9. Puzzle Apocalypse

Date: 7/26/2019

A zombie apocalypse has descended upon the city, with people being gruesomely murdered by the undead before my very eyes, including the If Google Were a Guy guy. At the Home Depot (where I work) we had a lot of guys there trying to sell all our huge equipment by driving them down the secluded mountain they were stored on, while the rest of us were in the garden center. Gus Johnson wanted a Bud Light from the overhead, so I got him one and he ridiculed me because apparently it was non-alcoholic. It didn’t say it anywhere on the can though so we argued for a bit. Chris Rock came in but was on Gus’s side. Rude. A bunch of people and I went to an open field to wrangle down a transmission tower for some reason. It ended up folding like origami. That apocalypse was soon replaced by a different, weirder, and somehow more freaky one, whereby it was pretty much a cosmic The Floor is Lava game. If anyone were to touch the bare ground outside at all, they would be painfully obliterated (I think it was like a Thanos dissolution type of thing). So people were desperate to remain inside. The rules of the apocalypse were that if you touched any part of the outside ground without some sort of barrier (shoes or anything that attaches to them do not count), you would die painfully. However if you were to find something on the ground that were out of place (like a rock on the road instead of in the dirt) you could step on it. Cars were not affected since they weren’t people, so if you managed to hop into your car without touching the ground outside you’d be fine. So I was in a big building in the city, where I was essentially in this inpatient facility where we were trying to figure out how to stop the apocalypse, and it turned out to be a huge game with a puzzle type solution. The premise is that there are two different realities that exist hand in hand. You can switch realities by putting on these special glasses or taking them off (I ended up being able to switch automatically). The two worlds differed in color scheme, but the big difference is that some materials would turn into other materials when the realities were switched. Wood would turn into water, blood would turn into ice, and several other things that I can’t remember. But by strategically switching realities in a set of puzzle-like scenarios, we would get closer to being free. Each individual person to solve every puzzle would automatically become immune to the effects of the apocalypse. We called the game Cosmic Lights. I was lazy and gave up after not figuring some of the puzzles out, and even when the solutions were being passed around, I didn’t care enough to get them all done. I just accepted that I guess this was my life now. I was now living with my nuclear family and my cousin in my grandmother’s old house, and I was starting to lose all hope in life. I got angry with something my mom said and decided I was going to go outside. It was a bit of a Mexican standoff where I was tired of living but scared of dying out there, and my mom was very scared and angry at me for considering going outside. Eventually I did and just went as far away as I could, somehow making it to the curb of a street near a gas station before passing out. When I woke up, a black SUV pulled up beside me and a Chinese man who I somehow knew, came to me walking on the bare ground (???) saying that my manager Katie from Home Depot sent him out to come get me because she was concerned. He told me that the USA and Japan and a bunch of other countries were affected by this apocalypse but that the people of Hong Kong (where he was from) were left untouched. At one point I was playing Minecraft and the same rules were applying there. Then I saw on a big server that Cosmic Lights had been a popular gamemode for a while that not a lot of people were good at and then I thought to myself, Dang I’m sure glad I have an advantage against these noobs now. Then I woke up.