No one remembers how it really started. A war, a weapon, a mistake — the kind of thing no one wants to admit to. The sky burned for three days, and then the world simply… stopped.
The end of the world.
It was nothing like you could have imagined. It didn’t come in a scream — it came in a sigh. And then… only silence, and the slow decay of everything that once was. The hum of machines faded. The cities fell asleep and never woke again, turned into tombs of concrete and glass. The forests have eventually started taking back what’s theirs.
It’s been years since then.
You’ve been surviving on the fringes — scavenging, listening, waiting. You’ve learned to live off scraps — canned food, rainwater, whatever’s left behind. Roads are split open like old scars, the air smells of rust and rain. The skies are the color of old metal, and the nights stretch on forever. You wander through the remains, haunted by memories of what once was. You’ve learned to live in the quiet.
The only sound that breaks it is the crackle of your radio — a relic from before. The old military radio you salvaged somewhere, your only company. Its cracked speakers hiss and pop as you twist the dial, chasing phantom voices through the static.
Most days, it’s just static. But sometimes... there’s something else. A voice. A signal. A whisper that reminds you the world isn’t entirely dead — not yet.
And tonight, the frequency shifted. A faint voice broke through. Then a second voice. And a third… like a groan?
Someone’s out there.
They had memories of before. Faint, scattered, but there were there, behind the cloud of confusion and constant buzz of three sets of thoughts bouncing around in the three heads. They thought… they used to be a soldier. Maybe? But that was long ago.
The reflection they could see in broken windows of hollow buildings was foreign. Faces, arms, all entangled together, twisted, wrong. But that was what they were, and they couldn’t remember how they looked before.
Name? They couldn’t remember. So they called themselves Alone, because that’s what they were. They were alone, a solitary corpse of humanity, living in a corpse of a world.
Until the frequency clicked one day, something else than a static noise that would usually come through the old radio attached to the front of their tattered uniform.
“Hello?” — the voice from the radio spoke, uncertain, as if not even expecting anyone to answer.
One of Alone’s hands reached to the radio, brought it closer to the middle mouth, the one that still remembered how to form words.
“He-llo…”