The Overlord: A Post-Apocalyptic Novel Read Online Free Page A

energy that others so desperately seek.
    Along with the heart inside me, I took the monitoring intelligence, the Far Stranger, and fled the planet for good. The hope was to bring slumber to the mayhem, but upon returning, I fear I may have just reawakened the bloodshed. I knew I had to come back, but I didn't know what the cost would be this time. The Last War had its own price and it was all too high. Mankind won't survive that kind of payment again.
    My bloodline's predecessors, immigrants from a place called Kenya, used to tell me something in their primordial Swahili tongue, "Dunia duara."
    Literally, the motto means that the earth is round. More significantly, it means that wherever you go, you'll always end up back where you started. When need be, it was a way for a mother and father to express to their child that nothing ever really changes. Thus, nothing is really worth fretting over.
    At other times, it was a way of reminding me that I'd never be able to see and do everything. Instead, I should just focus on what was right in front me. As I grew older, its meaning translated into something far more despondent. Dunia duara, the earth is round. It never has an end. What will be, will always be again.
    Distant stars, planets, and galaxies alike shine out from the black expanse of this whole universe, but here in the Milky Way, this planet of water and earth has always seemed to stand alone to me. It's been more than two decades since I've stepped foot in its dirt. Last I saw of the world, a web of red veins was laced upon its shadowed face. From the surface, the sky was painted black and crimson. Flames danced across the ground. Cities burned as horrible lasers gleamed from every corner. War was being waged over every nation and territory. 
    It's much, much quieter now. As far as my eyes can see, miles of desert wasteland stretch out in every possible direction. This morning, as I descended upon this familiar planet from the cosmos above, I came to two likely conclusions. I thought at first that there appeared to be a layer of dead skin that covered the whole of the earth, just waiting to be peeled away to reveal new life. I took hope in believing that the world wasn't completely dead. 
    As my ship fell, however, a terror came upon me that the world was actually deeply scarred, unable to ever be what it was, incapable of sustaining any sort of life. Upon arrival, it seemed that my worst fears had come true. I've never known such dread as the possibility of being the only sentient being left in all of the earth.
    Crashing on some strange coast, I couldn't make any sense of my surroundings. The oceans had swallowed most of the continental mass. Geography had drastically changed as a result. I had no idea what sea I was in, let alone what national borders laid beyond.
    Stumbling out of the wreckage of my ship, I waded through the surf toward an unknown shore. I took a moment to gaze upon my own reflection in the waves, praying that I was not staring at the last of humankind upon those waters. In that mirror of the sea, the arching waves revealed something more than just me. A pair of eyes that were not my own were staring back through the reflection. The irises were bright green, vivid and glowing like a predator of the night. A face than rose from the surf to meet my own. A smell came up with it, an aroma of death like the mushroom clouds in the Last War.
    Disfigured and mutated, the creature almost looked like a man. Its skin was unclothed, scaled and draped with slime. It was marred with open wounds that would have slayed a normal person. Fins protruded painfully from the whole of its frame. The neckline was slit with gills, struggling to respire in the open air. As for the green eyes, there was no sign of intelligence staring back at me. If ever it was a man, it had become pure animal.
    Snarling with a few blackened teeth, the creature snapped toward me. I quickly seized its mushy neck with one hand, shoving my knife