Age of Monsters by John Schneider (a book to read txt) 📕

every frequency was somehow being jammed – also impossible – he should be picking something up.   He knew for a fact that they were still out there – in some of the bigger cities there still maintained military resistance – albeit, ineffective and token – but Tom was getting nothing.

In the meantime, he watched the world destroyed in real-time.  Live.

Ostensibly, most of the footage was of the destruction itself – but between it all, was the people.

There were a lot at first – survivors of the initial blitz, mostly in the surrounding areas immediately outside the cities – but these faded fast.  After the first few days, most of what he got was from the outlying areas – particularly in the higher-elevations.

Some of them were people trying to talk to their families – sending out messages in video bottles – many in foreign languages – others were simply reaching out – is anybody out there?

The bulk of these began to flicker and fade as the world went dark – but there were a few echoes.  Armageddon or no-Armageddon, people apparently still pod-cast, as a few remaining towers bounced images randomly off satellites – sometimes making sense of scrambled programming.

And although no one could hear him, or had any idea that he was even there, Tom listened to their stories, one by one.

There was one guy in the Midwest, who had managed to fire up an old radio-station transmitter. That one hadn't worked out so well – something about the signal attracted the attention of the 'new wildlife' and the place had been stomped flat – all described in moment-by-moment detail by the apparently semi-deranged operator as the beasts had stampeded down on top of him.

A group of teenagers – among the last survivors in any of the urban areas – somewhere in downtown Tokyo – exchanged a video diary in a language Tom couldn't understand.

There was a young woman living somewhere in Alaska who had barricaded herself in an old hunting cabin – she had been fighting off packs of sickle-claws like wolves.

She periodically turned the camera from herself to the shadows skulking out beyond her fence – she was talking about polar bear season – her place was already well-fortified, with spiked mats on the steps and windows – only this year, she explained, as she fired intermediate shots out the window – most of the polar bears seemed to have been eaten.

She panned to a view of the sickle-claws prowling outside, the peaks of the Yukon directly behind.

Some survivors had even retreated off-shore.  There was footage from a boat – a yacht of some kind, apparently broadcasting from its own antennae – where the last thing you saw was the mouth of a large shark – resembling a Great White with a mouth seven-feet wide – sufficient to take out the boat's hull in a single bite.

One broadcast actually showed some idiot climbing on the back of what looked like a three-horned Triceratops, attempting to ride it – evidently with another person filming.  The clip had ended with the beast charging off over the hill with the guy still clinging to its back.

Even in the face of Armageddon, there were still Darwin Awards.

But Tom took a moment to watch every bit of it – trying to hear all of it at once, and at the same time, all of it individually.

That was how you did surveillance.

No detail was inconsequential – but it must be dealt with on its own scale, or you run into the systemic problem of 'preoccupation with inconsequential details’.

It also served to steel himself, as he played and replayed the testimony of people recording their own epitaphs.

In particular, Tom had listened to their reasons 'why?'.

The guy in the mid-west with the radio station had spent two days broadcasting a lot of wild conspiracy-stories before he was stomped flat – deep-government stuff mixed in with a lot of Biblical hugger-mugger.

That one had resonated with Tom, who had spent a lot of time as a kid listening to the UFO/Bigfoot hours on early AM tin-hat radio.

As an adult, he still found it all fascinating – the circular logic, always starting from a given premise, was often ingenious – and could be remarkably convincing, especially coming from otherwise intelligent minds.

Something about conspiracy-theories satisfied that human need to apply meaning – or at least 'reasons'.  It was sort of like religion in that way – perhaps that was why followers always believed so fervently.

All those conspiracy-stories.

Tom had to admit, at one time, as a kid – hell, even into his early twenties – part of him had believed every one of them.

These days, he believed in precious few.

It was disappointing in a way.  As an adult, he knew, for example, that there could be no Bigfoot – not because the animal was impossible, but simply because of the kind of animal it would have to be – a breeding population would be visible – especially in the day of cell-cameras and the populated areas where 'squatch was supposed to live.

Ditto the Loch Ness Monster.  In fact, 'Nessie' was the subject of one of Tom's personal favorite long-term hoaxes – the famous 'plesiosaur' photo – which learned scientists claimed showed an object better than thirty-feet – and continued to do so well into the millennium, despite a local newspaper story identifying the beast as a foot-tall model – literally two weeks after the incident, when the pranksters themselves came forward and fessed-up the gag.

There was even a Bigfoot hoax where some guy had actually been killed – he had been laying in the road, pretending to be a Sasquatch hit by a car, and he had been run over twice.

In a way, Tom could almost understand the hoaxes – it was an effort to preserve the magic – even if