Life is a funny thing.
It's persistent. It'll just keep fighting back against the forces that wish death upon it. It's truly beautiful, yet sometimes it gets tiring. As prey, survival depends on life's perseverance. As a predator, that certain trait of life is annoying. Almost all things die eventually, some with a little more effort than others.
There are some who will live forever. Well, for as long as their country survives. They can die, sure, but they'll come back. A shot to the heart? A few minutes. Burned to death? A few hours, maybe. Decapitation? That's a toughie, might take a day. But no longer.
Lukas Bondevik, otherwise known as the nation of Norway, had died more than his fair share of times. As a viking it had been a commonplace occurrence. Something that happened once a month. In fact, he'd almost grown used to being slashed and battered and bruised. It seemed natural.
Times had changed since then, obviously, and Lukas' deaths had become less frequent. In the Modern Age, he wasn't sure if he'd died even once. There was war, yes, but things had settled out quite a bit. Peace was prevailing, and positivity was dominant.
This was before the New Era. Before the Machines were built. Before they attacked humanity. Before everyone left alive had to band together to form new countries, new kingdoms, new nations in order to survive. There was no war against each other anymore. The only war that went on now was against the Machines.
There was Amexida. South-Central. FEPS. Germanic Union. Italian Unity. Russian Wilderlands. Baltica. Australia. Nordic Union. And that was all that was left.
The Machines had completely taken over Africa and the Middle East, and recently their occupation area had been growing. Romania and Bulgaria had been taken over, though the nations themselves had made it to Hungary for help and were now under the protection of the Germanic Union.
News traveled slow, due to the fact that for any messages to get anywhere it had to be on foot. There was no more cell service, no more power, no nothing. And it was a long way to walk. All forces available had gone into protecting the borders of the countries, trying futilely to stop the progress of the Machines. It worked a little, though all anyone seemed to be able to do was make the Machines angry.
And other things were changing as well.
For example, the temperature and weather had changed drastically. It no longer snowed. It no longer dropped below forty degrees fahrenheit. The atmosphere had been damaged and thinned severely due to the constant wars and explosions, and so there was not as much protection from the sun as there had been.
But whatever. Lukas could live with the heat, though he'd much rather survive in the cold.
Everyday life had gone on for a while after the Machines had turned hostile and started attacking. People had still worked at their jobs, the birds had still sung their songs, and the clouds had created little cotton balls up in the sky.
That haphazard peace only lasted for around a year.
A year in which everyone was constantly on edge.
The original Machines, the ones that were slowly making their way across Europe, were slow moving. They didn't go very far very fast, though they did go destructively. But they created smaller, more efficient yet not quite as deadly little Machines.
Everyone called those small ones the Beasts.
And they were. The Machines had used any material that they could get their mechanical hands on to build the Beasts, and one of the predominant items that they seemed to find in an abundance was bone. Human and animal.
So some of the Beasts had skulls for heads. Some of them had ribcages full of mechanical clockwork and gears. Some of them were mostly skeletal, with just a few mechanized features keeping them from falling apart.
Of course, they all shared the same trademark feature. The glowing red eyes. All Machines and Beasts had at least one, though most had many more.
Lukas wasn't sure why humanity had thought that building something like the Machines was a good idea. He supposed that it was to get an advantage in wars, though he knew for sure that it wasn't worth it. All the carnage and death… All the widows and orphans and bodies…
Everything had been thanks to one bright young scientist and engineer straight from Oxford University who had moved to South Africa. William F. Johnson. Lukas and his Scandinavian brothers hadn't really been paying much attention to him before he designed the first Machine and its trial run had aired on television.
It had gone smoothly, and evidently William had impressed the right people because in a year there were already a hundred more Machines just like the one that he had built.
Two years passed, and that's right about when they got hostile. They turned, quite suddenly, on mankind and began to slaughter their way through Africa. When the Beasts came along, that was when everyone really panicked.
The threat hadn't seemed that real to anyone who wasn't in Africa. Oh yes, sure there were evil Machines that were slowly taking over the world. But they were only in Africa, and surely the armies would stop them before they got much further.
The armies didn't stop them.
Nothing did.
They sent out the Beasts, who were merciless and destroyed every living thing that they saw. Faster than a human and with highly equipped senses, the Beasts hungered for bloodshed and death.
The Beasts had made it everywhere in the world. To the Americas. Australia. Europe. Asia. Russia. And even to Scandinavia.
Bombshells and mayhem had followed their arrival, and for days the sky was filled with grey smoke. The scent of charcoal and ashes permeated the air. Everything was loud, louder than Lukas could ever remember it being.
Then, it just went silent.
Everyone lived in fear. The Beasts frequented the cities, though they seemed to come out mostly during the night. The buildings were falling down. People died by the hundreds, their bodies littering the streets until one of the Beasts came and used it to create more monsters.
Barely a fraction of the Earth's population was left.
So many people and animals had died at the hands of the machine that the cold chill of death was ever present all around, a unwary feeling that crawls down one's back and sends shivers up their spines. The feeling that makes one want to run and hide and cry. The feeling of abject terror so awful that all one can do is stand there, petrified, while their life seeps away from them.
Yes, that was the feeling that the Earth had nowadays. Death, death, and even more death.
The nation's mortality rate hadn't seemed to change. They could still die and come back, though their regenerating was taking much longer.
Lukas remembered that one time, when he and his family were going from house to house and assuring people that things would be okay, a Beast had erupted out of the shadows and shot Berwald in the heart. They'd grabbed him, ran, and hid beneath the derelict remains of an old bridge.
What should've taken a few minutes took an hour and a half. An hour and a half of Tino's anxious breathing and fearful glances. He'd been crying feely, and started to sob out of sheer relief and joy when Berwald had finally opened his eyes and hugged Tino.
Lukas hadn't died yet at the hands of a Beast or a Machine, though he was sure that in this apocalyptic hellhole of a world it was only a matter of time. At least he'd make sure that he'd be the one to die, instead of Emil or Mathias. He knew that they'd come back, but due to the fact that their mortality seemed to be increasing, he didn't want to risk it.
Since they were all part of the same country now, Nordic Union, they all lived together. Maybe lived wasn't the right word, though, due to the fact that none of them were living life the way it had been before. Survived was a better word. Yeah, they were surviving together.
To be able to tell how much the apocalyptic events had affected life, all one would have to do would be to walk down one of the city streets. The cracked, uneven pavement with mysterious stains. The shattered windows. The half-collapsed buildings. The mechanical whirring of the prowling Beasts. The sky, a permanent dark grey.
People had tended to take to the roofs or the sewers. Very few lived on the ground, and those that did were either very stupid, very brave, or dead.
Lukas and his family had taken shelter with the important members of the government until the power was gone completely and they kicked them out. You can survive on your own, they'd said. We have to protect the kings and queens and leaders.
So the Nordic nations had been taking shelter in an abandoned church. They'd set up a camp on the uppermost floor, where they could look out through the cracked stained-glass window that was full of holes. Also, since they were up in the rafters, no one who simply walked into the atrium and main part of the church could see them. It was a good hiding place, really, compared to some of the other places that Lukas had seen people surviving.
Food and water had become major issues.
The water was polluted, though if worst came to worst it was still drinkable. Who knows, you might wind up fine, or you might end up dying an excruciatingly painful death, screaming all the way. Lukas wasn't willing to take that risk or let his family do so unless there was simply no other option.
Finding food required raiding stores and houses and hunting the few animals left.
Lukas and the rest of his family had a small stockpile in the corner of their little camp full of cans of food, granola bars, trail mix, jerky, and other mostly non perishable goods, plus bottles of water. They were pretty set for a while, which was good, because Lukas didn't look forward to walking out on the streets.
They'd had more than one encounter with a Beast, and Lukas certainly didn't want to relive those experiences. Since the mechanical monsters were much faster than a human, or a nation for that matter, the only way to escape was to either hide, take to the rooftops, or shoot its bright red eyes. If all the eyes on it were destroyed, then the thing would blow up. So you shoot it and you sprint away and hope that none of the flying shrapnel hits you.
Lukas had kept a record of how many Beasts they'd killed. He'd destroyed 3. Mathias had destroyed 5. Berwald had destroyed 4. Emil and Tino had worked together to destroy 2.
They had assault rifles and a whole lot of ammo that the government had given them. Still, the ammo wouldn't last forever, so they had to be careful.
Of course, there were a few other threats apart from the Machines and the Beasts. There was the acidic rain, which happened around once every two months. There was feral animals that still hung on to life and prowled ever closer to the cities. And there were other humans who had reveled in the freedom that the apocalypse had brought to them.
But Lukas wasn't as worried about the humans as he was about the mechanical things. Humans he could kill easily. He'd done quite a lot of that during the viking times, and the old skills had started to come back to him. It was a gruesome thought, and one that Lukas wasn't sure that he enjoyed.
But he wasn't about to let some sadist get to his family. No, he would die himself before that happened. And Lukas didn't plan on dying.
Still, better safe than sorry. They'd stopped trying to reassure people that things were going to be okay after the time that Berwald was killed and came back. They played it safe, taking shelter in the loft of the church.
There was a part of Lukas that wished there was an easy solution. Surely there was some sort of switch that would turn off the power to all of the mechanical beings… but if there was such a thing, nobody had any idea how to find it. Maybe there was an alpha Machine. Maybe if they could take it down, somehow, everything else would stop and humanity could find a way to piece itself back together.
But for now, all that matters is that my family is safe, he thought. And I'll do anything to keep them that way.
Anything.