it hasn’t slowed down at all. What do we even have that can take it out?”
“We’ll take care of that, soldier. Don’t just focus your fire on the big one. The little ones are managing to sneak through. We’ve lost squads A-F already.”
“On it, sir! We’ll…augh!”
The comm channel goes dark and the field descends into further chaos. The camera, which I assume is attached to a drone, zooms in on the chaos before a clanker group swarms towards it and it falls to the ground and shorts out.
The footage swaps to various bodycam shots. Like in Detroit, soldiers begin writhing in pain before turning into clankers and turning on their buddies. In a stroke of irony, the network that was supposed to be the crowning achievement of the US military and the secret weapon against enemies instead turned the military into its own worst enemy by making it easier for Genesis to infect those on the battlefield.
The footage changes one last time. A soldier appears to have barricaded himself inside one of the bunkers. He looks frantic and panicked as he records himself. There are loud banging sounds all around him,
“If anyone sees this, we need to turn off all of our networks! They help Genesis to spread. It looks like people who never even got Genesis can pick it up this way! This virus is going to drive us to extinction, unless we do something to stop it now!
“Mom and Dad, I love you so much. If you’re still out there, please know I died trying to do what I could for the human race.”
The banging on the walls of the bunker get louder and louder. The soldier takes out his gun and slowly puts it under his chin. He pauses for a moment to steady his shaking hand as he puts his finger on the trigger. Slowly, his finger wraps around the trigger and he squeezes it with a loud bang.
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Post by texican on Sept 10, 2020 16:51:06 GMT -6
GT,
The clankers are using technology against mankind.
What else could go wrong?
Only GT knows.
Texican....
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Post by geekyteacher on Sept 25, 2020 16:38:44 GMT -6
EDF Log Jason Reed 4 Years After G-Day The next speaker is another recurring face – Lt. Jason Reed. Despite only being 25 at the time of the apocalypse, he looks much older in this video. There are large bags under his sunken-in eyes and deep wrinkles lining his face. There are several scars across his face. His hair is nearly completely gray with only a few patches of black.
“San Francisco was really the final nail in the coffin. Detroit started it, but San Fran finished it. That image of clankers swarming the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge plunging into the bay. The only way it could’ve been more symbolic of the death of America would’ve been if it’d been the Statue of Liberty. If Detroit had wounded the morale of the American people, then the way that San Francisco went killed it, stomped it down into the dirt, spit on it, and called it names. The Omega Protocol – Dalton’s final parting gift to this Earth then carried out by Walters. Once it was decided that San Francisco was a lost cause and it was turning into Detroit 2.0, Walters pushed the red button so to speak, and 2 nuclear missiles were shot right at the city. And, unlike the movies, there was no hero to swoop in and divert them at the last minute or any of that Hollywood bullshit. “Dear God, I still have nightmares about it. All those soldiers. The innocent men, women, and children who were left in the city. All of them gone in the blink of an eye – one blinding flash and one of the largest cities in the Continental United States was off the map. What was it actually for? It wasn’t for our morale, that’s for sure. Maybe it was Dalton and Walters trying to make a big show of ‘defending’ the country. Or maybe it was a way to cover up their part in the apocalypse. After all, there was no way they could’ve thought that two nukes would be enough to wipe out Adam and all of Genesis, right? Maybe he and Walters were delusional, or Genesis had infected their brains. Who knows? But no one would’ve expected to see a mushroom cloud in America. It was the end of the USA no matter the fact that the government ‘stood’ for another month before the clankers got them. “I was one of the lucky ones. I wasn’t a person who was instantly vaporized, though some people might say that was unlucky. Hell, I wasn’t also instantly blinded or had my flesh melted off like the people who were close enough to see and feel the blast without the instant vaporization. Instead, I got to deal with the aftermath. In school, we read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are dozens of stories of people who went in after the explosions to try and save people who had to deal with unimaginable horror. San Francisco was the same, but even worse.” “You could see exactly where people were when the blast hit. They left their shadows behind – the heat and light from an atomic bomb going off are so intense that they vaporize anyone close to the blast – imagine like how water makes an outline around a person, but it was everything around the person getting bleached by the light and heat. That was the first thing we noticed when we went into the city to see what was left. As we got further into the city and further away from the sight of the explosion at the Golden Gate Bridge, it only got worse. People were alive, or nearly, but so mangled it felt better to put them out of their misery. There were shoes melted into the pavement – who knew if their owners were vaporized or not – and people whose skin peeled off in sheets when you tried to help them. Even worse, some people had items fused to their skin from the intense heat of the blast. So some people survived, but with their shirt or pants fused to their skin. And trying to remove it was like trying to remove a layer of skin. The number of survivors who died of radiation sickness had to be at least 90% if not more. And anyone who survived the radiation poisoning was easy prey for the clankers because of their weakened state. To say that it was an absolute nightmare is an understatement. Same thing to say that there aren’t times where I don’t wake up in the middle of the night from having dreamt about it. “The most horrifying thing came during a routine sweep for survivors. We used to do them all the time right after the blast. The Red Cross organize them - I figured it was a way to try and do my part. We were looking through the city for survivors. Things had been eerily quiet when our Geiger counter started going crazy. We couldn't understand what was happening. We even thought it might have been faulty, until we noticed something - or rather multiple somethings - moving under the rubble. At first we thought it was survivors, but no survivors we'd run into had been that active or set off our Geiger counter like that. I thought it was best to leave it alone, but the others in the group were sure it was survivors who we couldn't leave behind. They got to move in the rubble one piece at a time and kept ignoring me yelling at them that this was a bad idea. “I don't remember exactly what happened next, it all happened so fast. Suddenly a silver arm with clawed hands shot out of the rubble pile and grabbed the nearest person by the ‘collar’ of her biohazard suit. A clanker burst out of the rubble and went straight for her, biting and clawing like you would have thought it was a zombie. She completely froze, as did everyone else around her, and was about five seconds from getting her throat ripped out when I was able to fire several rounds straight into it, which was able to put it down long enough to properly dismantle it. That explained why we found so few survivors. The bastards weren’t affected at all by the radiation, and humans suffering the effects of radiation sickness were easy targets. After that we stopped doing frequent sweeps of the city and suburbs looking for survivors. I can't imagine how many survivors died of radiation sickness or starvation if the clankers didn't get them. But what we did was what we had to do to try and save the human race. “After San Francisco, if things weren't already bleak for the human race it became pretty clear that nanites were overpowering humanity. There were over seven billion of us on the planet before G-Day and in five months just about every major city on the planet was destroyed or on its way to being destroyed. World governments were falling apart daily. And humans who weren’t being killed or converted into clankers were dying of disease, starvation, exposure, and everything else you’d expect with the breakdown of society. At that point it became clear that it wasn’t our world after San Francisco. It was Adam’s…”
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Post by texican on Sept 26, 2020 19:59:55 GMT -6
Fall back and regroup.
Thanks GT for the chapter.
Texican.
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