Charlie’s perception of time had seemed somehow altered. For one moment, he’d been alone as the situation around him transformed, then the next he’d been standing amid a crowd of other people. His initial reaction had been to get away from them, but upon looking around at them he’d realised they were just like him. Scared, confused, terrified and upon visual inspection, free from the Plague. He’d assumed in that instance that they’d all been like him, that they were to some degree at least, still themselves unlike those that had fallen to the nightmares and given themselves to the pus of humanity. They’d all been gathered in this horrific landscape of pain and agony together by some means that eluded him, and most probably any kind of logic or means familiar to humans all together.

Charlie had darted his gaze around at the crowd before looking beyond, to something in the near distance. Swinging his head around, he’d realised there had been something surrounding them; dark figures on the horizon in all directions, some of them close, some of them far but the mid ground around them was thick with them. He’d suddenly been struck with the image of cattle, surrounded and with no where to go as a nightmare closed in to the hapless prey. His pulse had rocketed with the realisation, hands shaking, his whole body abuzz with sheer horrified terror as he finally got a good look at the figures surrounding them. They’d already been closing in but he saw their odd shapes, the alien gait in their steps and the inhuman faces staring at them all as they closed in. Some with arms and legs, generally humanoid in form; others completely alien, quadrupedal and with forms he could scarcely describe aside from having horrifying features enough to strike fear into the very soul of humanity. They’d closed in, closer and closer as the crowd around him grew into a frenzy of terrified screams and panicked thrashing; the last horrifying burst of energy before the final cataclysm. The things outside had closed in enough that Charlie could hear the ragged breaths, the inhuman voices of the figures unknown as the crowd suddenly stopped as if freezing with fear before realising their impending doom.
“What’s going on! Where are we!” Charlie heard a woman scream out from somewhere in the crowd amid the uneasy near silence.
An inhuman voice replied from somewhere outside, one of the figures stood in wait. “The feast! The Harvest!”
“Finally she comes into this world, the nocturnal feast begins!” Another voice said from somewhere outside.
“The harvest!” Another voice shouted before the entire mass of them replied by erupting into a cacophonous, monstrous roar.
“She is arriving! Soon her mind will be here! The resurrection will begin!”
With that a deafening roar emerged as a gigantic column appeared somewhere off in the distance. Charlie couldn’t see exactly what it had been other than an obscuring black shape pointing up into the air. The emergence of the thing had been like the green light to the horrid entities as they suddenly closed in; running at full speed before the crowd burst into one last frenzied, terrified burst of movement before all hell had broken loose.

Once the demonic entities had closed in, everything had erupted into chaos as Charlie suddenly found himself in the midst of a morbid feast of the human flesh. Creatures, demons of all manor of inhuman forms; claws, teeth, all of it used to rip apart and consume the humans, the lambs of the god. He’d been able to do nothing but watch as he saw bodies, shattered arms and legs mulched and ground in the maws of the abominations. Screams, terror, agony filled the air around him as everyone had been torn apart; their reddish viscera spraying and streaming through the air before falling into the mouth of some horrid demon. Charlie had ran as best he could trying to avoid whatever nightmare awaited him next. Around him people had been chased down, the laughing, guttural and demonic as the helpless fell one by one into the deathly, inescapable grips of the demons. He hadn’t known which way, or from what he was running other than just trying to avoid the disgusting, terrible maws that had already consumed so many in a matter of minutes.
He’d ran past a site where he found several disembowelled, but still very much alive people before spotting just beyond yet another atrocity. Pulled in half, torn apart alive; their screams a hideous din before being suddenly cut off with a sickening spray of blood and viscera. He watched helplessly as a handful of people had been consumed, all of it now a horrendous vortex blood and pain swirling around him as something terribly real.
Eventually he’d kept running through everything when he’d been chased by something; he hadn’t dared look back at but instead just ran. The fear, the constant, overbearing fear of that fate that had befallen so many others; it had scarred him already in ways he could scarcely believe but it had kept him alive. It had kept him alive and all he could do was run, run, because his life depended on it, whatever his life was worth in all that horror anyway. Whilst in full sprint he’d suddenly found himself tumbling down an incline; head over heels he’d gone and he hadn’t even seen it coming. The landscape had shifted, higher, lower, all of it unfamiliar and alien, nothing making sense anymore. By falling, he’d escaped the pursuing demon but he came to a stop at the bottom to find himself in some kind of watery opening littered with the remains of broken humans. The sky remained black, nothing; but the water he suddenly realised, hadn’t been water, but blood. A thick and dark red, bubbled, inconsistent with drying, coagulating patches. Pieces, ragged and torn floated amid the debris of human remains that stuck up from the surface like jagged ruins; some of them not quite so broken, in fact some of them didn’t even look damaged. Suddenly a body he’d been looking at emerged out from the water. Alive, a man stood up to look at him. He’d screamed out before his head had exploded in a mist of reds and stringy purples; the body falling back with a splash before something else, much larger began moving under the surface. He’d immediately turned back and tried to scramble back up the incline; behind him, whatever abomination had emerged from the pool must have been consuming the remains. The gut wrenching sounds of shattering bones and tearing flesh percolated just slightly above the sounds of the splashing and growling which had flung Charlie into a more intense panic. He’d scrambled back up the incline bit by bit; tiny horrid faces in the surface screaming at him as he hauled himself up. At that point he hadn’t thought about what might have been at the top; he just went, fleeing from one scene of dread to another.

He’d gone on like that; running, fleeing from one terrible fate to another for some time. It had been as if his perception of time had once again been meddled with as he’d suddenly realised there appeared to be no one left. He’d somehow found his way back to an open plain similar to that from where he’d been when it had all started, but he’d been all alone. The shouts and roars of the demons now seeming distant as if they’d eaten their fill and were falling back but it made no sense to him. Why, if he was still alive had they still retreated? He was out in the open, vulnerable, alone, the perfect prey, why hadn’t they taken him? Although it had appeared he’d escaped the morbid fate, it brought him no sense of ease in any capacity. He was still stuck in a horrid, alien landscape that had served as the death grounds for countless people that had died in the most horrific ways imaginable. Yet he was alive; there had to be more to it. As much as he wanted to just somehow get out from there, he knew instinctively there had to be something else.
With that, the hellish landscape of red and black suddenly disappeared as he seemed to snap back into some kind of semi reality. Within just a second, gone was the hellish site of the harvest and he’d found himself back in the world he’d known. A sigh of relief, a release of weight gone in a long exhalation as his shoulders sagged. But then he’d realised everything still hadn’t been right. The sky had remained black, the landscape of the town he’d known so well, polluted, poisoned, overgrown by the effects of what the Plague had done, the pus of humanity. He’d looked around to find everything altered, ruined, some of it destroyed as if he’d returned from a war he knew nothing about. But there were no columns of smoke in the distance or fires burning, nothing to indicate that any one thing had occurred in the lead up to that point. The pus of humanity, that grotesque thing, macabre and vile, was everywhere. It had been as if since the harvest, the stuff had grown, and by no small measure either. He saw entire buildings, entire areas of land now consumed by the hideous meat that had become the human race. He’d checked himself, looked himself over, checking he was still who he thought he was, if what he thought had happened, had happened. Looking down he was still entirely drenched in blood, most of it in the later stages of drying. His face felt wrinkly like something waiting to peel off. Rubbing his finger over his forehead a thin roll of dried blood clung to his fingertip, the harvest really had happened. He’d thought for a moment it had been yet another vision, another nightmare but it had been real, like before he wasn’t sure if the revelation had been a relief or not. Screams, howls and roars still echoed out through the unnatural night, the sounds of things waiting, but for what he wasn’t quite sure, at least until he then realised some of them were familiar to him. He’d heard those roars during the harvest; he’d realised in that moment, the rest of his life were to be an unending tale of dread.

Years Later

The place was filthy, disgusting, dank and fetid; but they’d all found themselves there because it had proven itself a safer place than the outside. The old world was gone, nothing more than a memory of another time; but they, the humans had served as the only thing to live through and into a new and terrible epoch. Charlie had been there for what must have been a matter of years, but with everything being what it had been, he couldn’t have been sure. The days had become little more than a grim reddish colour in what little of the sky they could see from down there. The rest of it just an interminable, endless night where the demons constantly roamed. Time had amalgamated into a hideous, relentless parade of constant terror, an inescapable dread of being subject to events unnatural, of things not meant to be.
The settlement where Charlie and all the rest of them had stayed hadn’t been somewhere any of them had remembered from the old world. The place had somehow been brought into existence only after the harvest; a structure rising out from the ashes of the quickly dematerialising old world. The place had been like a crevice, an armpit of the world. Where ever they were it had been somewhere very low down; for all around them colossal structures surrounded the settlement giving the impression they had been settling in the rotten sewer of some inconceivably large construct. They were all down there in the dark and horrid, in the damp and toxic wastes of a building unknown. It had been as if the place had been there for much longer than their memories would have indicated. The walls had had a long series of haphazardly built gantries that were suspended above the toxic swamp at the very bottom, yet no one there remembered any involvement in its construction; it had been more like it had been home to some other group of people long before. But they weren’t alone; the filthy, toxic waters at the bottom had been home to entities, creatures that hadn’t existed at any point before the harvest. Emerging from the ever present pus of humanity, strange and disgusting slime like things moved sluggishly through the waters. Creatures of completely alien forms waded through the filth like wild animals foraging for food, and all the while, the demons remained, ever present and just on the periphery. Never fully there, but never fully gone.

There had been about twenty or so other people there with Charlie. All of them like him having survived the Plague, the nightmares and the harvest, and now they existed in a world unknown to them. They had all compared their stories together; everything fitting together in its own, disjointed kind of way. By the way the world had changed, Charlie at first had wondered if each of them had come through from a different reality; but no, they’d all been from the world he knew, the world of the Plague and the pus of humanity. All they could do was survive, survive and hope to fight another day. They’d lost a fair number of people to the filthy swamp already. Some of them venturing out in search of food, no doubt they’d stumbled across a wretched slime or maybe succumbed to the toxicity of the waters or even worse, walked into the path of a wandering demon out there in the darkness. Ever since the harvest, the demons had become a constant presence, a constant threat. Every couple of weeks or so someone would go missing; whether directly attacked by a demon, or quietly disappearing in the small hours of the endless night with a distant scream, they’d been slowly picked off but not enough that they’d been extinguished completely. Several times now groups of two or three people would arrive from the outside. The place wasn’t ideal but it at least provided shelter from the chaos of out there in the open. Some of the people, one couple in particular, had even been adventurous enough to attempt to procreate, to bring a new life into the world. Every so often the demons would attack though, spaced out assaults that had been far more aggressive and direct. It had happened twice since Charlie had been there. Without warning they’d rushed in out of nowhere; the events of the harvest playing out all over again only this time in the gantries and the toxic sludge of the sewer below. But what had been most unusual and perplexing had been their motives, their tactics. On both attacks the demons had rushed in and viciously consumed a substantial percentage of the little population; but even when they could have, the demons hadn’t finished everyone. Like the harvest, they’d backed off and retreated before consuming everyone. The survivors had talked amongst themselves, debated and eventually concluded that the demons were somehow up to something, or at least following some kind of contingency for the people, for the damned as they were calling themselves. But that was how it had been, they’d rushed in on two spaced out, separate occasions; consumed well over half of them, then in spite of quite obviously being able to eat the rest, backed off and left them. Both occasions had left the entire remainder of the group in a deeper, much more real and visceral kind of terror as the memories of the previous feast lingered ever more presently with each passing moment. All of them had collectively been more on edge, more aware and terrified of not knowing who might be next or when or from where the next attack might come from.
But they were the damned, and subject to the every whim of the dead god.

Charlie had heard a whimpering in the darkness, one of the gantry platforms above in the shack where the couple expecting a baby had been staying. He’d wandered up the cold metal frame to the hut to investigate when he saw the pair of them sat on the bed. The man with an arm around the woman who was clutching her torso with both hands as she cried softly into his chest.
“He’s not moving.” Charlie heard her cry.
“He was moving yesterday, kicking like he always does. But now there’s nothing.”
Charlie hadn’t said anything to them, the man had seen him and just nodded with watery eyes before Charlie had left them.
“He’s gone, my baby, he’s gone.” She said as he headed back down the gantry.
It hadn’t surprised him. Since they’d been down there they’d been in constant fear, in a constant state of stress and terror of what would come next. Charlie hadn’t had access to a mirror in all the time he’d been there but he imagined he looked terrible; aged and tired from sleepless delirium and constant terror. It was no environment for a new life to be brought into. The couple had actually survived the last attack; in fact Charlie had been surprised the stress and terror of it hadn’t been enough to miscarry the pregnancy back then several months ago. But sadly enough, it had to happen sooner or later. Not by choice, but causality.

It had been as if the tragic miscarriage had somehow turned the demons attention toward them. Charlie hadn’t thought about it until then, but over the last few months they’d had quite a few new arrivals and the last attack had been months ago. He’d been down in the tunnels with a handful of others when they’d suddenly been aware of something, a presence in their midst and not just a poisonous slime sitting under the waters scummy surface. Suddenly with a few loud, lumbering footsteps it was happening again. A scream from a woman at the end before that horrid, wet pulpy sound went through the air and next, several demons came charging down at them from the darkness of the tunnel. Charlie had ran with the rest of them through the tunnels. Their footsteps kicking up the filthy water trickling down the middle as the demons bellowed and roared in pursuit of their next meal. He, like the rest of them had ran without a thought in his mind but knowing full well that the tunnels had been the best place to try and lose them. The gantries had been really quite hopeless at evading the demons; Charlie had seen others attempt to try and climb higher up the suspended structures only to helplessly fall into the crushing maw of the demons that, could actually scale walls and ladders unexpectedly well. The group had ran through the nameless corners of the sewage tunnels, every so often a new group would emerge and join before being split up again as they ran frantically through the filthy depths. All around Charlie heard cries of pain, of anguish, of death as more and more, one by one they fell to the demons. He hadn’t known how long or which way he’d been running but he and a small group had suddenly found themselves running directly toward another group. Both sides had demons chasing them, they’d fought for several seconds pleading not to go one way but the other instead, a sickening paradox from which there was no way out. He spotted the once pregnant woman in the crowd before realising they’d been closed in by the demons.

The demons encircled the group; all of them different and alien in form, their grotesque features all on terrifying display before the group of the helpless and the damned. They’d quickly started snapping up people here and there in fast, messy slashes that sent lashes of blood through the air as the screams were suddenly cut off. The once pregnant woman had stood there, terrified just as Charlie had been when the demons appeared to take notice of her. Their strange, inhuman eyes scanning her form; their gaze one of twisted want, of something Charlie couldn’t quite grasp.
“Woman.” One of them said.
“Mmm, the sacrificial woman.”
One by one each demon seemed to speak up.
“We can eat her.”
“But before we do that…”
The words sent a cold, freezing, morbid sense of unrelenting dread through him as the unstoppable nightmare continued.
One of them, a large unknown blob shaped thing grabbed her with a series of foul tentacle looking appendages that almost immediately proceeded to tear away her clothes. Naked and helpless in the demons grasp; she thrashed and writhed in terrified protest as another, more humanoid demon approached. The womans eyes went wide and vacuous with the horrified realisation of what was happening, of what was about to happen. Charlie had been helpless but somehow still hadn’t been consumed. His body told him to stay still, for any sign of struggle would have signalled his doom. Forced to watch, he saw as the demon put its hand on the womans bulged stomach.
“She has a snack for me, a starter before the main course.” It said before it thrust its long, stick like fingers inside her.
The blob like demon held her legs wide open as the other pushed further, then further inside as the woman screamed to the limit of her capabilities, to the edges of her humanity and beyond as if becoming something else entirely. The disgusting hand stopped a fair way inside her before retracting back out. Blood staining the black hand, dripping, running to the floor in a horrific, disgusting display of twisted debauch. The tips of the fingers emerged back out when Charlie, in tears at this point, realised the form that the fingers had pulled back out. A tiny human fetus, coiled into a bloody ball and covered in the deflated fleshy white film from the womb. The tiny body motionless, dead, no noise, hanging from the demons morbid grasp. The woman, the mother now changed altogether into a different state of agonising hysteria. The demon had then gone and tossed the fetus into its wretched, filthy maw; the body going down in a series of soft fleshy crunches, a sickening parade of demonic want and hunger.
After that moment had passed, Charlie had been virtually made, forced to watch as it went on further. The demon had stood there as it watched the writhing, suddenly dying energy of the woman; all the while something else emerging into view. Then he saw it; a huge, massive and disgusting phallic shaped appendage emerge from the underside of the demon. Charlie couldn’t bare to see any more, but helplessly he’d watched on knowing he couldn’t come back from what he’d already seen. He’d got the sense this was the end, the end of everything.
“Now for a bit of fun!” The demon shouted out to which the others let out a roar.
It had been as if the appendage, the dick had ballooned up to a truly inhuman size; the tip of it pointing at the woman like an accusing finger. The demon then went inside in a single, painful looking and bloody thrust that suddenly brought back a horrid and ear splitting screech from the woman. With every second the demons surrounding them grew into a louder tumult as the demon began impossibly sliding back and forward, in and out with its member that appeared to bloat the womans lower abdomen with every sickening thrust. It had gone on, just on and on, the demons phallus seeming to grow bigger with time, far too big for a human.
It had been pretty soon that it looked as though the woman had been discharging more and more blood. Every drip and splash of it a thing for the demons to frolic in, a bloody sexual massacre of the human form. The demon grew larger still with time, its dick now looking enough to begin opening the woman up. Thrust after horrific thrust the sick noises of bloody squelching and running blood grew louder; the mostly dead looking womans body growing wider and wider with every thrust. The demon had gone on faster and with more powerful thrusts as it became abundantly clear the woman was no longer alive, the demon fucking a mutilated corpse. Then it had all happened suddenly. The body, stretched and wide and with parts from inside showing; the body came apart altogether. A horrifying and morbid tearing sound as the body simply split in two through the middle. The demons phallus emerging through all the blood and intestinal tract as streams and a messy spatterings of blood and viscera went through the air showering everything like some kind of sex act from hell. The demons had then rushed in, pulling and tearing their own little piece of the body like a pack tigers ripping apart a lamb.
By that point Charlie had given up. There was nothing more, no point to survival, it had been the end of everything. He’d tried to survive, tried to carry on, but for what? For even more misery and pain to follow? He’d realised that would only be the future for the ones left behind, the ones that didn’t get eaten and instead chosen to carry on like he had in the past. He’d then felt something go through him. A sharp pain and a wet splash before seeing those teeth, those terrible teeth lining the maw that he’d feared so much; but it had seemed more like a mercy after everything. After everything that had happened, death was a mercy indeed.

He’d realised after that something yet remained of him. Some non physical aspect of his awareness, a conscious epitaph floating in the space between reality and somewhere else entirely. He could see around him in the infinite void the others that had perished, not just in that moment but over the course of everything that had occurred in the last several years. No longer could he think or feel as he had done while physical and alive. He’d found himself merely as an observer, an interdimensional tourist free from worry or any other preoccupation that had plagued him in the past. Knowledge came to him from a means unknown, thoughts, ideas, information entering whatever awareness remained of him.
Around him in an infinite void hung a myriad of lights glistening faintly in the space. First thousands, then millions, billions of them being gently carried along by an invisible current toward something unknown. Those lights, their energy had somehow been familiar to him; as if at some point it had meant something to him. They had been the ones, like him that had come from the now dematerialising Earth realm. He’d even realised he had actually been one of those points of light at some point in the past; the physical body, its energy harvested and sent on to parts unknown.
She had then appeared through the void; shapeless, formless and now in a not so diminished state as she’d once been. The lights, each one now gravitating toward the effigy, the resurrected Queen Of The Damned as with each second, she grew in power. The demons, her spawn had acted as the farmers of the human race. Without realising it the human race had been processed, its collective energy harvested by the demons and sent on to the terrible spectacle of a dead god; the latent Queen Of The Damned.
After that there had been no knowing what would or could become of Earth. The Queen Of The Damned; the infinite, terrible and reality warping entity held significant sway over the Earth realm from there on. Every being, every ideology, god, entity, the very fabric of reality had all been rolled up into that one vast and unknowable being that defied all understanding and known limits of reality. A being that knew no limits, no faith; and still the human race had unknowingly contributed toward it, resurrected it.

The End