The world ends not with a bang, but with a whimper, at least for Talia Gould.
She was an engineer with Crest Weapons. She worked R and D in a lab at a secure location two levels below ground buried under a military grade concrete sub-floor and surrounded by steel reinforced walls. The lab has no windows, an air filtration system with narrow openings and redundant traps inbuilt to prevent electronic eyes. Multiple armed guards work every choke point, badge scanners on barred access to every door. A no outside communication devices prevented phones and tablets and laptops of entry. There wasnt even internet access. The top engineers even got escorted to and from their cars through triple layers of fencing topped with razor wire.
All employees get company housing and monitored twenty-four, seven.
The facility ran three shifts.
Talia worked the night shift. She did QA.
Crest Weapons was like a prison. If prison paid seven figures and was filled with smart people who lived in luxury and were pampered with no expense spared.
Weapons development was the name of the game. They Built stuff to knock out the bad guys EMPs, sonic pulse, high altitude drone tech basically war toys that took the death burden of American soldiers.
That is until the Sun ironically spit a massive solar flare accompanied by a coronal mass ejection at the Earth and in the process rendered all modern technology useless. This effectively plunged mankind into a post-apocalyptic Stone Age.
The good news is Talia got to miss the mass carnage on the surface. The plane crashes, car wrecks, the lack of medical care and all the looting and widespread violence all which resulted in the sudden death of more then three quarters of all human life on the planet in less then a month.
Those left went from apex predators to scrounging trash and avoiding anything that moved on less then two legs or more then four.
At the Crest lab all that avoiding the surface carnage meant for the fifty people trapped inside was that they either got to starve to death or start the process of killing and eating the weakest of them.
Groups formed quickly.
Murders happened.
Human’s were eaten.
And slowly the numbers dropped.
From fifty down to unknown.
Talia wasn’t the biggest one left, and maybe she got her job through more charisma then smarts, but it was that charisma that gave access to the pistol she wields in her right hand and the flashlight she holds in her left. The security guard thought they were going to partner up. She still has a bit of him left, dried and stored in a safe spot not far from where she hunts now.
Time is meaningless now. She lives in the dark. She hunts in the dark. The flash light is a weapon, as well as the gun, but she will only use the gun if she needs to.
She hears something and freezes.
It a soft scrapping of naked calloused flash on the cold linoleum floor. She can tell it approaches. She waits. What concerns her is the person who approaches is showing no concern. The scrapping
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