This choice: You intend to survive the apocalypse alone • Go Back...Chapter #5Great Leviathan by: Unknown You take one last peek out of the letterbox before pulling the last plank of wood across the door and hammering it firmly into place. Safely behind the wooden facade of shuttered-up windows, your desk lamp fills your dorm room with a dim glow. You are certain the light will not escape your refuge.
College campuses can be chaotic enough, even without the continually mutating crisis all of humanity currently faces. Lucky for you, it is still spring break. The whole situation erupted only days ago while you chose to remain on campus to study for an upcoming philosophy test while the rest of your friends and classmates took off for relaxation and partying. You have not heard from them since.
Occasionally, your windows are drowned in bizarre patterns of lights due to the townies erupting into a mad transformation splurge- as had happened only hours ago. This being said, your college campus remains relatively empty and devoid of college students. It may be very well possible there may be other student survivors. This being said, you never ran into anyone else staying on campus in the days leading up to the crisis. Suddenly, here is an intensely bright flash of green light, briefly flashing in between the planks that board up your windows. A crash shudders softly in the distance. Silence returns. Survivors or not, you know there is little reason to go exploring.
Sighing deeply, you slump over on your futon. Something pokes your thigh from below. You reach underneath and pull out a familiar red tome. It's 'Leviathan' by Thomas Hobbes. You smirk. There has got to be at least one benefit to the apocalypse: namely, when it comes to next week's philosophy paper, all bets are off!
You flip through the dog-eared and highlighted pages. Almost everything in this book seems fitting to what's going on right now. One passage in particular strikes your eye: "To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues."
Outside, there were no rules. Were you going to be the last man on earth to maintain them, right here in your dorm room of 18x24 feet?
There were definitely rules that applied to you. For starters, you seem to be perfectly fine with the body God gave you. When the transformation craze first came out, you were definitely hesitant and now your worst fears have been confirmed. With a mind faithfully set on preserving your life and sanity, you know there's a perfectly good reason why you didn't join the fray when the crisis erupted.
Another rule that applied to you became painstakingly clear as you set the final nail across the letterbox: you need to eat. Luckily, as a college student, you still have a good supply of soup, pretzels, water bottles, ramen, and whatever care package junk food from home you've been saving up for the past couple of months. Ever since the crisis began, you have not heard back from home. Cell phone towers and phone lines have been pulverized by the ongoing fighting. It is true that your wireless connection is still intact and you do have access to the Internet. Still, no sign from home. At this point, you bitterly regret your parents' lack of savvy when it comes to using computers.
You know your little supply of food is not going to last forever. In your room, there is probably enough to live on your own for two weeks... maybe a little over two months if you stretched your rations out as far as they can go. Eventually, you will have to go out and find food if you are to survive. You hope and pray that by then it will be safe once more to walk around in the world for the crisis will have subsided... for better or worse.
The best case scenario is that the nightmare suddenly ends in the near future. Maybe there's an unstable component in all these transformation products and in the near future, everyone on Earth will begin to return to normal. But, just by the little research you've done, you know this is not a particularly likely scenario.
What seems likely is a war of "every man against every man." Those turned power-hungry will continue to transform themselves and wage war against all others. Chaos might just continue until they have all driven themselves extinct. Then survivors might have a chance to rebuild the shattered world.
The worst case scenario is those power-hungry who are not cut down in the fighting will eventually discover limitless power through the transformation products. If they are going to chaotically destroy themselves, they might have the power to take the entire world of survivors down with them. For all you know, some madman may have discovered a way to torch the entire surface of the world by changing others' bodies into hazardous chemical structures, nuclear bombs, or even more destructive substances born only in the imagination of a wicked soul.
You cringe at the possibilities. All you can do is sit and wait and hope for the best. As a proud member of the human race, you hope preserve order within the safety of your dorm, so that the good may still survive. You leave 'Leviathan' on the futon as you head to bed, terrified but determined to brave the storm.
***
"Justice and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his senses and passions. They are qualities that relate to men in society, not in solitude." -Thomas Hobbes, 'Leviathan'
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