Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-35353892-20180423020816

When the announcement came over the televisions, it was as if the whole country sat at attention. It was a cold October afternoon, and the threat of impending rainstorms left many people inside, their eyes glued to their televisions with industrial grade adhesive. At exactly 2:44 PM standard eastern time, all channels of every television nationwide were suddenly diverted to an emergency broadcast. The televisions blared the alert used for the Amber alert, and the words "THREAT LEVEL: CRITICAL" took up the entire screen, no matter what the size of the television. After a few seconds, the alarm subsided, and a man's voice began to read instructions in a low tone.

"This is an emergency broadcast," the voice said, "if you are seeing this, please do not turn off your television, and listen closely to each individual instruction."

"A military base belonging to the United States government has been compromised, and a valuable asset has gone missing.  This emergency requires the vigilance of all American people.  This is a matter of national security and worldwide safety."

Anybody who had zoned out suddenly snapped to attention when they comprehended the magnitude of the situation. The voice began the formal instructions in the same tone in which it issued the warning.

"If you see a duplicate of a person you know, or if you see somebody travel between locations irrationally fast, DO NOT ENGAGE.  Find a secure location away from this person, lock all entry points, and wait for the threat to subside."

"If friends, relatives, or anybody you know begin to act uncharacteristically, or show irritable or violent tendencies that they don't normally exhibit, ISOLATE THAT PERSON IMMEDIATELY.  The person and their relation to you no longer matters.  If this is the case, seek shelter as far away from them as you can.  DO NOT ENGAGE IF YOU ARE SUSPICIOUS OF SOMEBODY YOU KNOW."

"The most important thing that must be reiterated is that if anybody displays any of the aforementioned symptoms or abilities, DO NOT ENGAGE.  Do not interact with them in the slightest.  They are a threat to national security, and they will be dealt with by trained professionals.  We will present an update on the situation in the coming days.  For now, I repeat, DO NOT ENGAGE ANY SUSPICIOUS CHARACTERS.  Your life may depend on it."

The emergency broadcast was never followed up with an update. Other military bases attempted to reach the base in question after its location was disclosed, but every attempt at contact was met with prolonged radio static.

The American people plunged into chaos. In the early months of the crisis, people were exiled from their homes, whole communities turned against loved ones who seemed even the slightest bit suspicious, and people spent most of their days isolated from even their closest relatives. As the days went by, the threat became more and more violent. After the "trained professionals" were never sent to assist with the crisis, many people took the responsibility into their own hands. Packs of self-righteous bandits roamed the streets of nearly every major city; they killed men, women, and children indiscriminately in their quest to rid the world of whatever anomoly walked among them. Every body added to their body count had to be burned, just to be safe. After 6 months since the broadcast was aired, the American population had dropped by nearly 25%. Those who survived were scattered across the country, many of them thousands of miles away from their friends out of sheer paranoia. The economy collapsed, and the people reverted to a primitive trading system combined with the "finders keepers" rule. Within the year, the population dropped by 30%, and the makeshift trade economy crumbled. The people who survived the year were nothing but glorified cavemen, roaming the lands and killing anybody they came across with primitive bats and knives. America was a wasteland, occupied entirely by soulless killing machines, so afraid of an unseen force that they murdered all living things on sight, for fear that anything could be harboring "it".



Somewhere, 30 feet below the Nevada desert, a lone man sat in the desolated control room of a military base. Sometimes his hands reflexively slammed on the emergency alarm button, but nothing happened. It never did. He had grown a scraggly beard in the year he had been there, and his wire frame glasses were bent and out out of shape.

He turned his head, glancing around the control room at the decayed corpses proppped neatly into their office chairs, skeletal hands still resting on the keys of their computers. They had given their lives so he could send the alarm that "it" had broken out. So that he could send the people into an incurable panic.

So he could kill America.

He smiled, as his beard fell away instantly. He preferred the clean shaven variant of this human far better. He stood and stretched, his arms reaching until they nearly scraped the ceiling, his hands growing gnarled and clawed. Keeping a single form for too long was exhausting, and it needed to get back in its own skin every now and then. He laughed to himself, his jagged teeth clicking together as he thought of the people killing themselves over the belief that he was out there among them.

He sat back in his seat, his hands retracting into their human form as stubble began to slowly form on his chin. He slid his office chair across to another computer, crudely shoved the skeleton aside, and began to type away. 12 months had passed since the first alarm was issued, now it was time for phase two.

"Attention, all citizens of the Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec areas.  This is an emergency broadcast from the United States of America..."

THE END 