Today must be one of the most beautiful days I can remember ever seeing. Sunny with almost no clouds in the sky, warm but not suffocating, with a refreshing but not exactly cold wind, the kind where you can lie down in a hammock in the afternoon just looking at the sky and talking to whoever is near you.
Which is exactly what I'm doing with my family, me lying on the bench at the table outside, my father in a hammock, my mother in a beach lounger and my younger sister lying on her stomach by the pool like a cat, with her dogs lying right next to her.
A day when even my father, who is practically allergic to standing still, decides to do this, which is a sign that either he was really tired from work that week or he was calm enough to allow himself to relax, I choose to believe it was the latter.
We were talking about a lot of unimportant things, like about our family up until now, about that distant cousin's wedding, the problems that some friends were going through and if there was anything we could do to help.
If the grandma (who is now a great-grandmother thanks to some cousins who are in a hurry with their boyfriends) would be okay in her new house, which is on the other side of the state with my older uncle (my mother's older brother), etc.
But as the subject was ending, we just stayed quiet in our corners, enjoying a silence that is almost impossible to achieve in a big city, just relaxing and watching the sky.
That is until some clouds appeared out of nowhere and ruined the lazy and comfortable atmosphere. There were even crickets chirping in the background and some birds singing. But as soon as the clouds appeared, they immediately stopped, leaving things in a very strange silence.
Not that we had much time to think about how strange this behavior was. Soon after, we were all hit by a sudden wave of sleepiness.
It was so strong that I almost fainted right there on the bench, luckily I managed to hold on, just barely.
I heard a loud bang coming from the clouds and a very cold wind started to blow out of nowhere, in a few moments the air that was previously only slightly humid became heavier and heavier in a few moments.
I'm not a meteorologist and my guesses about the weather are more wrong than right, but even I know that this meant there was going to be a downpour coming, a heavy downpour. When I got up to go home I saw that unlike me, the rest of my family had fallen asleep.
"Hey, guys, you can't sleep there, it's going to rain really hard, come on, wake up, get moving."
I said, shaking each of them, trying to pat them and even touching their feet (no one in my family likes their feet touched when we sleep, including me), but it didn't help at all. They went straight to sleep and while I tried to wake them up I fought against this drowsiness that was getting stronger by the second.
As I felt increasingly sleepy, the most I could do was pull my mother's lounge chair into the covered area where my father's hammock was, grab some thick blankets and pillows from inside the house, arrange them in a corner, and put my sister and her dogs on top of it (she would never leave me alone if she knew I left her dogs out in the rain). Finally, I closed the accordion-style folding doors of the covered area.
I could have sworn that I had already passed out standing up at least 5 times while doing all this, it was obvious that I couldn't hold out much longer. I gathered the last crumbs of energy that I still had and put a blanket on each of them (ok, I threw it on top of them more than put it on carefully, but I'm almost passing out here!!. And I even put a blanket on top of the dogs, so you can give me a little consideration, right?).
And finally I found a good spot on the floor (where the dogs hadn't "marked" or vomited or at least hadn't done that that day, note: it was difficult), I put a blanket on the floor, the pillow and another blanket to cover myself and let my tired mind give in to the embrace of dreams.
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This drowsiness didn't happen just in a certain random house in Brazil, the same thing happened around the world. Black clouds, apparently rain clouds, appeared out of nowhere and a wave of drowsiness appeared, forcing everyone in every house, every building, mansion, trailer and any place that had any kind of conscious living being to sleep, some gradually and calmly, others more suddenly as if they were fainting.
Unfortunately, this was not restricted to people inside rooms. People in cars, planes, ships, who were swimming or doing some kind of sport at the time the clouds appeared also fell asleep.
This resulted in an extremely high rate of deaths or injuries. Unfortunately, these unlucky people were unable to receive any kind of help other than to rely on the luck of having someone nearby who could resist drowsiness. Or luckily, since many died without even realizing it.
While this was happening in the concrete jungles, something similar but slightly different was happening in the original jungles and forests. Animals not only slept, some of them were wrapped in a kind of cocoon of white energy, but not just animals. Even plants, in some places entire forests, were wrapped in these cocoons.
These cocoons also involved several humans, but not nearly as much as with the animals. This also happened in the sea, and even in the planet's own atmosphere. If someone had been awake at that moment, they would have seen the blue planet being taken over by a kind of balck-gray cocoon of clouds, and from this cocoon, several beams of light could be seen appearing sporadically from within it.
The largest and most persistent of them seemed to come directly from the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans.
It is not possible to be sure how long this lasted; it could have been a few minutes, a few hours or even days. But one thing is certain: everyone who woke up later found the cities in a very different state than when they were forced to sleep.
Some were almost completely taken over by plants, becoming literal urban forests. While other cities were devastated by the rain caused by the clouds, by the resulting floods and landslides with no one to contain them, other cities were invaded by some animals that had woken up earlier.
However, they were very different, some had different fur, others seemed to have acquired new types of appendages and all the animals that appeared were larger than they should have been. What was once a small mouse was now the size of a cat, a smal domestic lizard was the same size as an adult rat and so on.
In addition to these, some animals didn't seem that different from before. Like the wolves, some were just bigger than before, while others were now completely black as shadows and others had fur that seemed incandescent with flames, and stranger creatures like what could only be described as living slimes.
And yet it wasn't the animals that shocked people the most. No, it was the new inhabitants that appeared while they were sleeping, creatures that should only exist in books now had appeared in broad daylight. Small and ugly beings no taller than a 8-year-old child appeared in groups, along with what appeared to be green, brown and pink giants.
The green ones had a more human appearance with lower canines protruding from their protruding jaws and were 2.30 meters tall on average. The brown ones were slightly larger, with human and muscular bodies but with the heads of ferocious boars, with a savage appearance accentuated by enormous tusks that almost reached eye level. While the pink ones essentially had the appearance of bipedal pigs measuring 2.10 meters, with a more unkempt appearance than the previous ones, and without that dangerous fangs, but no less frightful.
And the most repulsive (in the opinion of some, others thought that the goblins and orc pigs were more repulsive than them) were the undead.
Zombies and skeletons began to emerge from the ground itself, while the previous ones appeared sporadically in cities, these beings had a predictability of where they would appear. That made them both easier to control and avoid and equally worrying, emerging predictably from cemeteries and morgues, tô thouse who simply coming out of the ground of alleys, canals and even sewers.
Some of the undead came from the ground covered in dirt and rags, while others appeared using ancient weapons such as swords and spears. With several of these having appeared much more in places where murders had occurred (including several backyards and gardens).