《Short Stories by Regan Brooks》The Apocalypse We Didn’t Expect

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In school, they always taught us that nuclear war was the biggest threat to our existence. Whenever we saw worrisome headlines in the news, we would make jokes about World War III. For as long as I could remember, instability in the Middle East threatened to pull in the nations who had interests there. Now at the age of 30, my friends and I just laughed at the headlines, making jokes that concealed a very real fear.

Anyone with a mind for history could see how devastating both world wars had been. With the technology we had by this point, a third could destroy the global way of life. A nuclear holocost in which the Earth would never bounce back from, a dead world of our own making. Climate change, radiation, and scarcity of resources would drive the regression of our global society back into tribal societies of old.

As international tensions rose, we’d often wonder who would kick off the end of the world. The Russians? The Chinese? The madman who ruled North Korea? No one expected the universe’s cold indifference would begin the end of us.

I remember it had started when I found articles online about individuals or whole communities having the same dreams at night. Each report seemed to detail fever dreams about submerged megalithic stone cities, creatures with grotesque aquatic bodies, and a creeping dread that followed them into the waking world. Mass hysteria that blossomed in early 2020 had reached a fever pitch in December.

Howard Aldersen, one of the famed archeologists who located the sunken Egyptian city of Thonis, seemed to take an interest in these stories, as anyone fond of history and exploration might. Collecting details from interviews of those suffering from the frantic dreams and news articles reporting on the events, he managed to launch an expedition in search of what could be a ruined sunken city like no other. What he found shaped the world we now live in, or at least try to.

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The tops of skyscrapers that used to be New York City can be seen jutting out of the water, miles inland where I and other survivors try to scrape out an existence. The sky is always overcast. When we sleep, dreams come to beckon us to join the followers of the Great Old Ones, interbreed with creatures of the deep, and usher in the new dawn of mankind.

Lumbering shoggoths traverse the fields and forests, while bat-winged creatures take to the skies. Finding other humans should have been a relief. Roaming bands of aquatically mutated people now hunt for survivors. Anyone they can find with their bulging black eyes or slimy tentacled hands are said to be dragged off for perverse rituals to return the Earth to its original and perfect state. To turn it back to the cosmic breeding marsh of the Elder Gods.

Who could have guessed that what would destroy our world would not be our penchant for war but rather our curiosity, humanity’s tendency to poke at the dark corners of the Earth until a door, that should have remained shut, instead opened?

"That is not dead which can eternal lie.

And with strange aeons even death may die."

~ H.P. Lovecraft: "The Call of Cthulhu, Abdul Alhazred

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