The Rocpocalypse Story

By Quaker

The best anyone can guess, the apocalypse wiped out the world that used to be in the year 2021, or thereabouts. It was a time when people flew airplanes over land and sea like it was no big deal. Every day, thousands of people traversing continents, even oceans, if you can believe it. Everyone had a car, or two, or three, or a whole fleet. Gas was cheap and plentiful, with full stations on every corner. And food. My God, the food. Every kind of taste you could imagine, cheap, fast, and hot, if you believe the stories. They had police to enforce laws and, even though everyone and his brother owned a gun, most people still managed to live into their 70s, or longer.

Then it ended. Like drawing a curtain closed. Tuesday night everything business as usual, but Wednesday afternoon? Hell on earth. Bombs falling from the sky, cities on fire, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, bullets like hailstorms, high-speed collisions as everyone tried to run from everything all at once, demons rising from cracks in the earth and swallowing people whole. Okay, that last one sounds like bullshit on its face, but as for the rest, who can say? Considering we're surrounded by a psychic maelstrom that can touch through your skull into your brain, maybe the idea of demons isn't such bullshit after all...

Point is, things fell apart, and not just a little. Now, something like 50 years later, those days are distant dreams for the unlucky few old enough to remember. For better or worse, in the aftermath they pulled something resembling a world back together, patching it up with mud and snot and the bones of the dead to build a sick caricature of the world that once was.

Most of us living now wish they hadn't bothered. But here we are, a panting, dying thing, on one hand wanting to be put out of its misery, but on the other, it's all gnashing and clawing and snapping of teeth, refusing to go down easy.

The Districts, Holdings, and Heavies

Don't get me wrong. The Roc's "Districts" aren't neat, well-ordered units complete with functioning governments and PTA meetings. They're more like a patchwork web of territories that people generally recognize, each with its own unique characteristics that set it apart from the others. Each of them has at least one Holding, or what we call a place that someone has carved out and claimed for their own, which makes it difficult--- if not impossible--- to dislodge them. We call those people Heavies, the ones who won't be moved. Some are loners, some run their own crews, some change it up every time you see them. Think twice before messing with these folks. In a hard world, they're among the hardest. On the flipside, they're good friends to have and can help you out of almost any spot you find yourself in. You want a word of advice? Tread lightly. Or don't. Upsetting the applecart can be advantageous too. Up to you.

We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident

Look, ask 100 people how the world works and you'll get 100 different answers, and all of them can't be right. Maybe none of them are. But what seems like an objective fact to you in our here and now might not hold true for someone else living somewhere else and some other time. Putting relativist philosophy aside for a moment, there are things that we certainly can say are true, at least for everyone in the Rocpocalypse. We might quibble about some of the details, but more or less, no one in the right mind would argue with any of the below. They're the basic facts of the land.

Environment

Everything’s broken. Buildings, roads, everything. And in most places, it's completely overgrown with vines and moss and weeds reclaiming what concrete and blacktop stole. Swampy, stinking water trickles into every nook and cranny, sprouting more fungal life with it. The old infrastructure---stoplights, traffic signs, guardrails--- are rusted and corroded, threatening to collapse with the slightest nudge.

The sky is a huge, crazy blue, shot with grey and white and sometimes orange. Looking out at edges of the splotch, there are gigantic streaks of color: grey and white and green and blue and black, all stretching out the horizon. Stare too long and it feels like it's touching your brain. Some people claim they can commune with it, draw power from its secrets. They call it the psychic maelstrom, and people like me want nothing to do with it.

Boundaries

To the west, Rocpocalypse is separated from the wastelands of Grease and Grates by a north/south old highway. No one goes there, because why would you? It's a bleak, devastated land covered in ash. Rumors have it that survivors mutated into pale, grey zombies that wander among the blackened ruins of strip malls and convenience stores. They have animals just like them, pale and grey, and secret cities underground. It's said that if you inhale the ash, you turn into one of them, and the superstitious people living in Get High Falls, Maplehood , and the Char cover their faces and seek shelter if there's a strong eastward wind blowing.

To the east, it's all flooded hills, and craggy swampland full of mutated monsters and waterlogged towns. There are people there, too, but they speak in a guttural language nobody knows, and some people in Fenfield say they have scales like fish. You tell me if you believe it. What I can say for sure is that the water there is murky and green, and deadly poisonous to drink.

To the south, smart people know to stay above the old interstate. Beyond that, it's endless rocky hills blasted free of grass and undergrowth, leaving nothing but the skeletons of dead forests. They go on forever and ever, and the roads are filled with husks of rusted cars, making road travel almost impossible. Nobody knows what’s further south, since anybody who’s ever set out that way never comes back.

The north? An ocean. On the shores, there are some holds and settlements in North Web and The Char, and out on the water there's the flotilla known as Lake Town where the lakies live, who step ashore as infrequently as they can manage. More than a mile out the water turns dark, churning and boiling. You can take a boat out onto the Lake and cruise around, but get out too far and you're liable to be swallowed by monsters of metal and flesh or get sucked down a whirlpool. Or so the story goes. Maybe the lakies are bullshitting us, but maybe not.

Food

Food? In general, I wouldn't recommend coming to the Roc for a grand culinary experience, but you've got stay alive somehow. People eat bugs, birds, varmints and whatever they can catch. Others hoard foods from the time before that have eternal shelf lives. Some people are food. Others still seem to eat and drink well, even with an air of sophistication. Surprise, surprise, they're not exactly cooking for others. More like they shoot strangers on site and don't even bother asking questions later, unless you're offering them something good in return. And, to be honest, you're probably not, right? People do crazy things when they're hungry though, especially when they've got mouths to feed. It's a problem, to put it lightly.

Climate

It's May, springtime in Rocpocalypse, and that ain't good for anybody. One day it's brutally cold raining down sheets of sleet and hail and slush, and the next it can be sweltering hot. Days get dark early and the sun sets fast. The city gets shrouded by long shadows and it gets chilly, even on the hot days. Once night sets in, everybody that wants to live hunkers down, huddling for warmth and safety. To go out at night, you'd have to be brave, psychotic, or stupid. In most cases, it's hard to tell the difference.

Travel

The roads and the old highways are crumbling and cluttered with rusting dead vehicles, but are still the primary means for getting from point A to point B. A surprising number of people have managed to get cars, trucks, and even buses working, despite the fact the last of the gasoline disappeared decades ago. You can drive from one side of town to the other and not see another soul, but you can't deny that you're just making yourself a moving target. Booby-trapped streets, overpasses and bridges threatening to collapse, lightposts ready to fall across the road---or your hood---at any moment? Who needs it? There's plenty enough around here to kill you without needing to risk hitting the roads at high speed.

How do these things run anyway? The short answer: it depends. Some have managed to find and refine their own fuel. Others have rigged contraptions in other complicated ways that make vehicles move, sometimes slow, sometimes very fast. There are even some crazies that brave flying in machines. The landings don't always work out so well though. In general, vehicles break down a lot and they need fuel. Parts and fuel sources? You guessed it: the kinds of things people kill and die for.

Society

People are still around, but who can say how many? They cluster in holds and forts and sometimes micro-towns inside the corpses of huge buildings, on the waters’ edge, and tucked deep in rotten old woods. Survivors manage to keep themselves clothed, sheltered and fed. For some, it means inviting useful new people inside; others view any outsider as an enemy, shooting first and not even bothering with questions. Clever ones produce their own electricity or other energy, though I can't claim to know how. The most industrious ones make their own booze, concoct new drugs, throw block parties with live bands, host pretentious poetry readings. The violent ones kill all those people and take their stuff, but that doesn't happen that often. Honest.

Government doesn't exist outsides gangs and clans. Some holdings uphold democratic principles, others are ruled by tyranny. None of the Heavies has much pull outside their domain, but that isn't to say turf wars aren't common, because they are. Sometimes it's over territory, sometimes it's revenge for some past wrong, and sometimes people just get bored and want someone to crack open like an egg.

Like governance, economies are localized and contained, relying more on bartering goods and services than any mutually agreed-upon currency. Trading within districts and with neighboring districts is a daily occurrence, but it's rare for it go much further than that, simply because travel is too dangerous. Most of the holdings have big markets, ones where you can buy almost anything, even sometimes hi-tech or luxe eternal.

Religion is mostly a thing of the past, as its hard to believe in any benevolent deity that wouldn't crush this world and start over, but sects and cults are still here and there. The closest thing we have to a universal religion is a general acceptance that might makes right, and you own whatever you're strong enough to take and hold in your own two hands.

One positive, if you could call it that, is that most of the old prejudices died off with the cataclysm. Racism? Way too much metal effort. Man, woman, both, neither, something else? No one cares, no one's policing who gets to screw who. Sex is one of the few pleasures that survived the apocalypse unscathed, and it's not that hard to find a willing partner.

Besides basic biological functions and needs, what else did we inherit from the Old world? Lots of rubble, lots of trash, and lots of guns. Lots of guns. In those last days before it all came crashing down, they had guns everywhere. Everywhere. At businesses, at stores, at schools. Tiny kids, packing heat. Little old ladies toting guns with a recoil that would've broken their wrists had they been fired. Makes you wonder if they armed their pets. And in that world with so much comfort and convenience, what were they so scared of? Seems crazy, right?

Anyway, all those guns still work fine.