You snap the locker shut, and cinch the bag closed. For the first time since your awakening, you feel something close to control – a faint grasp of order in the chaos and unknown. Food, water, weapons, tools. You are not helpless. You cling to this feeling like a lifeline.

The pod groans, then shifts, as it begins its final ascent. The enclosure shudders as the depth gauge swiftly approaches closer to zero. Your ears pop as the air pressure changes. The sensation is nauseatingly swift, a sprint upward through roiling black water that thrums against the pod like a mirror of your own heartbeat.

You hold your breath when the motion stops. The pod blares a warning, then a hiss as it cycles through its decompression protocols. The noise of its completion is a soft chime, and the red hazard light by the hatch switches to a vibrant, safe green.

With trembling hands, you reach for the release, cold air seeping through the seam. You want your first breath of real air to be clean, bracing, and a promise of deliverance.

You push the hatch open.

The first sight you have of Earth is a nightmare straight out of hell.

What should have been an endless blue sky is consumed by a swirling maelstrom of fire and fury. They sky is bleeding, clouds warped into ribbons of incandescent red and black that roil and rumble. The air claws down your throat, dry and chemical, the taste of salt ash and something acrid, electrical.

Charged air, magnetic interference. Geiger counter measures no ambient radiation.

The ocean itself is a mirror to the ruin above, waves catching the blaze so that the world appears doubled. Fire above, fire below. For one delirious instant, you can’t tell if you’ve surfaced or sunken deeper, trapped between two burning ceilings or floors.

Not a nuke, beyond its capabilities. Ionization spikes, indicative of an Electromagnetic Pulse.

And in the distance, you can see a burning city. Or the corpse of one. Pillars of smoke devour the skyline, feeding into the cauldron of black clouds that’s spread across the heavens like a stain of blood. From the clouds, ash falls like snow, buffeted by flames that look as if they’ve a life of their own, casting the horizon with a thick, bloody red tint.

Communications offline, satellite signal offline, implant telecom incepts only static. Effect too devastating to be manmade.

Whatever world existed before you awoke is gone.

Atmospheric conductivity skyrocketing. Storm cells forming where none should exist.

Whatever salvation you thought waited beyond the ocean’s depths is gone.

Sky burning. Ocean reflecting. There is so much data, yet not enough of it.

What greets you now is a world already ending, and your immediate surroundings a raw, cauterized wound.

You are alone.

You. Are. Alone.

The stress of your escape finally catches up to you, and emotions you've only recently discovered come boiling to the surface.

(cont.)