For someone who had lived as long as he had, such a major upheaval of the long-held status quo had been equal parts horrifying and thrilling. When the humans had begun dying in droves, it had been a shock to the system that had jolted him out of the complacency of his established routines. The problem was, once Draven and the world around him had recovered from that shock enough to settle into new routines, they found that the new normal was almost uniformly worse. Not that there weren’t some advantages to the world’s new scarcity of human beings; Draven could now move unhindered through spaces where, before the Devastation, he had always been a wary intruder. He could make a desolate home in civilization’s bones, with little …show more content…
It was a hot summer’s night, even by the changing standards of the slowly-warming world. Heat was humanity’s worst enemy now, bringing everything from drought to wildfires to the unthawed, long-dormant virus that had emerged from its frozen slumber and spread south, transforming cities into graveyards. Humanity, in their hubris, had ignored the warning signs until it was too late, unable to comprehend that the moment of their own destruction was advancing on them slowly, by a matter of degrees. Draven barely noticed the heat. His body’s internal temperature only had one setting: cold as a …show more content…
Draven had a destination in mind – the nearby city of Seattle, now better known by its recently-acquired nickname: Sanctuary. The reputation that the city had gained in the post-Devastation aftermath had overshadowed its prior identity; Draven found it darkly relatable in that way. It had earned its moniker as survivors from all up and down the country’s western regions had migrated there. In the new reality, people couldn’t afford to live spread out and isolated; it was strength of numbers, a communal pooling of skills, and manpower, that held the key to survival now. Seattle had the space to spare for refugees and an infrastructure that needed people to maintain it, and what’s more, its geographic location meant that it had something that was crucial but increasingly rare in the cities to the south: access to