No one remembers what the last broadcast was.
Maybe it was a notice of the fall of a certain city, maybe it was another rumor about the Ark Project, or maybe it was just the rustle of an emergency channel that had been repeated for too long. When the sixth wave swept through, tearing apart the power grid, the Internet, and the last dignity of mankind, there were only two things left among the ruins still breathing - one was the predator that had learned to be silent after mutating, and the other was the survivor who was even more silent than the predator.
People once thought that the end of the world was death. They are wrong. The end point of the apocalypse is to live, to rummage for food in the cracks of concrete day after day, to count how many fingers you have left in the moonlight, to watch helplessly the person who shared half a piece of bread with you yesterday, has turned into an empty shell with dilated pupils today.
This disaster has no name. Later, the living people called it the "Great Silence" - not because the world was really quiet, but because everything worth shouting died in the first three months.
It doesn't matter what my name is. The important thing is that I have a map in my hand, which marks seventeen material points that have not been completely plundered, as well as a secret that is thirty meters underground and poured with thirty thousand tons of concrete.
That was a national reserve that had not been activated in time before the Great Silence.
It took me two years to find its entrance.
Now, I'm going in.
