The Fifth Millenium

It’s been five hundred years since the Coming. Five hundred life-shattering years. Religions told the story of the Coming before it even happened, though they had a few things wrong. A Great Being did come, and those he deemed worthy were taken to a better place, a place of peace that those left behind can only imagine. A war between angels and demons ensued after; there were burning towers and falling crosses. But in the end, the angels won. Or so the survivors thought.

Christianity, Buddhism, Catholicism; none of them were prepared for the end of the end. Living life after the wars. No book told of it, no newscast broadcast it, but as the Demons and Angels fled the burning world, the empty husks left behind began to rise. They had all heard the horror stories and watched the movies. But as in those stories, the mayhem that ensued was impossible to prepare for. Those who had been raptured became living corpses, walking dead. Maybe it was the Angel’s way of eradicating any further life on Earth, maybe it was sheer happenstance, but Zombies were now the dominant species.

For almost two hundred years, the humans fled the decaying creatures, surviving in cities behind barricades or high up in skyscrapers, but somehow they kept getting infected. People who had had no contact with the rotting corpses became them; children were born like them. Finally, a scientist by the name of Frederick DeCampler answered the confusion with an even more disturbing conclusion. Seventy-five percent of the human population was carriers of the disease he began to call Decrepit Extremis Fatalis. The carriers became known as the Cretins and were therefore banished from the uninfected. Humans must survive, after all, right?

What ensued was a calamitous life of misery. The Cretins waged war on the uninfected, rallying and herding the zombies against them, controlling the D.E.F. infected as if they were beasts. It was the uninfected’s worst nightmare; whilst the zombies were mindless eating machines, they had no control of themselves further than shambling along and pulverizing people to death, but with the Cretins behind them, they were impossible to defeat. 

The Cretin's mind did not deteriorate with time but rather became only more brilliant. They developed impossible strategies that left the uninfected dwindling definitively; there seemed to be no hope for them. Or so it had seemed.

In the year 2365, the government began a secret experiment. They took soldiers from their duties in the field and began to run experiments on them. The hope? To develop a super soldier, a Cyborg. Though nothing was ever said to the public, those taken were announced as missing in action. The mission succeeded to the greatest extent. The machine men were known as brain melters, or more specifically, Enhanced Humanoids for Eradication of the Cretins. Each EHEC was equipped with a pair of cyber-genetic eyes that, when utilized, would literally fry the brains of the Cretins, or the uninfected; it didn’t matter. In this, the EHECs were defective; they could not discriminate foe from friends and foes.

These supermen, these machines of death, were indestructible. They could live through a fallen building, withstand poison, and even jump over fifty-foot buildings without breaking a sweat. They had the faces of their human components, but their entire body was made up of a metal skin suit. Their faces were the only humanity that remained, and that wasn’t enough to keep them sane.

When the battle between the uninfected and Cretin was at its worst, the EHEC was released in New York. They swept the city ruthlessly, ending the battle for ten straight years as even the Zombies had to hide from the unstoppable robotic men. But then they lost control, stopped attacking only the Cretins and the mindless zombies, and turned on the rest of humanity. Life as we knew it was coming to a brutal end, again. The last defense humanity created had become the second apocalypse, and there was no way to stop it. 

Thirty years after the cyborgs turned on humanity, a descendant of Frederick DeCampler, Jonathan, discovered that the EHEC had a weakness. It was he who noticed the Cyborg's pattern; how they never left their back vulnerable.

Beneath all of the metal, entwined in their internal wiring, was a kill switch.

As if the floodgates had been loosed, Cretin and Uninfected swarmed the EHEC, jumping on them from buildings, from behind cars, and anywhere where they had a chance to get on their backs. In a matter of weeks, every EHEC in New York had had its eyes gouged out and its circuitry yanked. Their humanity kept their bodies moving, their circuitry keeping them alive, but they were rendered useless. Their infallible bodies were then thrown in the rising tides of the ocean to boil beneath burning red skies. It was said that none were ever able to find their way out of that abyss, and are still under there. Unable to die, unable to get out.

Unfortunately, after the eradication of EHEC, the Cretins turned on humanity once more. Though the Uninfected had grown amazingly adept at fighting them off, they began to fail again. Finally, in the year 2497, the nine-time great-granddaughter of the great scientist Frederick was born. Little did her father, Harold, know that his little Elizabeth Marie DeCampler would be one of the last Uninfected alive, or how her story would outmatch all of her ancestors in greatness, in glory, in victory. It is here that the story begins, in the year 2517, when the last Dweller stood sentry. Her name is no longer Elizabeth, but Cue.