“Did what, chile?”
I’d shrugged. “Made stuff. Like the earth.”
I hadn’t appreciated it as much then as I would have now. How my dad took a moment to pause to give me a serious answer. How he chewed the end of his pipe as he had mulled. "He was looking to create something to love Him and something He could love, too."
Then I’d thought about it a little. My dad had told me over and over again about the monsters at our door, the monsters that we had made ourselves. "Is that what we wanted to do, daddy? Did we want to create something that loved us?"
He’d patted my head, then held me close. "No child. We aren't God. Where God created for love, we created something that we could hate."
And hate we did.
Monsters hadn’t all been bad Before.
Before, monsters wasn’t a bad word. It was synonymous with anyone who shifted. They kept to themselves mostly, and even though an activist group would pop up here and there to shout them down for being evil, for the most part no one normal raised a fuss about them.
At least, not against the ones who only wore the monster skin every now and again. My dad, however, had a thing against those he labeled “monsters wearing human skin.” They looked just like us, lived among us, but were definitely not us, he would say.
No one else had taken my dad seriously. They were all, “That Pastor Reggie, pay him no mind. He just think he doing the Lord's work. Lord don't got nothing to do with us no more. Look at what this world come to.”
But my dad was convinced that there were real monsters in human flesh plotting the end of the world as we knew it. Most of them had gotten into the highest offices of power, he would say. According to him, heads of governmental agencies, CEOs, and other influential personnel were all steeped in conspiracy.
He was a popular enough preacher and word mage in the old community that he had been able to start grassroots activism to audit political corruption, like earmarks and porkbelly spending. Dad was actually getting some media attention with his perspectives. Anyone who’d listened to him were swayed by him, that was for sure.
The fact that he was a legendary monster hunter in his heyday also helped. People still talked of the way he had contained a berserker Sasquatch out in the Pacific Northwest. If he was an expert in identifying monsters in the field, they would say, then he should be trusted in pointing out monsters in our midst. At least, that was the general logic.
He was on the cusp on getting some real reform happening when the Rave disease struck and the fever swept through the country.
That was the turning point of the world’s descent into darkness.
Because after the Rave hit, the Reapers stepped out from their disguises—their human skin—and showed the world who they really were. Pale-skinned, glowing, and beautiful, they duped the world with their promises to save the world from the Rave disease.
In their desperation, people believed them and embraced them all while getting vaccines that would kill them faster.
Most of those who survived, were consumed in the Hellfire that the Reapers called down from the sky.
It all started because of a spore.
Before the world went dark, a tiny thing that no one could see had infected millions of people.
No one noticed, of course. Fevers, chills, even shakes were normal enough that people had mistaken the epidemic that swept the nation as an odd flu.
But then, one by one, the infected fell into a coma until a good third of them were unconscious. More than half died at this stage.
The few who managed to survive woke as something...else. The spore had eaten away at their brains, leaving people driven by their baser urges. From coma one moment to ravenous fiends the next, the havoc they wrought in a short time was devastating.
The one subset of humanity not affected were the shifters—which didn’t help their likability factor one bit.
It didn’t matter that those were the same people that bore the brunt of containing the first wave of Ravers. No one had wanted to put down a rabid loved one and those moments of hesitation cost more lives. The shifters didn’t hesitate.
And that sealed their fate.
Once the first wave burnt out and the incidences of infection died off, all people remembered was the unaffected shifter population killing their loved ones while they were sick.
It was open season on monsters then, though not the ones that Dad preached against.
You would hear about a massacre on the news or see a lynching in the midst of zealots. They looked no different than the Ravers who had razed whole communities in their bloodlust.
My dad had grown quiet in those latter times, no longer moved to preach. He had stopped watching the news or television shows at all, which was just as well.
Soon after, the Hellfire rained down and there was nothing left to see.
My mother was one of the scientists who helped to isolate the spore. Though she was Dr. Lena Bishop among her colleagues, as an herb witch, she had been more attuned to plants and herbology in general.
They tried to make a vaccine, of course, but nothing worked. The vaccine either killed people outright or turned them into Ravers immediately—people whose brains were reduced to nothing but madness by the spore. They were driven to infect anyone and anything they came into contact with.
The scientists discovered that after the first wave of Ravers burnt out, the ones left behind had some kind of gene marker on them. In an attempt to avoid this genetic anomaly from happening in the future, the government, in connection with a big name pharmaceuticals company, patented the vaccine that my mother and her team had deemed ineffective.
The government didn’t care. They said that the people wanted them to come up
