About Under the Gray Dome
When the eyes of the deep cosmos turned toward Earth, humanity finally realized it had never been the planet’s only master.
The story doesn’t begin on the day the apocalypse arrived, but with a two-kilometer-wide black meteor core: the Esolmis Core. At the edge of Jupiter’s orbit, it abruptly veered from a course it had followed for billions of years and turned straight toward Earth. It did not crash to the ground with a thunderous impact, as disaster prophecies foretold. Instead, at high altitude, it exploded in an utterly unnatural fashion, scattering an ancient pathogen from deep space, the Helospore Mist Virus, into every inch of air on which humanity depended for survival.
This was no simple biochemically induced disaster. The Helospore Mist Virus was an “evolutionary key” from the depths of the cosmos.
It did not kill directly. Instead, like a program rewriting itself, it adapted to its environment with astonishing speed, frantically activating, warping, and fusing every virus, fungus, and microorganism already on Earth. Within hours, the sky turned from blue to gray, and a dense “Gray Dome Spore Veil” stitched up the heavens like a living bandage. Gray snow, black dew, and spore-laden winds blanketed the land. Of the humans who had once stood atop the food chain, sixty percent became mindless, highly aggressive undead within a week, reduced to the lowest-level sustenance in the new food chain.
Worse still, the Helospore Mist Virus continually spawned new families of monsters, varying by region, climate, and Host: the Gray Devourers, which overwhelm their prey through sheer numbers; the Abdominal Parasites, which infest the human abdomen; the Bone Armor, which smash through walls in heavy armor; the Nest Callers, which direct hordes of corpses in tactical sieges; and, later, the Sky-Rippers, which tear across the heavens, along with creatures that completely reshape the terrain…
