“Breaking news: a mysterious comet is approaching Earth, potentially bringing the largest meteor shower in recorded history. Experts are currently calculating the comet’s trajectory…”

“Where did this comet even come from? Why was there zero warning? What is the government hiding from us?”

“Oh god, help, a meteor’s heading right for me—”

“The meteor shower has now swept across most of the Eastern Hemisphere. Reports indicate that Russia, China, Australia, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, India, Malaysia, Thailand, and other regions have experienced widespread communications blackouts…”

“This is a catastrophic disaster. God — Mother Mary — every satellite in geostationary orbit has been destroyed. We’ve lost all contact with the outside world… Mayor George is working on a response. Everyone stay in your homes. Do not go outside under any circumstances.”

“Mommy — I want my mommy — waaaaaah—”

“This is Allah’s judgment upon the kafir. Hahaha — you godless heretics, tremble in the hellfire!”

“Command, this is Iron Falcon, requesting comm restoration — I repeat, this is Iron Falcon, requesting — AAAGH — BOOM—”

“Grandma, what’s that up in the sky?”

“It’s a meteor shower, sweetheart. Make a wish — they say it’ll come true.”

“Okay! I wish… I wish for Grandma to get better…”

“Stop playing League of Legends and get out here! The meteor shower is insane, oh my god—”

“The ancient Mayan prophecy — delayed by ten years — has finally come to pass. The end of the world is here. Human civilization will be wiped from the earth. God, please show us the way forward.”

“Hello? Hello? Is anyone out there? Is anyone still alive?”

“Admiral, wind speed exceeding 67 m/s, tsunami wave height 47 meters — we’re listing!”

“No — the Liaoning will never — BOOM — gone—”

Watching the meteor streak toward him, Shen Cong’s eyes went wide. One thought filled his head completely: this is it.

Maybe six years of mental preparation had drilled the response into him at a reflex level — his body moved before his brain could catch up. He popped Vajra’s armor open, hauled himself into the cab, and hit the ignition, ready to floor it away from whatever was about to land on him.

But Vajra wasn’t fast off the line. The wheels had barely started rolling when the meteor hit — a roaring wall of fire slamming directly into the old corrugated warehouse, the explosion swallowing everything in an instant.

Inside the cab, Shen Cong didn’t even have time for another thought. The shockwave took him out cold.

If you could have looked down from space at that moment —

A comet, grazing the upper edge of Earth’s atmosphere. Meteors raining down like fireworks, blanketing the planet. Each impact sent rippling energy storms rolling across the surface, one after another. The whole Earth looked like an abstract painting, smeared with light and fire by a careless hand.

The doomsday prediction from that forum post. The 2022 deadline.

It had arrived right on schedule.

Crack. Pop. Ping.

Something was pelting the outside of the truck — a constant barrage of it, like gravel thrown against a tin roof.

Shen Cong’s head felt like it had been filled with wet cement. Heavy, foggy, slow. And underneath that, something stranger — an unfamiliar sense of expansion, like he’d somehow grown to an enormous size, become something vast and mechanical and solid.

He tried to move his body.

Nothing responded.

Paralyzed?

Paralyzed.

That single word snapped him fully awake. His breathing went ragged. Six years of non-stop training — one-finger push-ups, dead-eye slingshot aim at twenty meters, a body built specifically to survive this — that was his greatest asset going into the apocalypse. He could not be paralyzed.

He forced himself to calm down and actually pay attention.

Then he let out a long, slow breath.

He wasn’t paralyzed. His arms and legs were fine. His body was fine. No injuries. He was still sitting in Vajra’s cab — it was just completely dark. The screens were all dead. The meteor strike must have taken out the electrical system.

Outer armor: widespread thermal damage. Internal wiring: partial burnout. Immediate repairs required.

The information arrived in his head without warning — not as words exactly, more like a feeling with meaning attached. It was coming from Vajra. Like the truck had become an extension of his own body, and he could sense the damage the way you sense a bruise — dull, insistent, present.

“What the hell is going on?” Shen Cong muttered, brow furrowed. He had no framework for this whatsoever.

Outside, the pelting continued — rocks and debris hammering the hull, wind screaming through whatever gaps it could find. It didn’t sound friendly. He wasn’t about to step outside to check, and he still couldn’t make sense of this new connection to Vajra. The pressure in his chest was building.

But he needed to know what was happening out there. The last thing he’d seen before blacking out was a sky full of meteors and one of them caving in the warehouse roof directly above him.

That thing was enormous. If it had landed a meter closer, there’d be nothing left of me.

He shuddered.

He found a small flashlight stowed behind the driver’s seat, clicked it on. The cab lit up. Everything intact — just no power. Not even the emergency backup supply. The truck’s condition was a problem for later. Right now, Shen Cong needed eyes on the outside world.

Below the steering column, he found a manual pull lever. He yanked it.

Thunk.

The steel armor over the windshield split open — just a crack — and a hatch about the size of a shoebox swung outward. He’d planned for exactly this scenario when designing the modifications: every window position had a manually-operated viewport in case of total power loss.

He pressed his eye to it.

The world outside was dark.

A curtain of flying sand and debris stretched in every direction. The warehouse walls — four or five meters of solid concrete that had surrounded the entire compound — were simply gone. Not collapsed, not crumbling. Gone. The yard had become an open plain. Rocks skipped across the ground and threw up little puffs of dust each time they landed. When they hit Vajra’s hull, they rang out sharp and clear.

This was it. The real thing.

Shen Cong pulled the viewport shut and climbed through the door behind the driver’s seat into the cargo container. He’d built it out as equal parts survival bunker and living quarters — widened, raised, reinforced — with enough supply storage to last years and just enough living space to stay sane. A folding area with a treadmill, because running was the most efficient way to stay in shape in a confined space.

The supplies were all still there: canned meat, hardtack, flour, honey, chocolate — all shelf-stable for decades — alongside a full medical kit, a portable generator, and a comprehensive set of wilderness survival gear. As a senior member of the outdoor survival forum, he’d spent years refining the list with other preppers. He hadn’t cut corners.

The container had viewports along the sides and rear too. He unlatched the rear one and looked out.

The warehouse was gone. What used to be directly behind the truck was now open air, with a handful of load-bearing columns still standing alone in the dark. One of them — thick as a grown man’s thigh — had been bent ninety degrees.

Far off in the dark sky, the occasional meteor still streaked through, trailing light.

Staring at the wreckage of a world he’d spent years preparing for, Shen Cong felt something unexpected: helplessness. He’d imagined dozens of apocalypse scenarios — zombie outbreaks, total blackouts, mutant creatures, alien invasions, polar ice collapse, the Yellowstone supervolcano going off — but a meteor shower had never been the one he’d really pictured.

He also had no way of knowing whether this was a local disaster or something that had hit the entire planet.

All he could do was trust Vajra and wait it out.

Food and water weren’t a concern. Space was tight, but he’d designed the interior with that in mind — even with supplies occupying most of it, there was a functional area to move around in. The treadmill would keep him from going stir-crazy.

There was no sign the storm was letting up anytime soon. After a brief moment of staring blankly at nothing, Shen Cong pulled himself together.

Honestly, the end of the world could wait. What was bothering him more right now was that strange connection to Vajra — that sense of the truck as an extension of himself, present and real and unexplained. It made him uneasy. It also made him curious.

Confined spaces could break a restless person.

For Shen Cong, after six years of self-imposed isolation, it was just Tuesday.

Eat. Sleep. Train. Watch the storm. Probe at the mysterious link between himself and Vajra.

With no way to tell day from night, time was measured only by the mechanical ticking of his watch. Two weeks passed in the dark like that — nothing but the constant percussion of debris hammering Vajra’s armor plating.

Then one day, Shen Cong sat on the edge of his bunk with a Geiger counter in hand, checking the radiation levels inside the cab.

When the apocalypse hit, he’d immediately clocked the interior radiation at 320 microsieverts — alpha particles, beta particles, gamma rays, X-rays, all elevated. It was roughly comparable to the contamination levels recorded around Fukushima after the meltdown. Not immediately dangerous, but not nothing.

One time he’d stuck the Geiger counter out through a viewport and gotten a reading of 5 millisieverts — five thousand microsieverts. Brief exposure at that level wouldn’t cause serious harm, but sustained exposure over weeks? That was a different story. Any survivors out in the open without shielding had probably already started showing effects.

The recent news, at least, was better.

Over the past few days, both the interior and exterior readings had been dropping. The storm intensity seemed to be easing up too.

Just a little longer. It should stop soon, he told himself.

It took another two weeks.

One full month after it all began — what he calculated to be around June 17th, 2022 — the storm simply stopped.

When the hammering against the hull went quiet, Shen Cong sat in the cab and realized he’d forgotten what silence felt like.

He pulled out the Geiger counter and extended it out through the viewport. The reading was still several times above normal background levels, but no longer in the range that posed a meaningful health risk.

He took a slow, deep breath.

Then he reached up, unlatched the armor panel, and prepared to step outside Vajra for the first time in a month.

(End of Chapter 2)