An Almanac of the World After the End

Being a True Account of the Bacterium and the Undoing of Men Set Down in the Year of Our Lord, 1815, by One Who Watches, Nameless -------------------- The Pestilence Comes It is the fifth year of the Corsican’s reign, 1810, and Europe is a drumskin stretched tight - boots tramp, cannon bark, and the air hums with shot. Into this clamor slips a thing unseen, a breath of ruin. The learned call it the Bacterium, a cruel marriage of deadened nerves and ceaseless fury. It rides the wind, quiet as guilt, and no man escapes it - not the grenadier with his plumes, not the plowman at his furrow. It shows itself in fevers that come and go, in a slow sapping of strength, the kind you’d blame on mud or hunger or a night without sleep. But it waits. Not for death - death is too late - but for that trembling edge when the body knows it’s done. France sees it first, in the spring of that year, amid the churn of armies. A man staggers - sabre-gashed or fever-racked or simply old - and as his knees buckle, the Bacterium moves. It takes him, twists what’s left, makes him the Hunger. Reason flees; so does kindness. What stands in his place hungers, fights, endures, until you crack its skull open and let the darkness spill out. There’s no cure. No one’s found one yet. -------------------- What the Hunger Is Picture it: a shape you know - your brother, your captain - until it isn’t. The Bacterium doesn’t wait for the last breath; it steals in as the pulse stutters, unstrings the mind, leaves only the animal behind. Pain can’t touch it; exhaustion doesn’t slow it. It’s a machine of flesh, driven to tear and devour, and it stops only when you stove its head in. How fast it comes depends on the hurt. A musket ball through the chest, a blade across the throat - it’s thirty minutes, maybe less, before the Hunger stands up. Slower deaths - lung-rot, festering sores, the creeping fade of years - give it days, weeks even, as the man wastes and the virus bides its time. Either way, it’s the same: relentless, unbreakable, a body held together by something that isn’t life. -------------------- How It Spreads Blame the wars. Napoleon’s legions march - Spain to Russia, boots slogging through mire - and the Bacterium hitches along. It’s in the campfires’ smoke, the shared canteen, the breath of the dying. Villages burn, towns empty, and still it moves. Then come the battles - Borodino, Leipzig, Waterloo - fields soaked red, and the wounded don’t just lie there. They turn, mid-groan, into the Hunger. These packs, these Hordes, swarm the living - friend or foe, it’s all meat to them. Every man who falls joins them. You can kill it, if you’re quick - a bullet through the brain, a sabre to the crown - but a Horde laughs at that. Ten men go in; five come out, and the five who don’t are clawing at your back. Cannon shred the lines, horses trample the fallen, and it only speeds the change - whole companies lost before the smoke clears. -------------------- Europe, 1815 The map’s torn now. Paris is a kennel for the Hunger, its fine streets choked with them. London huddles behind its river, but the Thames runs thick with blood. Russia’s steppe is a sea of Hordes, endless as winter. What’s left of us holes up - castles with barred gates, cliffs where the wind howls - watching, waiting. Armies are scraps now, bands of men with muskets and no orders, shooting to eat, to live another day. Priests shout of God’s wrath, swinging crosses and swords; it changes nothing. Surgeons slice into the Hunger, peering at its guts, and find only questions. The Bacterium doesn’t explain itself - not to them, not to anyone. Europe was a prize once; now it’s a grave. -------------------- What They Saw In the Ardennes, a dragoon troop cuts down Prussians, cheers the win - then their own wounded turn, rip into the horses, teeth red. Vienna: a woman, fever-soft for weeks, wakes as the Hunger, eats her children while her husband watches, then kills her with a chair-leg. Lisbon’s docks whisper of ghost ships - sailors drop mid-haul, turn, and gut their mates. It knows no loyalty. Your wife, your son - they’ll turn on you as the light dims in their eyes. A child, small hands bloody from its mother’s throat - that’s what breaks men, sends them to the pistol or the edge. The Bacterium keeps them moving, rotting but upright, till you smash the brain and they fall. -------------------- No Way Back No potion, no prayer stops it. Europe’s a husk by 1815, the living hunted by the Hunger they loved once. Armies that fought for crowns share one enemy now, and it’s winning. Every stumble feeds it; every stand crumbles. I write this in a room with thinning walls, the Hordes’ noise rising like a tide. The candle gutters. This isn’t hope - it’s a marker, a scratch on stone. If anyone’s left to read it, let them say it’s true.