The Last Monster on Earth: Appalachia (Prologue)
This is the prologue of my new fanfiction centered around LJ Davis's work called "The Last Monster on Earth". I recommend you look their books up on Amazon, it's very amazing and interesting! The author clearly has some furry influences, and they are fantastic at the community building they do, as well as the many stories they write. I was very inspired by their works to write this fanfiction.
This is the story of a man named David Thompson, who endures unbearable sickness at the fault of the Curse Virus. He awakens shortly after in a strange world, far gone from the one he knew. His survival is dependent on his skills and knowledge from before, adapting to the strange times he's forced into in the present. Not as a human, but as something more.
Fanfiction Material:
This story is intended as a work of fiction, based on the series “The Last Monster on Earth" by LJ Davis. It is not intended for profit. Any person may utilize the fanfiction lore established in the following story for their use, or to contribute to their own story. The names, characters, places, and events described are fictional and sourced on fanfiction material.
The Last Monster on Earth:
Appalachia
PROLOGUE
I intend to upload this to Royal Road:
royalroad.com/profile/760086
The ultimate conclusion of adversity is the growth of maturity, though whether or not the person being tested could grow in that climate depended entirely on their resolve and will. I was never a man to understand the limitations of their resolve, I had always clawed my way past the incredulity of the state of my mind and being, trying to affirm in myself the necessary requirements that I deserved to exist. It was not always the case, I had not always had the motivation to live and breathe as the human I once was. I had suffered with multiple issues that compounded to create the maelstrom of the individual, the man, I had grown into. In a way, moving to Blairsville in Northern Georgia had helped alleviate my mind of most of that suffering. That was before the Curse Virus had changed everything, and altered the state of my existence forever.
I had been a truck driver before the collapse; the “collapse" being the word that the Appalachia Clans used to describe the events leading up to the great change. I had traveled the country during my truck driving job, been to every continental state and then some, and even traveled to parts of Canada and Mexico on my runs. Blairsville had become my home near the tail end of my career, and there, while I hadn't become acquainted with many of the folk, and had come to know most of the town as a friend or associate.
My land was situated off Hickory Heights Rd, just off of Blue Ridge Highway, which itself wasn't much of a highway other than a local state route. The property I bought was around four acres and, with some foresight, I had put a camper on it with utilities and a driveway space enough for my truck and trailer. There were a few other drivers in the city I was associated with and, when I was home and they were too, we'd often go to the Hole in the Wall, a well appropriately named restaurant near the town center; associating, meeting, eating, talking, and deliberating about our runs and how the degradation of the trucking industry culture was ruining everything, that sort of stuff.
In the two years prior to the collapse, I had a life for me, and I was turning myself around after so long of a struggle. My life had been shit, up until I dedicated it not to be. The small camper I put on that lot was more of a home than any place I ever been before. Looking back, it was a nice town to live in, nice place, and I miss it greatly.
Those times were over though. Once the collapse started, the government began to panic and enforce stricter quarantine rules across the country. Every city, every town, and every county in the country had some sort of quarantine rules in effect enacted by the federal government. Stockades and places built up by organizations from the “Men in Black", the proper word we used around these parts to call those bastards who rounded up the sick and dying, were in place too—built quickly and seemingly overnight right off of Pat Haralson Dr just north of town, near the curve where the cancer and outpatient medical centers were. There, it seemed, the entire populace of Blairsville was forced into, including myself.
At first we had all accepted the fact we were being processed for our illnesses. Like everyone else, I fell ill with the disease. It felt like COVID in a way, I had that horrible stuff and almost passed away from it, but I survived that—I was gonna survive this too! I followed instructions, much of us backwoods and country folk did that and we followed the orders of our superiors to make things flow nicely. Looking back, this was our downfall, and the downfall of everyone and all I knew. The stockades weren't a place of recovery, they were just that: a stockade for cattle. By the end of things, we all figured out the government knew more than it let on. The disease changed you into what we were now, the Ukentian, but then again everyone had their own name for it. That was just the popular name the Appalachia Clans had for our kind now, a name derived from Cherokee folklore, of which many of the clan consisted.
On my first waking after… becoming a Ukentian, I was in the stockades, like everyone else from Blairsville. This was after the world ended, after everything meant little and nothing else mattered, after the world we knew was thrown from our grasp. Blairsville was just another town, a backwater, and I suppose once the government realized they couldn't keep control of the situation, those men in black suits left us to die.
Everyone I knew had either changed or died in the process of it. I remember a few times in a makeshift bed as I slipped in and out of consciousness, the last bits of what I remembered of my humanity, I asked the doctors and they told me those folks had passed or were in recovery. It was like having my world ripped from me, painfully slowly, every step I had taken being stolen by the unfairness of what the disease was. And that's the last of what I remember of being human.
That's where my story started, the disorientation, the first waking. Waking up the first time was disorienting because, at first, you think you're still human. You move your hand around, and lo' and behold you got paws! You turn your head, and wouldn't ya know it? You got an elongated neck with a weird shaped head! My entire field of perception was shot to nothing in a second that first day, mainly because I began to notice the long snout that dominated the center of my vision. Had I not been a more well rounded manner of man, I would have lost myself there, and as I laid the hay that served as my makeshift bedding, I could also hear the savagery of those who lost it all in the process of becoming what we were now.
I suppose it's only fair to tell you it from my side of the story, how I saw it, how it began, how I began into this new life and world.