They crawled out from the dark into even greater darkness. They were the survivors, at least for a moment in time. They were the lucky ones who might not remain either survivors or lucky.

The devastation was epic. They bunched together in a small group, stunned and speechless as they gazed at what was around them. Where once there were buildings that defied one’s ability to see the very tops from the streets below, now the landscape was simply piles of unbelievable rubble. Even all these months later there was dense smoke in the air and the stench of rot and death.

Never before had there been such a storm in the history of the planet. There had been warnings over the decades before as every year the storms gained strength and became not only more numerous but monsters in size and strength. But the arguments about whether the planet was in trouble just remained arguments and no real effort was made to address what was happening.

The ones now standing in awe and fear had been the planners. They were scientists who had been prophets crying in the wilderness about what the future would be. They were ecologists who tried to speak about what was happening to Mother Earth as Her cries and warnings grew ever more dangerous; the winds, the earthquakes, the fires, the great floods. But no one listened so this group had made plans and when the last, gigantic storm hit the coast and the great cities, they took to the shelter they had been planning for years and took with them their families and friends and even a couple of strangers they dragged down with them as the storm roared its way onto the land.

It was a massive coming together of the years of warnings. The winds were over 300 m.p.h when they hit and nothing built by man withstood them, or the rains that dumped oceans onto the land. It went on and on and on for days, moving barely inches as the weather patterns were altered and nothing changed. Where the planet was drowning on the coasts, the fires raged in other parts and nothing stopped them. Then the earthquakes shook and cleaved the great plates and the chasms that were created swallowed everything as they yawned open.

But here was this small group and they had literally weathered the storm. One might like to hope that they could rebuild some kind of existence and the human animals could rise again, but in their hearts and minds they wondered. Even greater was the unspoken thought; did they even want to try?