The sky wasn't blue. Marcus didn't think it had ever been blue, not really.
In his entire life, the sky had always been the color of a week-old bruise—purples, toxic oranges, and a suffocating, perpetual gray. The elders talked about the sun like it was a friend, a warm hand on your shoulder. To Marcus, the sun was just a pale, sickly eye glaring through the cloud layer, offering no heat, only radiation.
Click… click… click.
The Geiger counter strapped to his wrist kept its steady, rhythmic beat. It was the heartbeat of the wasteland. As long as the clicks were slow, you were alive. If they sped up, you were already dead; your body just hadn't figured it out yet.
Marcus adjusted the rag wrapped around his face, the fabric stiff with dried sweat and grime. His backpack straps dug into his bony shoulders, each step scraping against skin cracked from cold and hunger. He was twenty, but his joints moved like they belonged to an old man. Malnutrition aged you from the inside out.
He shouldn't be this far out. The ruins of the King of Prussia Mall were deep in the Red Zone. But he didn't have a choice.
Lena.
The name struck him like a knife twisted under his ribs. When he'd left the settlement this morning, her breathing had been shallow, rattling wet and deep in her chest. Dust pneumonia. If he didn't bring back clean water or calories—anything—she wouldn't make it to the end of the week.
"Just one can," Marcus whispered into the silence. "Peaches. Beans. Dog food. I don't care."
He stepped through the shattered glass doors of what used to be a department store. The air inside was still and stagnant, smelling of wet rot and plastic left too long under dead lights.
Something crunched under his boot.
Marcus froze, hand drifting to the rusted pipe hanging from his belt. Ten seconds. Twenty.
Nothing moved.
He looked down. He'd stepped on a fallen newspaper box, rusted shut but intact enough to protect the paper inside. He knelt, wiping dust from the yellowed plastic.
THE WASHINGTON POST – NOVEMBER 12, 2020
The ink was faded but legible.
PEACE TALKS COLLAPSE. DEATH TOLL PASSES 400 MILLION.
Below the headline was the photo. That photo.
General Silas Thorne, kneeling in the rubble of a demolished house. In his arms was the limp body of a woman in a floral dress. His wife. Next to her, two small shapes covered in soot and blood—his daughters.
Marcus stared into Thorne's hollow eyes. Not a general. Not a leader. Just a man who had nothing left.
The elders said that was the moment the world ended. Not because of politics or resources. Because one man with launch codes decided a world without his daughters wasn't a world worth saving.
He burned the world for ghosts, Marcus thought. Billions dead because one man couldn't bear the quiet.
He stood. He couldn't eat history.
He moved deeper into the store, checking shelves long since stripped bare. Behind the counter—nothing. Under fallen displays—nothing but droppings and dust.
Despair tightened around his throat. He couldn't go back to Lena with nothing. He couldn't watch the light fade from her eyes.
In frustration, he kicked a mound of debris. A slab of drywall shifted, revealing something impossible.
Color.
Marcus blinked. Nothing in the wasteland had color.
He knelt and brushed away plaster dust. It wasn't food. It was a book—wrapped in three layers of Ziploc bags, sealed meticulously by some survivor who never returned for it.
Invincible: The Ultimate Collection, Volume 1.
His breath caught. He peeled open the plastic.
The cover was vibrant—yellow and blue, a man in a suit flying upward through a brilliant sky. Not falling. Flying.
He opened the book. The sweet, musky scent of aging paper hit him like a memory of a world he'd never lived in.
Cities soared with glass towers. Skies were a clear, impossible blue. People laughed in diners and complained about prom instead of radiation poisoning.
And there were heroes.
Marcus traced a panel where Omni-Man caught a falling bus.
"Look at you," he whispered. "You don't even know how lucky you are."
For a moment, he wasn't a starving scavenger. He was weightless. Limitless. A person who had the strength to stop someone like Silas Thorne before he could turn a key and end the world.
If I had that power, Marcus thought, I wouldn't just save the world. I'd fix it.
Something above him shifted—soft, faint, easy to ignore.
He didn't notice.
Scritch.
The noise sliced through the aisle like a razor. Wet. Heavy. Organic.
The Geiger counter spiked.
Click-click-click-click.
His blood turned cold.
From the shadows of the shoe department, two yellow eyes opened. Slitted, reptilian. A third eye blinked awake on the creature's forehead. Then a fourth on its cheek.
A Strider.
It stepped forward, scales glistening under the fractured sunlight filtering through the roof. Once a mountain lion. Now a nightmare shaped by forty years of fallout. Six legs, each tipped with obsidian claws. Tumors bulged beneath its skin like writhing stones.
It let out a low, chittering hum. It smelled the blood moving through his veins.
"No," Marcus breathed. "Not today. Lena needs me."
He didn't scream. He ran.
His boots hammered the tile, kicking up clouds of ash. Behind him, claws clicked faster—then thundered.
Move. Move. Move.
He vaulted a collapsed cosmetics counter, shards of glass bursting beneath him. The beast's breath panted hot and wet on his back.
The loading dock was ahead. A hole in the brickwork. Light.
Twenty feet.
Ten.
Marcus threw himself forward just as the Strider leapt.
Something slammed into him like a wrecking ball.
The impact didn't knock him down—it broke him. Ribs snapped like twigs. He flew across the dock, smashing against a concrete pillar before collapsing onto the ground.
Air wouldn't come. Blood filled his mouth. His vision blurred at the edges.
His backpack had torn open. The comic slid across the concrete, pages fanning open.
One page fluttered in the wind—Mark Grayson, battered and broken. But in the next panel, his father arrived. The save. The miracle.
A shadow swallowed the light.
The Strider towered over him, saliva dripping from its jaws and sizzling on the pavement. Not angry. Just hungry.
Marcus's fingers twitched toward the comic. Toward color. Toward hope.
Stories weren't hope, he realized. They were lies we told ourselves to survive the night.
The Strider opened its jaws.
"Lena…" Marcus whispered.
In the comics, the hero always arrived in the final second.
In the real world, the final second is when the pain stops.
The jaws snapped shut.
And then—darkness.