The Gospel of Joe Prologue

When you want to describe the end, how do you begin? I suppose I could start the end with “In the beginning,” given the religious undertones at play, but I've never been good at jokes. Which is sad because there was plenty of understated irony to chuckle at as the world crumbled.

Now, missing persons reports get filed all the time. I've filed plenty during my years at the NYPD. But when hundreds of thousands spontaneously disappear in a single moment the world over, eyebrows rise. At first, they called it The Rapture. By “they” I mean the sarcastic fucks on the Internet and the late night talk circuit. Then video evidence of people vanishing surfaced on the internet, though it was quickly followed by parody “evidence.”

Still, even with all the doubters, when you have such a widespread phenomenon, you have too many credible witnesses and too much solid evidence for the masses to ignore. Religious leaders were forced to speak on the absurd notion that The Rapture had occurred. After all, why would the whole of the Vatican clergy remain and the humble man selling religious trinkets on the Vatican streets be gone? Why would God pass over the rabid protesters picketing a soldier's funeral and take the gentle transgender girl who never in her life spoke an angry word?

See? I told you there was plenty to laugh at.

But the funny parts faded fast. The true horrors of the end became evident when crops wouldn't grow. Plants bore no fruit. Animals didn't stud. Apparently, cells still divided; what was alive kept on living and diseases still spread. But any higher form of life was effectively sterilised. No new young emerged.

Now, I'm sure you can guess the implications of this. Food quickly became scarce. Grain replaced oil as the commodity to wage war over. Conservation wasn't even attempted at. Livestock vanished. Then game vanished. Then pets vanished. Then man was pretty much all that was left, and well... people just quit asking what kind of meat they were being served.

Are you picturing the Hellhole the world became yet? Oh, there's more. Like I said, only single cells divided now. Diseases flourished. Since pregnancy was no longer a risk, condoms all but vanished. Diseases spread some more. And all those bodies that lie in the streets, a statistic of war, starvation or good ol' fashioned murder? There were now no maggots to strip the bone. No worms to clean the mess. They festered and bloated in the sun. Plagues spread like, well, plagues, I guess.

Early on, scientists tried to explain it with a number of bullshit theories from sunspots to magnetic shift; they tried to combat the starvation problem with lab-made meat and nutrients. Stem cells cloned into sheets of muscle tissue, meat grown without a mother. Success was limited, and could in no way keep up with demand.

In this brave new world, government corruption made Soviet Russia look like a hippy commune. Food only managed to be rationed to those in power. And those in power only bothered to act on public outrage when the outraged public started raiding government store houses. And by "act on public outrage," I mean they chose to disperse the food riots with tanks and drone strikes.

The moral compass of the world was permanently and irreparably broken. Whether or not you bought into The Rapture theory, whether or not you were convinced aliens did it, whether or not you believed people actually disappeared, you had to admit there were no good people left. The only philosophical debate was whether the loss of morality was the cause or the effect, but arguing over the chicken and they egg was meaningless now since we ate the chickens the moment they quit laying eggs.

Whether through war or through the collapse of civilisation, the strong and vicious destroyed the righteous and meek. If the end was truly the work of God, then He's clearly not coming back since there is no one left to support Him when He returns. This world now belongs wholly to the Devil.

And me? Well, I suppose I should say a little something about myself here. They say I'm to be a saint and all of this is to be gospel, but I'm a non-believer and I'd rather people hear the truth than some embellished fairy tale generations from now.

My name is Joe. Joe Martin. Or José Martínez, if you want to be technical about it. My mom was Puerto Rican and my father was a douchebag, which is why I claim my ethnicity to be half-Latino, half-asshole. That's the one joke I tell that actually gets laughs. There was nothing funny about my father, though. He walked out on us after one of his alcoholic fits, beating my mom and I within an inch of our lives. She fought hard to raise me on her own, but there wasn't money enough to go it alone, and she went through an endless string of pricks hoping one of them might be decent enough to be there for us. Meanwhile, I grew into a 19 year-old chain-smoking, alcoholic skirt-chaser and like so many with such attributes, I decided to become a cop.

She didn't get to see me graduate from the academy; AIDS took her a week before I got that badge. I know she'd be proud, though, as I worked on clearing the streets of alcoholics, wife-beaters and child molesters. I eventually made detective, and not long after that, the world ended.

Fortunately, I'd dealt with enough pieces of shit to be prepared for the new world order. I had experience wrestling lunatics with superhuman bath-salt strength; I've survived a few shoot-outs; I've hunted down some of New York's most hardened and well-hidden criminals. I was built to survive in the new world, so I became an entrepreneur, starting a gun for hire outfit. Protection and ass-kicking was my business, and business was GOOD.

For seven years I took whatever jobs were available; I didn't really care who my client was or who their target was. As long as they could cough up some money or a few cans of unspoiled food, I'd watch their backs. I made enemies, powerful enemies, terrifying enemies, but none of that mattered because I proved myself time and again, and they always became my next client.

Then fate decided to hire me. Seven years after the world ended, seven years after a new apple grew or a new calf was born, seven years after the last human child was brought into the world, I was given a job that would change me, and change the entire world in the process.

It's been a few years now, and my memory has surrendered in part to the alcohol, but what I'm about to tell you is true. I can't explain parts of it; I can only tell you what happened. Be your own judge. This is my story the best I can tell it. The story of Joe Martin. Or as some are already calling it, The Gospel According to Joe.