01.04.2020

The sky was dark and the wind whipped the snow around his face. There was a hole in his left boot, and his toes were beginning to numb. Normally he wouldn’t have ventured out into the dark. It wasn’t safe, not with the creatures lurking in the shadows, hoping for a meal to wander past. The hood of the stolen jacket he wore wasn’t helping much to keep the heat in. It was a thin material, thinner than was practical for the weather, but anything thicker obstructed his ability to fire any of the three guns that he was carrying. Trekking forward, he sniffed back an inevitably runny nose and moved towards where he had seen the light.

It had only lasted a moment, but from his vantage point in an abandoned van on the top floor of a parking garage, he had seen the spark. A fire had sprung to life, only for a moment before it had gone out. There was no telling if it had been an explosion (even though he hadn’t heard a bang) or some kind of accident, a dumb creature knocking things over until a small flame erupted and then died. He was hoping it was the third option, that someone was trying to get warm and had lit a fire before thinking better. As it was, Cian hadn’t seen another living human for five weeks. It had been months since he had woken up to find an Apocalypse had descended while the world had slept, but he was constantly marveled and disgusted at how quickly humanity was fading away. Every day there seemed to be less and less signs of survivors.

If the odds were against him, Cian felt better knowing that fate had at least given him an ace up his sleeve. Of the few people who had woken up at all from what seemed to have been a worldwide blackout, a small few seemed to have been gifted with abilities beyond what was natural. Cian had only met one or two people like himself but that had the same exact abilities- quick healing, faster reflexes, ridiculously increased strength. Cian wasn’t sure why he had been given these things while others had to survive with nothing but their wits, but he also knew that he had been a warrior before this and he often thought that factored into it. Maybe it was more of an enhancement than something new that had been bestowed in the wake of the world ending.