It started when the bees died. At first, no one worried because it was only out west in California, but then they started to die in the East. One by one they flew on the wind across the Atlantic. One by one they fell from the sky. It was as if they were running from something. Those who lived made it to the gardens people had prepared for them, but they only lasted a few months.


We were warned we couldn't survive without the bees. We had four years to live, they said, once they vanished. Within two months of the last sighting, we lost everything.


The harvests… well, there were no harvests. Grocery prices skyrocketed. I specifically remember apples shot up to $20 each. Livestock grew skinny and withered away. Scientists did everything they could to regenerate all we had lost but, before they could succeed, a plague swept the world.


It came like a swarm. It was so dark and deadly that the only thing we knew to call it was Sin. The Christians laughed at us. Sin was not a physical thing; it was something you did, not something you could grasp. They were wrong. Sin polluted the world, taking the form of many things: storms, boils, and darkness. Absolute darkness that filled the brightest day with dread. No one believed sin was palpable until they held their dead children. After that, they just screamed. We all did.


Some of us survived, immune to the black pollution. I prayed to God we hadn't. I prayed to anyone who would listen. If anyone did hear me, they turned a deaf ear.


Bodies piled up in the streets like mountains. The smell of rot was more overpowering than the thick smog of the plague that still hung in the air. If it was hard to breathe before, it was impossible then. There were no scavengers to eat the dead, but I once saw a woman picking at her lifeless infant.


James and I had a hard time finding food; animals were scarce and edible plants almost as hard to find, but we never stooped to picking over bodies. We weren’t religious, but something about desecrating a human body unnerved us.


It wasn’t long before they came. Or, others said "they woke". It’s hard to say what actually happened. It wasn't the apocalypse promised to us. It was so much worse.


These beings who overtook us, who still devour our minds and flesh, are not aliens. They are not zombies or vampires. They're demons. Worse than the ones they speak of in the Bible. They plague us more than any horror movie or novel could have prepared us for.