Packing their suitcases and loading up their rental car only took minutes. The motel desk clerk stood outside the office door while they worked, but his attention was on the sky. Suddenly cars and RVs, their headlights the only break in the darkness, began pulling into the parking lot, disgorging bewildered travelers who gravitated toward each other.

"What the hell's happening?"

"Ever see anything like it?"

"Not this time of year."

"Something's affected the power grid."

"They say that Reaper nut finally did it."

John started to approach them. Sherlock called him back.

"They have no clue what's happening, John. Now let's leave before you turn into one of them."

John scowled, but retraced his steps and got into the driver's seat. "What do you mean, one of them? One of the human race?"

"Don't be tedious." Sherlock buckled his seat belt and glanced at the milling crowd with contempt. "When frightened people form groups, their individual identities dissolve and they become fragments of a mob mentality. It's a guaranteed way to become a zombie without dying first."

John had no answer to that. So he just drove.


Those who survived would soon learn that the dead skies forecast the world's descent into hell.

The shadowy persona who called himself the Grimm Reaper had been threatening world annihilation for months. It was such a clichéd proclamation that no one had paid any attention to the warnings he'd posted on his anonymously hosted website. When John's sister sent him a link to the poorly designed page last spring, he'd scolded her for wasting his time.

I'm not a psychiatrist, Harry. This nonsense does not interest me.

John's response was so typical that when the Reaper punched the proverbial button, people died without the anticipation that breeds terror and panic. Their ignorance acted as a mercy.

Survivors were not so fortunate: the foundations of their existence vanished. Telephone and internet service disappeared, and televisions soon became something heavy to block the windows with. Everything created by Edison, Bell, Tim Berners-Lee, and the other great inventors of the past century and a half was gone in minutes, along with buildings, forests, and countless human lives. Electricity would gradually return, thanks to resilient generators, but the horrible scenes it illuminated drove many survivors to suicide or madness.

Even the sun disappeared, held prisoner by the noxious black mass that smothered its rays and substituted falling ash and burning rain. The toxic downpour contaminated lakes and rivers and poisoned the soil, forcing people to rely on stored food and water. When that ran out, they killed for more.

Driving through the artificial night during the first hours of the apocalypse, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson knew nothing of this dismal future. Therefore, they still had hope.