The End - Visions of Apocalypse

Steve had gone to lunch with his work buddies when the world turned gray. No one really knew what had happened. It sure was nothing like the crap you saw on the big screen. There hadn’t been a bright flash of a nuke going off somewhere. Nor the rumbling sound of a tidal wave crashing in. No earth shaking, no slow-motion explosion. Just the blanket of hot ash blowing through the streets.

He had hidden in a cellar somewhere and waited. And waited. Then, he had come out to realize the building above him was gone, eroded, blown away, picked clean, vanished. The next thing he knew, there was the wind, hot, searing, whipping into his eyes and nose and mouth. The pain came later, almost like a gentle afterthought, pinpoints of irritation budding into mosquito agony. He could only guess what his once handsome face looked like now. There was little hair left on his scalp. And his hands were raw and peeling and had those black bits of volcanic ash embedded in them.

The wind just wouldn’t stop screaming.

It would kill everything eventually, he knew. Sooner or later, it would chisel the meat off his bones, the last hope from his heart, the faces off the few people still left alive. Hour after hour, the world lost its detail. Even the huge blocks of crashed masonry and snakes of warped metal were turning less, the wind working its piranha magic, nibbling away corners and lines.

* * *

Some said it was the Russians. Others said it was the Chinese. A nerd like him theorized the atmosphere was peeling off like an old blister, blown away by the sun flares. Steve couldn’t care less. He was hungry. And the void in his belly filled him with a holy purpose. He would die one day, but not while he could still crawl through the debris and search for food.

Until a few days ago, there had been plenty of food. The doomsday experts had had it wrong. Cans of ham were more likely to survive an apocalypse than men. So the expected shortage of food had become a shortage of people to consume it. The lucky few to have outlived the first hours of the storm had not lacked in sustenance. Not for a while.

But days kept rolling, mashed into a gray paste by the never-changing landscape, and the food ran out.

Since then, most of the stragglers had dispersed. In the movies, people seemed to stick together. Not here. Not in this ruined place.

However, Steve wasn’t alone. There was Lena.

She was a young girl, weak, sickly. Most of the time, she spent leaning against what used to be a wall of some sort, still showing a faded letter D grooved into the granite, leaning and weeping, coughing. A strange thing that cough; it always reached his ears, above and through the thundering growl of the wind surrounding them.

Lena had found him one day, stumbling from the gray dusty mist like a ghost, her motions slow, erratic. Steve could have sworn she was a zombie, and for a moment, he imagined himself blowing her undead head off with his shotgun. Only he didn’t have one, and the emotion that replaced the thought was a pure white fear. Until he saw the scrawny thing shambling toward him, and felt deep shame in his bones.

All she had said was, "I’m Lena." And then, she found her corner in the shelter near him and started weeping and coughing. Steve resented her presence, resented her invasion of his privacy. It had taken him a while to find this granite rubble, which seemed to weather the wind’s raspy caress so much better than industrial concrete. It had taken him hours of hard labor to build a short wall against the sandy breath of ash. And now she was here, in his little blob of sanity, a reminder that death awaited the few people who had outlived the first days of the end of the world. But he refused to give up.

The cough unnerved him. And so did the wind. Steve wished he could get a single moment of silence. But even if he shut his jaw real hard so that he heard little popping sounds in his ears, and squinted real hard and clamped his bruised palms over the tatters of his ears, he could still hear the rush of the wind, calling to him.

Lena’s head sagged, brushing against the coarse stone. Her scalp was raw, red, scarred, her hair turned to a pale stubble. Like him, her skin was covered in those black diamonds, crusted in puss and scar tissue. But while he still could walk and think and dream of his next meal, all Lena did was lean against that granite letter D and sob pathetically, her eyes too dry for tears, her coughs pinging in resonance with his bone marrow.

Most of the time she was half-awake, but sometimes, she would raise her head, look around, see him without acknowledging him, and then sink back to her delirium. Her zombie movement eerie and frightening. Steve just sat opposite her, watching her carefully, dreading the moment she closed her eyes, died, and then opened them again, green and slitted and immortal. But the zombie never rose, and the coughs continued, even when he tried to sleep, even as the wind eroded the world to oblivion.