Cryptid-Apocalypse

Tessa was huddled up to a coffee table in the cool basement of an old farmhouse, drawing in her journal by soft lantern light. She held her silver heart shaped locket in her fisted left hand, while concentrating on every detail she could remember of what she saw earlier that day. The locket was etched with intricately shaped flowers with two small amethyst chips embedded into the metal. The amethysts were from a summer trip where her and her family had stopped to pan for the beautiful purple stones. Her mom had them set into the locket and she gave it to her for Christmas during her senior year in high school. It was the only personal item she had and it held the only pictures of her parents, so it was her prized possession. She had found a nice replacement chain in the upstairs bedroom and gave the previous owner her heartfelt thanks. Her original one had broken a while back. Biting her lip, she flipped the page and wrote down some more details of what she had seen the day before.

They saw a bigfoot. Yes, a real actual bigfoot. Mostly through the binoculars, because there was no way they were going to take on one of those on purpose. From what they found out recently, a bigfoot’s skin was very tough, and it took four of them shooting in the same area on the chest to take it down. They would have steered clear of that one too, but it appeared out of thin air 50 feet away from them. It had come running full speed at them down a forestry road and its howling scream was deafening. They had used up a lot of their precious ammo just to take that one cryptid down.

The apocalypse started 6 months ago. The bigfoot sightings increased enough that the government started surveillance on Mount Rainier National Park in Washington State. Then every day there were sightings of other cryptid and a lot of those were caught on camera. It was when people started disappearing or found dead from unknown causes that we knew we were in trouble. Well, that and seeing the Mothman in every major city in the U.S. for a whole week. In Texas, a farmer and his family were almost killed by a pack of Chupacabra after running out to check on their goats and chickens that were screaming. The family barricaded themselves in their house and the police came and shot a few and the rest ran off. It took 10 strong men to kill a giant anaconda in the Amazon after it had eaten or killed half a village. Fishermen around the world had sightings of aquodic cryptid. The Lock Ness monster was on video coming on shore and there was more than one Bessie that was spotted surfacing in Lake Erie. A thunder bird landed on the Space Needle in Seattle and then grabbed a person off the street below that was walking to work. It flew away, but every other day after that someone was taken to be its next meal. The real kicker was when all the cryptid in Fae folklore united to take down the power grids which shut down communications, economy, and infrastructure around the world.

Tessa and her best friend and boyfriend, Ryley, had been trying to make their way from Seattle, Washington toward their hometown. They grew up in a smaller town on the other side of Washington State, which is mostly a desert area. They would run into a few groups of people, but no one was heading in the direction they were. Weeks into their hike they heard the terrible news. The Fae took out all of the Dams on the Columbia River and the town that they had lived in their whole lives was under water. Thousands of people were dead and they had no way of knowing if their families were still alive. That night they held each other and cried themselves to sleep.

Tessa looked over at Ryley who was fast asleep. He was all she had left, besides her locket, and didn’t know what she would do without him. She thanked the gods again that they both had experience camping and hunting, which had saved their lives many times since this horrible nightmare started.

Tessa and Ryley had been best friends since either of them could remember. They stuck together through the ups and downs of childhood and throughout their teens. They went to the same college and had dorm rooms in the same building at the University of Washington, which was a relief to both them and their parents. After graduating with degrees in computer science and digital art, they both found jobs near Seattle, and moved into a 2-bedroom apartment together. Ryley had finally asked her on a real date and it was as amazing as she always dreamed it would be. They both had dated other people in high school and college, but no relationship ever lasted.

In the Cascade Mountains of Washington, Tessa and Ryley found a community of 15 people that had already been off the grid before the apocalypse and they were gladly taken in. The more people who know how to survive the better, as they said. Once they learned that Tesa knew the lore on the cryptid they had encountered, they felt very blessed to have her join them. They were very lucky to find the homestead, because winter had just started and the snow had started coming down in heavy flakes. They had 6 foot snow drifts until early spring. As soon as the snow was gone, they started building their own cabin, so they could move out of Bryce and Tammy’s place.

Tessa was the community’s cryptid keeper. Every group of humans they came across had a story about a cryptid they hadn’t encountered yet, so she would record their information in her journal that she had started at the beginning of all of the craziness. She had yet to encounter a cryptid, crypts for short, that she didn’t already have knowledge of. Most of what she knew about them was from listening to her most favorite podcast called Bigfoot Clubhouse. The BC boys would talk about everything from bigfoot to the Mothman and everything in between. Little did she know this would be the most important podcast of her life and thank the gods she had purchased some of the books they had recommended, which were back at the homestead.

Tessa, Ryley, Paul, Michael, and Bryce were on a foraging mission into the nearest town to see if they could find people, food, or items they need for the community. The bigfoot that they watched that day had been building a shelter with trees. They saw it disappear and reappear in a different spot several times with strange items that he put into the shelter. This may have just confirmed a few hypotheses about why bigfoot, the ultimate hide and seek champion, was so hard to find. They planned on giving this area a wide birth on the way back to the homestead.