Apocalypses didn’t happen every day, but once they got started, they had this annoying habit of going about their business.
Those who exercised reasoning were the first to go, followed by fans of survival shows (they believed they understood the wilderness, having never left the confines of their paved-and-plastered twenty-fourth-floor apartments and most ended up eating the wrong type of mushroom in the first week). The hoarders did all right, at least for the first while. And the jerks? They made it all the way to the end, because nature loved adding a thorn to a rose bush. It turned out that at the end of the world, those CEOs who couldn’t convert a Word document into a PDF did just fine in a dog-eat-dog-eat-rat-eat-human society.
A space heist gone wrong, a galactic conspiracy between Earth and Mars, and a princess caught in the middle.
A short fictional story about a man and his discovery of a lost land, written and read by Alexis Veenendaal.
www.alexisveenendaal.com
Use of music owned by FesliyanStudios
#shortstory #fiction #atlantis
Andrew chewed his nails nervously as he watched the hooded man approach him slowly. He sat on the edge of a wooden bench, surrounded by various strangers all rushing to one place or another in a scream of metal, footsteps and phone calls. The muffled intercom relayed the upcoming trains, but it was all but unnoticed by his pursuer, whose steady gaze bore at Andrew like no one else could. Andrew pulled his hand away from his mouth cautiously, and reached inside his right-hand pocket until he felt something cold, hard and smooth.
Marianne Dresnik and Ali Oswald, the Trapper and the Tinker, raced together up the final landing of the underground prison, narrowly avoiding two crossing guards as they passed under them. Red lights flashed and alarms blared on every level, and they had been lucky to encounter only a few adversaries thus far. Of the ones Ali did not take down with th
I waited patiently as men and women filed past me, shoulders bent and eyes downcast. The smell of urine and sweat, mixed with the damp mustiness of being underground was overwhelming, but my nose was forced to grow accustomed. I pressed myself to the rocky wall and closed my eyes for a moment. My unit passed nearly in silence before I felt a rough hand on my shoulder.
I always thought that dying was a horrible thing until I realized what the alternative entailed.
Human beings imagine the end to be a peaceful resolve. They imagine their loved ones on the other side. Others (the cynics of the world) imagine there is only darkness when they die.
Me? I imagined a sunset, and perhaps a beach somewhere with an endless supply of margaritas.
To my ungrateful surprise, none of these endings were what waited for me. Despite all the reli
