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Prologue The world was under attack. Countries were gone, sunk into a never-ending fire battle, lost beneath the seas of the world. Just how it had started no one knew. Perhaps the government did but of them there was no sign. In the end they too had been betrayed. Put their trust in the wrong people and paid the highest price. From another world the attackers had come. Bearing strange and outlandish weaponry, their faces hidden beneath masks and armour. Creatures followed them: from wherever they had come from the monsters had come too. Bombs and guns were something the two races had in common but the attackers were better skilled and had had the luxury of surprise. When the first of the bombs had been dropped they had created tidal waves beyond the human scale of concept. A large portion of the people of earth had been killed in that attack. Gun-toting maniacs quickly ambushed the ones who survived. The stench of death was in their air; the dust and smoke filled all gasping lungs. The other worlders had come and they had conquered. There was nothing left now. Quiet became the air and within less than twenty-four hours of the first bombs being dropped the human race was destroyed. But something did survive. Below the soaked ground, beneath the war, in the underground tunnels of the city, people huddled close together. Without food and water they were not expected to last long. Days, perhaps weeks if they were lucky. The last morsels of the human race, clinging to life in a dingy sewer. Babies cried and wailed; teenagers smoked and drank; adults made plans that would never be executed. One by one they died. Picked off first by illness and age. The babies, without the fresh milk of their |
mothers, perished first. One youth was found hanging by his belt, another drowned in the filth of the water. Into the blissful eternity of death they walked and fell until there was but three left. The three who had been the last to join, the ones who had been stood scared and frightened when the adults had bundled them down into the sewers and to safety. Now only they lived. Health and young age served as their protectors and when the last of the adults perished they had no other choice than to leave and find a new safety. Only death waited for them in the sewers.
Above ground was not an option. The other worlders had claimed it as their own. They were colonising the land that had once been green but was now charred and black. The world that the three boys had been born into, had ran and played in, was no longer recognisable. The last of their race they walked, ever onwards, through the muck of the sewers, through the hours of the days. They did not expect to survive. In fact they prayed for death to come - quick and swift. No longer did they want to live. Alone and frightened they huddled together and spoke of nothing for there was nothing left to speak about. The thumping started overhead a little after dark, or at least what one of the boy's watches said to be the time for darkness. In groups of three it came. Once, twice, thrice, a thump for each boy. It was the death call. Thump, thump, thump. It did not stop. Shivering and frightened the boys waited. For them the end had finally come. The other worlders had found them. Their time was up. |