To quote something I just read: “This is how humanity dies.”

It started off somewhere quiet, somewhere all alone, somewhere where the night air is still and cold and the filled with distant moans and barely living screams.

Now it has spread into everyone’s home, no one is left alone, except the ones who are programmed to do nothing more but assault, attack, destroy.

All the kids are crying out in the night, climbing on top of their cabinets to avoid the tidal waves of crazed human flesh, sobbing softly as they notice the blood-smeared face of the model student, teacher’s pet, complete with a broken neck.

Even as the sun sets, kids grab for guns (anything that can destroy the destroyers) and try to restore order to their lives. Yelling for an ambulance at the top of your lungs doesn’t do any good, it just brings a somnambulist shambling up the street towards your friend, almost spraying blood like spray paint from every room.

A shovel to the throat and things seem less threatening, somehow.

Chaos builds, and then your happy afternoon days begin to scatter to the four winds, propelled by your sobs and your screams and your silence (inside your head). Left behind on a school trip, you’re surrounded by broken nightmares, so what else do you do?

Run into a nearby house, lock all the doors. Maybe peek out the garage door, just once…no, there are freaks out that door. Do a bit of harmless looting (those whose items you are stealing are in no mood to notice the theft), making sure to grab a hold of some weapon, somewhere.

Walk through crowded Suburbia, avoiding the screams of the injured and the moans of the injurers, lashing out when needed but otherwise attempting to stay clear of the panicked orgy of torn flesh, torn clothes, and torn dreams.

To the airport we go, and lo, it is devoid of people, empty as shoe boxes. Let’s grab a plane, soar over the heads of all this pain and confusion. Before your picture-perfect and meticulous ending actually succeeds, though, you have a few visitors. Several hundred thousand visitors, each smeared with congealed gore, with a thirst for your blood and a craving for your flesh.

You fail to hold on to your loved one’s hands – alas! – and you find yourself slipping back into the crowd. Don’t pity your parents, pity yourself and (worse still) those behind you further, where the ghouls devour humans with twitching joy.

Whisked aside by some famous old face, and by chance, you have been saved. The rest have been condemned to a death worse than Fate, and God’s immaterial hand has intervened here (of all places), saying that you get to continue living (for now).

Angels guard you as you observe the revolutionary fight below, except that this is not Central America, and cry for your own lost innocence.

You might still be alive.

But you will never again be innocent.