The announcement came not with a bang, but with a bureaucratic whimper.
It was a Wednesday. Kyon Wilson was in his one-room apartment, dissembling a cheap handgun for the third time that week, his fingers moving with a bored, mechanical precision. The television was on, muted, showing a daytime talk show where people screamed about infidelity. The light through the grime-streaked window was the color of weak tea.
Then the screen changed.
Every screen, everywhere.
The talk show hosts vanished, replaced by a stark, grey background and a simple seal Kyon didn't recognize—a stylized balance scale, tipped, with a single drop of something dark suspended from the lower dish. No president, no general, no frantic newscaster. A calm, androgynous voice, digitally smoothed to a tone of absolute neutrality, began to speak. The closed captions flickered on automatically.
"A Global Address. By the authority of the Unified Continuity Directorate, Article Seven of the Global Crisis Protocol is now in effect."
Kyon's hands stilled. The slide of the pistol lay cold in his palm.
"For the next twenty-four hours, commencing at 12:00 PM Coordinated Universal Time, all acts of violence committed under the Banner of Necessity will be exempt from legal prosecution and moral sanction. Necessary violence is defined as any action deemed essential for the preservation of one's own life, liberty, or essential resources during this adjustment period."
A list scrolled up the screen in clean, bullet-pointed text.
· Lethal force authorized for self-preservation.
· Coercive interrogation authorized for resource acquisition.
· Asset reallocation (including biological) authorized under conditions of scarcity.
· All monitoring systems will remain active for data collection. Enforcement is suspended.
"This is a controlled release. A societal pressure valve. Compliance with the spirit of Necessity is expected. The Protocol will conclude in twenty-four hours. Prepare. Adapt. Persist."
The seal remained for ten seconds of perfect silence. Then the talk show returned, the host mid-scream, her face contorted in absurd fury. The world clicked back into its chaotic, meaningless groove.
Kyon looked at the gun parts laid out on the oil-stained newspaper. He looked at the clock on the microwave. 11:57 AM. Local time would sync up in minutes.
He did not feel excitement. He did not feel fear. He felt a single, crystallizing thought, cold and sharp as a scalpel: They have made a language of violence. Now I will speak it fluently.
His first move was not to barricade the door or sharpen a knife. It was to walk to his small refrigerator, unplug it, and drag it silently to block the apartment's entrance. It was heavy, solid. An impediment, not a stop. He then returned to the table and began reassembling the pistol, his movements faster now, purposeful. As he slotted the magazine home, he heard the first change in the soundscape of the city.
It wasn't screaming. Not yet. It was a cessation. The constant, low-grade hum of traffic, of distant construction, of a million people moving in their hive—it dipped, then stalled into an eerie quiet. It was the sound of a world holding its breath.
Then the exhale came.
A car alarm wailed, then was abruptly cut short. A glass-shattering crash, several blocks away. A single, piercing shout that climbed into a shriek and then vanished into silence. The new sounds were pockets of chaos, blooming like toxic flowers across the city grid.
Kyon finished his check of the pistol, a .22 caliber, low stopping power but reliable. He tucked it into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back. He pulled on a dark grey hoodie, the fabric worn thin. He then picked up his most valuable tool: a compact crowbar, eighteen inches of cold-forged steel. He hefted its familiar weight.
His apartment was on the third floor of a decrepit walk-up. His neighbors were a mosaic of desperation: a meth cook two doors down, a weeping woman who argued with ghosts, a family of five crammed into a studio. The hallway already smelled different. Not just mildew and stale cooking, but the sharp, coppery tang of fresh fear.
He listened at his door. Muffled thumps from the family's apartment. A man's voice, low and urgent. A child crying, then being shushed violently. Kyon waited. His breathing was slow, shallow. He felt nothing. This was a calculation. The first wave would be the impulsive ones—the rage-filled, the vengeance-seeking, the already broken. They would be predictable. Dangerous in their frenzy, but stupid. The second wave, the calculating ones like him, would come later, once the initial storm had passed and the new landscape was revealed.
But he couldn't wait for the second wave. He needed to move before the patterns hardened, while there was still chaos to exploit.
He moved the fridge just enough to slide out, then pulled it back. The hallway was dim, the single overhead bulb flickering. The door to the family's apartment was ajar. Through the crack, he saw overturned furniture. A spilled bag of rice like a white stain on the floor. No people.
From the meth cook's apartment came sounds of a struggle—grunts, a crash, a wet thud. Then silence. Kyon's feet made no sound on the grimy linoleum as he passed it. The weeping woman's door was shut tight. He could hear her inside, sobbing and chanting, "It's not real, it's not real, it's not real."
The staircase was a pit of shadows. The street door at the bottom was open, letting in a rectangle of harsh daylight and new, unsettling sounds: running footsteps, a distant, guttural laugh, the tinkle of broken glass.
Kyon paused on the last landing, peering into the street. His neighborhood was a canyon of decaying brick and rusted fire escapes. Usually, it teemed with listless life. Now, it was a series of frozen tableaux. A man stood over another man who was curled on the pavement, kicking him with a methodical, sickening rhythm. A woman dragged a suitcase, her eyes wide and unseeing, weaving between abandoned cars. Across the street, the bodega's plexiglass window was spider-webbed with cracks. Someone was inside, looting.
This was the impulsive wave. No strategy. Just hunger and hurt given a license.
Kyon's target wasn't here. The bodega had junk food and cheap beer. The meth cook's apartment had drugs and paranoia. He needed a different kind of resource.
He slipped out the door, keeping close to the building's wall, his crowbar held low and parallel to his leg. He moved not like a predator stalking, but like a shadow detaching itself. He saw the man doing the kicking. He knew him—Leo, the super's nephew, a petty bully who collected "protection" money from street vendors. Leo's face was flushed with a terrifying joy. This was his moment of permission.
Kyon calculated. Leo was strong, fueled by adrenaline. Engaging him was high risk, low reward. He let the shadow swallow him in a doorway and watched.
Leo finished, breathing heavily. He rifled through the pockets of the moaning man on the ground, pulling out a wallet and a phone. He spat on him, then turned, his eyes scanning the street. They landed on the woman with the suitcase. A new, ugly light sparked in them. He started toward her.
Kyon moved. Not toward Leo, but across the street, toward the broken bodega. The looter inside—a skinny teenager grabbing armfuls of chips—saw him and froze, panic in his eyes. Kyon ignored him, walking straight to the counter. The old owner, Mr. Hassan, was not there. Behind the counter, however, was what Kyon needed: not food, but the cheap, pre-paid mobile phones Mr. Hassan sold, and the off-brand tablets. The teenager bolted out the back door, chips scattering.
Kyon swept a dozen phones and three tablets into a plastic bag. He then went behind the counter and opened the small, flimsy safe. It was designed to deter junkies, not a crowbar. A single, precise levering motion and the door shrieked open. A few hundred in cash, which he took. And, nestled under the bills, Mr. Hassan's personal pride: a genuine, Soviet-era Makarov pistol and two boxes of ammunition.
Kyon stared at it. A .22 was a tool for rats. This was a tool for men. He ejected the magazine, checked the chamber, loaded it, and worked the slide. The action was smooth, heavy, definitive. He tucked the .22 into the bag and slid the Makarov into his waistband. The weight of it was an argument.
He left the bodega as silently as he'd entered. Leo had the woman pinned against a car, her suitcase open, clothes spilling into the gutter. She was pleading. Leo was laughing.
Kyon had a clear line of sight. Forty feet. No wind. Leo's back was a wide, taunting target.
He did not raise the Makarov. Shooting Leo fell under the Banner of Necessity, perhaps. But it was not profitable. It would make noise. It would draw attention. It would waste a bullet on a resource already being depleted by his own stupidity. Leo was not a threat to Kyon's immediate survival; he was a symptom.
Kyon turned and vanished down an alley, leaving the sound of pleading and laughter behind him. His survival was not about reacting to the world's new rhythm. It was about composing his own.
His destination was a twenty-minute walk away: a low-rent medical supply wholesaler. In the old world, it sold bulk bandages, cheap walkers, adult diapers. In this new world, it was a treasure trove. Antibiotics. Painkillers. Sterile gauze. Sutures. Saline. Knowledge of its existence was his edge. He had scouted it months ago, a habitual cataloguing of resources, never knowing why. Now he did.
The streets were a descent. The initial, isolated outbursts were coagulating into a thicker atmosphere of sanctioned brutality. He passed a group of men "interrogating" a store owner, demanding the codes to his safe. Their method was a tire iron on his knees. The screams were high, jagged things. Kyon noted the make of the tire iron. The number of men. Their positioning. Data.
He saw the first "employment" contract. A hulking man with a nail-studded bat was standing over a cowed group of three others, forcing them to load electronics from a store into a truck. "Work hard, eat tonight," the man with the bat growled. Slavery, rebranded. It was efficient.
He also saw the first cameras. On streetlights, above doorways, their tiny red LEDs blinking like indifferent stars. The Address had said they would remain active. For data collection. No one was watching to help. They were watching to record. The thought was colder than the gun at his back. Hell had not only permission; it had archivists.
He avoided main thoroughfares, moving through a labyrinth of back alleys and service roads. In one alley, he came upon a scene of aftermath. Two bodies, not yet cold. A man and a woman. Their pockets turned out. The man's hand had been severed at the wrist. A ring finger, it seemed, had been too difficult to remove. Kyon stopped. He looked at the stump. Clean cut. A machete or a large knife. Not a frenzied attack. A targeted harvest.
He knelt. The woman's jacket was of good quality. He checked the size. It would fit him. He removed it from her, his movements clinical, rolling her gently to slide it off. He checked the pockets. Empty. He put it on. It was lined, warm. A resource. He looked at the man's boots. Sturdy leather, good soles. He removed them, replacing his own worn sneakers. They were half a size too big, but he stuffed the toes with scraps of newspaper from a nearby dumpster.
As he laced the boots, he heard a whimper from a stack of pallets.
He turned, the crowbar coming up. A child, maybe eight or nine, was wedged between the wood and the wall, her eyes huge with a terror so profound it was almost serene. She was watching him steal from the dead.
Kyon looked at her. He saw a resource drain. A source of noise. A moral dilemma for those who still cared about such things. He had no use for a child.
He finished tying his boots. He stood. He took a protein bar from the bodega bag and placed it on the ground, within her reach but far enough that she would have to leave her hiding place to get it.
"Wait until dark," he said, his voice flat, the first words he'd spoken since the announcement. "Then run. Your tears are water. Don't waste them."
He didn't wait to see if she understood. He walked away, the new boots making a heavier, more solid sound on the asphalt. The encounter was logged and dismissed. A moment of negligible cost. It changed nothing.
The medical supply warehouse was in an industrial park that was already a graveyard of small businesses. The roll-up metal door was scarred with old graffiti. Kyon approached from the rear, where a loading dock overlooked a deserted lot.
He heard voices before he saw them. Two of them. Arguing.
"…just grab the good shit and go! They said twenty-four hours, man!"
"And what happens after twenty-four hours, genius? You think they're gonna come around asking for receipts? This is it. This is the new it. We secure this place, we control the flow. This is a goldmine!"
Kyon crouched behind a rusted dumpster. Peering around, he saw two men. One, jittery, holding a baseball bat. The other, calmer, older, with a hunting knife in his hand. They stood before the breached personnel door, which hung open on bent hinges. The calmer one was right. This wasn't looting. This was a land grab. These were second-wavers, earlier than he'd anticipated.
He assessed. Two targets. One nervous, one strategic. The strategic one was the priority. The bat was a wild weapon. The knife was intimate, quiet.
Kyon set the bag of electronics down silently. He palmed the crowbar. The Makarov was a last resort. Sound traveled here, in this concrete emptiness.
He waited for the argument to peak.
"I'm not staying here to get overrun!" the jittery one said, turning slightly away.
The calmer one sighed in exasperation. "You're not thinking…"
Kyon moved.
He covered the fifteen feet in a silent sprint. The calmer man heard the scuff of a boot and started to turn, his eyes widening. Kyon didn't swing the crowbar. He thrust it, like a spear, putting all his weight behind it. The flat, forged hook at the end slammed into the man's kidney from behind.
The man exhaled in a shocked, wet gasp. Agony short-circuited his brain before he could scream. He folded, the knife clattering from his hand. Kyon was already rotating, using the momentum.
The jittery man yelped, swinging the bat in a wild, overhead arc. Kyon didn't back up. He stepped in, inside the arc. The bat whiffed past his shoulder. He brought the curved claw of the crowbar down, not on the man's head, but on the leading wrist holding the bat.
Bone crunched. The man shrieked, the bat falling. Kyon's follow-through was a short, upward jerk with the tool's edge, catching him under the jaw. The shriek cut off into a gurgle. The man stumbled back, clutching his throat.
Kyon turned back to the first man, who was writhing on the ground, trying to crawl toward his knife. Kyon stepped on his hand, pinning it. He looked down into the man's pain-glazed eyes. He saw the calculation there, the desperate reassessment of this new world. This man had seen the opportunity. He just hadn't been the sharpest tool.
"You were right," Kyon said, his voice still that flat, quiet monotone. "It is a goldmine."
He raised the crowbar and brought it down, once, on the back of the man's skull. The sound was a dull, final crack. The body went limp.
He walked over to the second man, who was on his knees, gasping for air through a ruined windpipe, his eyes pleading. Kyon ended it with the same efficient motion. The gurgling stopped.
He stood between the two bodies, breathing steadily. He felt no thrill. No remorse. A slight elevation in heart rate, the body's chemical response to exertion. That was all. He checked their pockets. Cash, keys, a folding knife. He took the hunting knife. It was a good one.
He dragged the bodies behind the dumpster. Not hidden, but out of immediate line of sight. A notice to others: Claimed.
Then he entered the warehouse.
It was a cavern of metal shelves, piled high with boxes. The air smelled of dust and plastic. He found the valuable sections quickly: surgical instruments, prescription medications behind a locked cage (the crowbar made quick work of it), bundles of sterile dressings, liters of iodine and alcohol. He filled two large duffel bags he found in the office, prioritizing antibiotics (amoxicillin, ciprofloxacin), potent painkillers (oxycodone, morphine vials), sutures, and IV supplies. These were not for him. These were his new currency.
As he worked, methodically and quickly, he heard the distant pops of gunfire, the rise and fall of sirens that went unanswered and eventually died. The red eyes of security cameras watched him from the corners of the ceiling. He looked up at one, directly into its lens. He held its gaze for a three-count, then went back to packing.
Loaded with his new wealth, he left the warehouse. The industrial park was still quiet, a pocket of violence already concluded. He had a base of operations, and he had the hardest currency in this new economy: health, and the negation of pain.
He returned to his apartment building as the afternoon light began to fail, staining the sky the color of a bruise. The hallway was dark. The power was out. The family's door was wide open now, the apartment ransacked, silent. The meth cook's door was shut, a smear of something dark trailing from under it. The weeping woman was silent.
He moved his fridge and barricaded himself inside his one room. He did not light a candle. He sat in the gathering dark, the duffel bags at his feet, the crowbar across his knees, the weight of the Makarov a constant, sobering pressure against his hip.
Through the thin wall, he heard a new sound from the weeping woman's apartment. Not weeping. A low, steady monotone. She was reciting something. A list. "…canned beans, six. Bottled water, twelve. Batteries, size AA…"
She was adapting. They all were, in their ways.
Kyon looked at the blank, black screen of his silent television. The twenty-four hours were not even half over. The "controlled release" was a lie. A pressure valve, once opened on a sealed system, doesn't close. It blows everything apart.
Hell wasn't a place they had entered.
Hell was a permission slip they had all signed, and it was irrevocable. The condition was now permanent.
He closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to plan. Tomorrow, the flesh markets would open. The survival gangs would formalize. The corporate butchers would set up shop. He had medicine. He had a gun. He had a clarity that felt like ice in his veins.
He was not a hero. He was not a villain raging against the world.
He was a man who understood the new grammar. And he intended to write his own destiny with it, one brutal, necessary sentence at a time.
The first day was ending.
The forever had begun.