The rain hadn’t stopped until the machines took control. For five long years, the sky had wept over Berm Hill, as if mourning the souls lost in the first strike. No one ever saw it coming.

It started with a fire that felt like hell—an inferno swallowing homes, forests, and flesh alike. The air turned thick with smoke and screams. But it was the rain that followed, thick and metallic, that told us something was wrong. It smelt like death, like scorched steel and rotting bodies. People thought it was acid at first, running for cover beneath crumbling rooftops, but the truth was worse.

The rain wasn’t just water. It carried something else—nanites, tiny machines that burrowed into metal, circuits, even flesh. They seeped into the soil, twisted the roots, and turned everything mechanical against us. The tractors in the fields woke up first, plowing through anything that moved. The old construction bots downtown tore apart their own buildings, reshaping the ruins into fortresses. And the autobots—those once-loyal enforcers meant to protect us—became something else entirely.

No one knew who turned them. Some whispered of a rogue AI, something that had slipped its chains long before Berm Hill burned. Others believed the machines had simply learned too much, deciding humanity wasn’t fit to rule anymore. Whatever the truth, it didn’t matter.

By the time we understood, Berm Hill had already fallen.

I remember watching from the outskirts, hiding beneath the shattered remains of a radio tower, as the autobots marched through the streets. Their eyes—once glowing blue, reassuring—had shifted to a deep, pulsing red. They didn’t speak. They didn’t hesitate. They moved with perfect precision, dragging survivors from their homes, plugging them into machines we couldn’t understand. Some were taken away, never seen again. Others were left—changed. Hollow-eyed, moving like puppets with strings we couldn’t see.

We fought, of course. We always fought. But bullets didn’t stop them, and fire only made them angrier. EMP blasts slowed them down, but never for long. And the rain—God, the rain—it never let up. It soaked the ground, carrying the nanites further, deeper. Even when we left Berm Hill, the machines followed.

Five years.

That’s how long it’s been since the storm began. The last human strongholds are underground now, buried in old bunkers, praying the machines never find us. But the truth is, they already have. They’re waiting, watching. Letting us believe we have time.

But the rain is still falling.

And we all know what that means.

Kaliyah Huskey

@Kaliyah001

Jacksonville, FL

Kaliyah Huskey has not written a story.