Hi Everyone,
I'm new to the forum but have been a huge Batman fan for over three decades. A few years ago, my creative juices were flowing, so I took to my computer and put together the beginnings of a story set in the Bat-verse. I was reading through this story a few days ago and realized that I'm still quite fond of it. I've included some of it below. If you're so inclined, read through it. I'd love any feedback you may have. Due to posting limitations, I'm only able to include a small percentage of it, so if people are interested, I can keep adding to it in subsequent posts. Also, if you'd rather read it as a PDF, email me at caseycs21@yahoo.com and I'll shoot you a copy.
Take care!
Casey
Apocalypse
I
Like everything that goes awry, things were normal until they weren’t. The hustle and bustle of daily life throughout Gotham, throughout the USA, throughout all of Earth had moved forward, untouched, beautiful in its continuity: merely another day into the face of assumed eternity. Algae and moss and bacteria clung to the rims of unscrubbed toilets; the undersides of submersed boats; atop the corrugated faces of rocks extending from the surface of trickling streams, slowly growing, expanding, green and fuzzy and lumpy. Ants and bees and birds darted about with single-minded focus and intent, constructing their homes and colonies and systems of order. Humans, too, did their thing, often with similar intent, walking and talking and drinking and fighting and loving and killing. From the bums in the allies, clutching bottles of cheap liquor and beer to their chests as if the contents within the brown bags were rare treasures; to the baggy-eyed teachers in the schools, working tirelessly with the distracted youth; to the blues in their police cars, casting wary stares at the men in sagging pants on dilapidated street corners; to the elite in their mansions and fancy cars and floating casinos: it seemed reality as they all knew it would go on into perpetuity.
A derelict moved down a dimly lit alley between two shoddy apartment complexes. He had tattoos on his bald head and track marks running the length of each of his arms. He shouted and hollered, making a ruckus. A room above lit up, a window opened, and a bottle came soaring downward, narrowly missing the man. “Shut up!” cried someone from a different apartment.
“All good things!” exclaimed the derelict. He was staring at the moon’s pallid and cratered face. “They all come to an end! Do you hear me? They all come to an end!”
“Lunatic,” someone from above grumbled.
He was right, though—the derelict. All good things do come to an end.
It started with a groan of sorts. Faint to quiet to loud. Almost as if a great, behemoth creature from a monster flick was shrieking at the camera. People covered their ears, looked at each other, tried to ask, “What is that?” but they couldn’t hear anything other than that awful roar. And then the tremor started. Of course they couldn’t hear it, but they felt it, from all directions. It came up from the ground beneath them, down from the emptiness above them, from their sides, rattling them with such a ferocity that it hurt. Their teeth clattered together, pitchers of water and beer at bars and restaurants splashed and spilled and then entirely toppled over, plates and glasses and precious China crashed out of cabinets in homes.
And then there was the impact. It hit so hard that the bridges that connected Gotham to the mainland swayed, like an unsteady Jenga tower. Cars were abruptly tossed askew, landing on their sides, pressed against buildings and guard rails, some thrust entirely upside down, others twisted against one another, their steel bodies crumpled like tin foil. The water about the island came frothing over the land, white, like suds in a bath. People were driven in all directions all at once, sent soaring through the air, landing and rolling endlessly, their bodies twisted and broken.
And then, save for alarms sounding over and over, there was silence. No sound at all. And then, after a time, the chirping of a bird, the barking of a dog, the braying of an animal somewhere far off. Then the voices of the humans: disoriented, discombobulated, afraid. Sirens, then: the police, the ambulance, the fire department.
“I told you!” exclaimed the derelict from within the shadowed recesses of a dank alleyway. “It all comes to an end! All good things!”
But as he blathered on and on, his form suddenly went from shadowed to blinding white, as if a light shined upon massive and pristine diamond encompassed him. The light came down on them all, from all directions, blinding and brilliant and beautiful, a perfect white, so hot that it hurt. It encompassed Gotham, the USA, the entire world—and then the Earth somehow opened wide. The plates beneath the Earth’s crust split apart and then spiraled upward, exploding through streets and buildings and valleys, thrusting upward toward the heavens, hundreds of yards. Great mounds of rubble and ancient stone and gouts of lava spiraled upward as the tectonic plates radically shifted position: that from below was now above. A great rainbow of red lava and yellow stone and black oil and brown dirt, spraying everywhere, made a great and beautiful and vehement cascade. And then everything seemed to slide downward, into great stretches of black abyss where tectonic plates had once supported life above. Entire miles of surface spiraled below: apartment complexes and shopping malls, highways and housing subdivisions, a spread of mountains and a series of schools, parking garages and skyscrapers. The aforementioned bridges broke apart, like a mass of connected Legos bashed against a wall, and gargantuan swells of ocean water churned upward and outward, covering all of Gotham, frothing into the obsidian abyss, leaving a trail of choral and seaweed and floundering fish in its wake.
And then the blinding light was gone and it was replaced by a blackness so resolute and dense that it, too, was blinding. It was as if a black sheet had been placed over the Earth, allowing no light in. And then nothing. A long period of nothingness. It was as if a great creator had pressed the Pause button on some intergalactic remote control. And it stayed this way for a long time. Save for some alarms and the froth of the troubled ocean and the periodic cracking and splintering of further tectonic plates and that strange braying noise in the distance, there was no sound at all.
And then it all seemed to start again, as if the Pause button had been pressed for a second time on that intergalactic remote control by the omnipotent creator. It started with a shrieking wind. It cut through the billowing smoke and stench of burning oil—hot and acrid, thick with heat and vitriol, more poisonous than life-giving—but the wind, nonetheless. And, soon after, through the dense blackness that shrouded everything, came a gentle lightening of hues above: daylight beginning to work away at the plumed haze enveloping the Earth.
Perhaps it was this light that drew them forth. Like timid plants, exposed to sunlight for the first time, the survivors of this grandiose catastrophe—what few of them there were—emerged from beneath magnificent piles of twisted steel and dead flesh and blocks of unearthed soil to face the day again. They moved through great plumes of inky blackness—black shadows moving through black smoke—until these shadows found one another, their faces ebony with suit save for the swaths their running tears left behind. The shadows embraced one another, touched one another. Something about this human contact—each knowing that he or she was not the only survivor of whatever it was that had happened—brought forth great, racking cries, deep and profound and guttural, both distressed and joyed at once.
A barrel chested, potbellied, and bearded man led them. He had a harsh face, but his eyes were soft. He lit torches and pounded on a slab of steel against a car fender, using it as a makeshift gong, its call reverberating outward across Gotham’s broken remnants. They came to him, more survivors. Some limped; others ran; others moved in stealth, quiet and hesitant—but they all came to him. They heard the banging and saw the twinkling flames from a distance and made their way to the big man’s encampment until there was fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty of them. He motioned them to sit, so they did so, atop cluttered stones and cinder blocks and smashed motors and car doors. Between two torches, he sat on his haunches and told them his name was Robert and that he was from Arkansas. “I was visiting family,” he said. He had a smoker’s voice. “My sister. Her girls. Her girls’ boys. I’d put it off for too long. Hadn’t seen my sister’s girls in years. I’d be surprised if their boys even remembered my name.” He paused, frowned as if he were pained, and then continued, “But enough of the past. The present is the concern.”
He led them from the encampment through the ruins of what had once been a great, gothic city. They sought out water, food, shelter, weapons. Sometimes they would stop at those great, gaping potholes, and stare into them, wordlessly, as if doing so would somehow bring the city back to them. Once, a survivor, a black-haired woman named Rosalva, while staring into a chasm, had exclaimed, “Look! That angle! Through the smoke: the top of a building!” But she had been wrong. It had merely been a billow of smoke, curling upward at an awkward angle, looking somewhat like the squared perimeter of a manmade structure. “No, Mama,” her little daughter, Yesenia, had said. “It’s just smoke. More smoke.”
“Illusion,” whispered a little Indian man named Pranash. “It’s all we’re left with.”