It was the year 2045 when the apocalypse struck. An asteroid hit the northern pole and caused a massive tidal wave that wiped out Canada, most of Greenland, and Russia. The water moved like a wave across America, bringing the top half under about five feet of water before it started to recede. Most of the coastal cities were submerged in the next few months. While the asteroid struck four days before the wave of water reached America, most Americans didn’t know about it as the military held it a secret until the people deemed more important fled to South America, giving normal citizens only two days' forewarning before their lives were turned upside down.
After the initial wave of water struck, it rained for an entire month afterward, as the air saturation was so high from the influx of water. Some aquifers were polluted with salt water, making about thirty percent of all water unsafe to drink. The same went for open lakes and other sources until the rivers could flush the excess salt out of the system and back into the ocean.
People who left their safety after the initial long storm were greeted with an almost destroyed world. Many of the houses lost their structural integrity and fell apart, while ninety percent of America’s infrastructure was rendered useless. Anything left in the bottom floors of houses was ruined, along with cars and electricity. It meant that the vast majority of food was submerged and thus rendered inedible.
Only a few hours of reprieve were given before the planet was struck with its first mega-storm. A blizzard hit Pennsylvania, with temperatures well below freezing and a hundred-mile-an-hour wind chill. Anyone stuck outside when the melon-sized hail began to rain down was most likely killed, as anyone who hadn’t stored burnable items in the house was doomed to freeze to death before help could come for them.
People still managed to recover. At this point, only about twenty percent of humanity had died, but the year after the asteroid struck was greeted with similar catastrophic natural disasters. Most of California was submerged, but the gigantic earthquake finished the rest as a huge portion of the new coastline sank into the ocean as well, bringing Las Vegas only a few miles away from the ocean.
Tornadoes the size of Rhode Island. Fires spreading from people who didn’t want to freeze to death, and acid rain, along with the blizzards and earthquakes, rendered all aid useless. The disaster relief centers were overwhelmed, and many law-abiding citizens turned to crime to survive. It was only a month into the apocalypse when people began to gain superpowers.
It was fairly rare, only about one in every ten survivors gained powers, with each providing aid for their owners in their most desperate time of need. The powers ranged from strength, speed, or endurance from anywhere between five and fifteen times that of a normal human to the power to control metal or electricity. I was one of the first people to gain power in the first month, and mine was a unique spatial storage power. Follow current novᴇls on novel⚑fire.net
I tried to keep my humanity, to help those I deemed in need of my help, but soon my powers were more useful in keeping myself alive. If the person robbing you didn’t know you could store food, they couldn’t take it. Guns had suffered a similar problem, with most being rusted, making them questionable to use, but there were still many with them after everything that happened. As much as being five times stronger than the average person would help, that person could still be struck dead with enough bullets.
Small survivor towns and larger survivor cities started to spring up after humanity realized the government was never going to recover. It wasn’t until much later that people discovered that most of the government was overwhelmed with their own problems heading south. At some point during the second year of the apocalypse, humanity found out that disasters were the least of their worries.
People began to report seeing zombies. There were sightings as early as the first month of the apocalypse, but it wasn’t until the cresting of the first year that it was a well-known fact that the dead were walking among us again. They weren’t that strong to start, and people had developed a system to judge the strength of each zombie. Zeroes were just that, dead but standing, they functioned as nothing more than the first step to the next phase of the zombie to grow into.
Tier one zombies were weak and slow but relentless. While their senses were weaker, if they got the scent of blood or heard the cry of a person, they would pursue them relentlessly. Tier two zombies developed intelligence and gained similar strength, speed, and tribalism as humans. Some people who watched their family members change and grow into this form thought that they’d be able to talk to them. While the zombies could communicate with each other, they had an extreme hatred for humanity. Those zombie family members they watched change would sooner rip their throats out than attempt to talk to them.
Tier three, four, and five were just powerful zombies that posed dramatically different threats to humanity. A tier three zombie could fight on par with a powered individual, while a tier four would need a team to take down, and five would be the group effort of an entire city to dispose of. Even then, there would be casualties, with most of their deaths, the zombies had an almost fanatical love for the flesh of humans, and would rather die than let humans defeat them without causing them some pain.
I struggled to find my place in the apocalypse. My power was useful, but it provided no benefit to fighting, which made most super-powered individuals think they could control me. Some used a soft hand offering me women, those bases I liked the most, while others attempted to keep me loyal through threats and fear. I was betrayed multiple times and almost died, but I lived until the end of the first decade since the asteroid struck.
That was when I gained my second power, time control. It was too hard to understand, and even a person with the power to know what someone else's power did couldn’t figure out what mine did. My storage power had grown over the years. With the growth of my power, so did my body, as I was about five times more powerful than a normal human. That went with my intelligence and perception as I could think and act faster than most who weren’t focused in that direction. It was deemed utility, so I wasn’t offered any of the cores to increase its strength; even still, it grew on its own.
I went from having a one cubic foot area up to five cubic feet of storage. That was the smallest change, as I could also duplicate items inside. Only a single pound to start, which increased to five pounds by the tenth year. I also gained a secondary storage for a single vehicle, which made me far more valuable than I had been up until that point, as the leader could spend cores to upgrade the utility of the vehicle, which made me more valuable as well.
The next change was that I could use tools I knew how to use in real life to make changes to stored items. It meant that after I learned how to be a blacksmith, I could passively make swords with stored coal and metal. My final power was that I could now absorb the power of another person and gain a similar power to the one they had. It made the current leader of the city I was part of wary of me, and he started to keep me closer to him. If I gained the right power, I could challenge him in the future.