Before the Lights Go Out
The first sign wasn't the lights. It was the silence. The constant, low hum of the city that had been the soundtrack to Maya’s entire life just… stopped. In the sudden void, she could hear her own heartbeat thudding in her ears. Then, the lights in her high-rise apartment flickered and died, plunging the world into a deep, unnatural twilight.
From her window, the view was terrifying. The sprawling metropolis of Aethelburg was a black scar against the night. No headlights snaked through the streets. No neon signs glowed. No planes dotted the sky. It was a total, catastrophic grid collapse.
Her emergency radio, a relic her doomsday-prepper brother had gifted her, spat only static. Then, a single, repeating message from a dying battery somewhere: "…not a drill… Cascading failure… ETA to full blackout, three minutes… Find safety…" The transmission dissolved into a hiss.
Three minutes. The message had been broadcasting for an hour.
Panic, cold and sharp, clawed up her throat. This wasn't a simple blackout. This was the end of the world, delivered not with a bang, but with a switch being flipped.
She was about to back away from the window when she saw it. A flicker of light in the building across the street. A single office on the 40th floor was illuminated by the frantic dance of flashlight beams. Figures moved inside. As she watched, one of them was thrown against the glass—a violent, jerking motion. The figure slumped and did not move. The flashlight beams converged, and for a single, horrifying second, they illuminated the victors. They weren't looting. They were hunting.
Maya stumbled back, her breath catching. The civilized world hadn't just gone dark; it had shattered.
A sound from her own apartment door made her freeze. A soft, scraping. Metal on metal. Someone was trying to pick the lock.
Her phone was dead. The landline was silent. She was on the 32nd floor, trapped in a steel and concrete tomb. The scraping became more persistent. She thought of the hunters across the street. Were they already here?
Her brother’s voice echoed in her memory. "When the lights go out for good, Maya, the monsters won't be hiding under the bed anymore. They'll be knocking on your door."
She had laughed at him. Now, his paranoid gifts were her only hope. She crept to the hall closet, her hands shaking as she felt for the heavy-duty lockbox. The code was her birthday. Inside, nestled in foam, was a compact crossbow he’d insisted she learn to use.
The lock on her front door clicked.
Maya loaded a bolt, the action feeling both alien and instinctual. She raised the weapon, her arms trembling, and aimed at the door as it began to swing inward. A sliver of darkness from the hallway appeared, wider, wider.
This was it. The moment the old world ended and the new, brutal one began. Not when the lights went out, but in the terrible silence that followed, broken only by the sound of your own heart, and the creak of an opening door.
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