2067: A Short Story About The Extinction Of The Human Race

In the dead of this frozen apocalypse, the shelter's fusion core was on the verge of overload. I grabbed my repair kit and sprinted for the basement, only to have the guard captain's girlfriend, Miranda Dunn, step right into my path. "Everyone, come look! Zach’s about to dump poison into the vents. He's gonna kill us all!" Her voice cut through the air as she shrieked. "I didn’t approve a private room for him two days ago, and now, he wants us all dead!" The guards didn't bother asking questions. They slammed me hard against the freezing metal door. "Zach, are you going to kill us all over a room? We're taking you in for interrogation!" I stared at the control panel, its readings spiking into the red, and shouted, "If the core blows up, none of us will make it out alive!" But they were too busy trying to impress Miranda and brushed off my warning, thinking I had lost it. Nineteen minutes remained before the core exploded.

Humanity has finally done it and destroyed the world. After the spread of the killer virus that no one had a cure for, countries started to fight as greed has pushed them to expand their territories. And in the process, they provoked mother nature to take a stand. The plague evolved into something that twisted and deformed humans; they were neither dead nor alive. Just walking empty husks that fed on flesh and had one purpose, killing. The supernatural were exposed to the rest of the world; as they weren't spared and got affected, too. The result of this knowledge was chaos. Instead of creating one unity, the rest of the living were fighting among themselves and the undead. The entire world turned into a big arena and it was (survival of the fittest).

In the year 2028, the government decides to destroy the world sparing only one million people to restart the next generation. Of those one million people is Christopher Woodsen, a 16 year old tasked with upholding the law of the bunker they were forced into.

I have the ability to see how people will die. The day my divorce is finalized, I'm hit by an electric scooter and sent flying. When I wake up, I see a line of text above the nurse's head. It reads, "27 years old. Breast cancer in eight years." I pick up my phone. The first name in my contacts is my ex-wife, Caroline Meyer. After a moment's hesitation, I open her social media. Her latest post shows her and her new boyfriend vacationing in Marencia, captioned, "Forever starts with you." The location tag says it was posted three hours ago. We only finalized our divorce the day before. Later, I get a voice message from my daughter. "Daddy, Mommy says I can't go to her new house anymore. Her boyfriend doesn't like kids." I clutch my phone and head out to pick her up, only to run into Caroline's father, John Meyer, outside the apartment building. Above his head, the words read, "62 years old. Carbon monoxide poisoning in three months." The moment John sees me, he starts yelling. "What a loser! My daughter should've divorced you years ago! Her new boyfriend is young, handsome, and owns three houses. What do you have?" I glance at the words above his head, then slowly delete the warning text message I'd already typed out. After that, I take my daughter's hand and say, "Come on. I'm taking you out for burgers."

Adaeze "Ada" Okonkwo has done everything right. At twenty-seven, she is sharp, successful, and professionally untouchable. A second-generation Nigerian woman building a polished life in London on her own terms. When Tobias "Tobi" Mensah proposes on a quiet Wednesday evening, she says yes with her whole heart. The same night, Damien Adeyemi walks back through the door. Damien is everything Tobi is not. Magnetic. Withholding. Dangerously perceptive. For eighteen months he rationed his affection with the precision of a man who understood that scarcity creates value, giving Ada just enough to stay and never enough to feel safe. When it ended, it ended gently. That was almost the worst part. Eight months of silence followed. Then Ada gets engaged, and he returns. Not with apologies or grand gestures. With a legitimate business brief, a fifteen-page document written in the dark of their separation, and the devastating honesty of a man who has spent eight months learning what he lost. Now Ada is suspended between the man who loves her completely and the man who knows her dangerously. Between stability and chaos. Between the woman she has chosen to become and the woman her nervous system keeps insisting she already is. She understands her patterns. She can name them precisely. She repeats them anyway. Because understanding something and being free of it are entirely different things. Love in the Extinction: After the Death of Boredom is a story about what happens after the spark. About what it costs a woman to choose something good for her when everything inside her has been trained to want something else.

The entire world froze. Overnight, the city plunged to –40 °F. Yet, in the middle of this frozen apocalypse, my mother, my sister and her son moved into the home I bought for my marriage. Even my own husband took my sister’s side. They threw me out into the freezing cold to scavenge for supplies. I came back frozen half to death, and they had not even saved me a bowl of warm soup. Then, my sister shoved me straight off the fifth-floor landing. In that bitter cold, my body hit the ground and shattered like glass. When I woke again, I found myself back in the week before the apocalypse struck. This time, I resolved to cut them all off. I would make every last one of them pay.