Prologue

Life wasn't always like this. I remember a time when we humans were prosperous, the rulers of the earth. It's been a long time since then, so long I can barely remember.

I was 8 years old when the world began to end. At first, people thought that we were just facing an increased amount of natural disasters. Until news leaked about what was really happening.

I can't remember the exact details because I was young and it was so long ago, but what I do know is that it was humanity that destroyed the earth. Our constant battles and wars got too much for our planet to handle, creating a vast wasteland. We just got so greedy and it lead to our destruction.

First, one country discovered how to create a weapon that would replicate the destruction of a high range earthquake. In retaliation, another country created a weapon that when dropped into water, the molecules were replicated over and over until the area suffered a vast flood.

And so the competition of technology and destruction continued until millions had lost their lives. Countries were completely eradicated and most of the earth was rendered unliveable.

My family and I were living in Phoenix, Arizona when the wars first began. My father was a high ranked officer in the United States Army. This meant we moved towns frequently and my father was privy to a high level of government information. This information slowly turned my father paranoid. He had enough clearance to understand that there was something more to the natural disasters than we were being told, but not enough to know exactly what was going on. Charlie was constantly telling anoyone who would listen about the upcoming end of the world and how there was more to these "natural disasters" than we were being told. Everyone he told just nodded their head and looked at him as if he was crazy. My father soon lost all his friends and all his coworkers avoided working with him. They all thought he had lost his mind.

Eventually, my mother left my father for a minor league baseball player saying that she couldn't handle my father's constant preaching about their impending doom.

Renee leaving broke my father even further. He became obsessed with proving his theories and finding a way to save us and showing my mother that what he had been saying for months was the truth. His digging lead to him hearing rumours of a secret "safe town" that was being built by paranoid people, similar to my father, that would be protected if the world were ever to become uninhabitable.

My father seeked out Renee and her new boyfriend and pleaded with her to leave with us to this tiny town in north Washington State. My mother refused to leave Phoenix stating that Charlie was crazy and that she would never uproot her stable life on his hunch. This was not this first time he had insisted that the world would soon face the apocalypse.

We never heard from her again. Last we knew Phoenix had been flooded by an aqua bomb.

As it turned out Forks was a great place to live, even before it became protected. When we arrived I was stunned by its beauty. I had never seen so much green before, not to mention I was far less likely to feel the sun burn my pale skin because it rained almost constantly. The fact that I could now play outside without getting burnt was very important to my 8 year old self.

My father set us up in a pretty weatherboard house on the edge of town. My bedroom overlooked the forest and had a giant evergreen tree in front of the window. The house was much larger than our home in Phoenix and was completely self sufficient with an emergency generator, a huge storage room full of canned food, a massive cool room and freezer and a giant underground water store. I loved my school and I had great friends. I never wanted for anything. I liked it here and adhered to Dad's warnings to never go beyond the town's boundaries because what would I ever need beyond this town?

Living in Forks I was fairly sheltered from the destruction of the world around me. Even though my mother had abandoned us, I had a happy childhood in Forks and it wasn't until I was in my Junior year of high school that I realised that not all survivors of the apocalypse had been protected as we had been in Forks. It was then that I realised why our house had extra supplies and utilities than our house in Phoenix. Before now I had just thought they were luxuries my father had provided me to help me to enjoy our new home.

This was the year that everything changed for me. This was the year I became more aware. This was the year that I learnt that humans and animals were not the only creatures on this planet. This was the year I learnt why Forks was so special.