It was the night before everything vanished; the sky had a sickly green glow. A cross between pea soup and baby puke. The air was stagnant, charged with electricity. The stench of rotten flesh filled the streets. A red layer of fog hovered low to the ground. A bloody carpet of thick, fetid goo covered everything. People didn’t panic right away. It wasn’t until the next morning when they could see the devastation. Everything is coated in blood and guts. The party was over.
Flocks of birds flew in circles. Planes fell out of the sky. Buildings and trees vibrated to the hum and drone of the planet's last gasp. It was the last thing they saw. They knew it was coming, and it was going to be a bumpy last ride around the sun. Some said it was the apocalypse. Many prayed to their gods of choice. Faith wouldn’t save them. Everything they believed no longer mattered. The news was spotty, and they told us not to panic, but not much else. The air raid sirens sounded across the country. Despite the official announcement, people panicked. Widespread looting and violence began in cities and towns everywhere. People were fucking in the streets. The sounds of barking dogs, ambulances, and fire trucks blasted out the warnings together. The horns grew louder by the minute. Was this the divine rapture of a vengeful god? Hardly.
The sun was slowly disappearing into a black hole of space above our dumb heads. This Armageddon wasn’t like the movie or the Bible-brainwashing taught in schools. This was different. All bets were off. There were no angels, no second coming, or loving grace offered. No one saw it coming. They were going out in one soggy, humongous bag of shit. The bag ripped open, and the contents were spewing out. No one survived the day the world disappeared. I must report that I’m the last. The only person on earth. I guess you could say I was lucky, but you’d be wrong. I was in my basement when the first wave blast started. Likewise, I watched it on my phone screen. The end was televised in short order. I heard a sonic boom along with people screaming and sobbing outside. Feeling the pain as people slowly went insane.
I couldn’t see what was happening, but didn’t need to. It was obviously the beginning of the end. Something destroyed our planet. It was clear that this was the grand finale of humanity’s reckoning. So much for forgiveness and forgetting. There was no coming back from the dead past as the future cancelled out, removed in seconds. It seemed longer, but it was over before anyone knew what went down.
All those years of end-day fears amounted to nothing now that it was finally gone. Who could have predicted that it would happen this time, finally once, and for all? I thought it would be more spectacular. When it’s time to go, there’s nothing to do but go with the flow. Yet somehow, I didn’t get a grand exit with the rest of humankind and every creature that walked, crawled, slithered, flew, or swam in this place we called home. We thought so highly of ourselves. As if we had the world by the short hairs. It was the world who had the last laugh.
So much for complete devastation. The scientists and scholars tried to warn us, but nobody listened. We were busy trying to survive rather than consider hypothetical scenarios that might or might not exist. Within the context of wild imaginings of doomsayers and other nihilists who predicted the end was always near. Nobody truly knows or cares how fragile this mess is.
An unexpected bummer, but it’s what makes the world precariously precious. So sorry for your loss, but I’m the last of your failed species. I’m not sorry enough. I don’t give a damn what anybody else thinks. Like I ever did. Now it’s time to think about how the bleak future will unfold for what is now my short, solitary existence. I won’t be able to make it much longer until the food and water run out. Then it’s just a matter of time. To be honest, I finished with this place long before the last night before the last day of the earth. Why was I spared the indignity of dying alone along with the rest of the lonely planet? Only to die later. Stuck in a windowless hole, sitting in my basement, waiting for the end. It was all I had left to live for. Finally.