N. White: The End - Visions of Apocalypse

“Court is adjourned. We will meet tomorrow morning when the sun is a hand high. At that time, we will announce the winners of the ration bonuses and decide on this man’s fate—on whether or not his offense was an executable one.”

Igor Ljubuncic is a physicist by vocation and a Linux geek by profession. He is the founder and operator of the tech-oriented website Dedoimedo , and the author ofThe Betrayed, the first book inThe Lost Wordsepic fantasy series. You can learn more about Igor’s writing on The Lost Words Bookswebsite .

How would you behave if you faced the end of the world? Stoically, gallantly, with respect for your fellow human beings? Perhaps, perhaps not. The inspiration forLet’s See What Tomorrow Bringscomes from a deep, inner question — what motivates us above all, against all fears, horrors, dangers, and above all, morality?

My hands , Steve thought.

They used to be soft, well-groomed hands of a graphics designer, hands that treated the keyboard like a second lover. Now, they were pocked with little black marks, bits of crystallized ash that had fused into his skin. And the wind kept blowing.

The world was a curtain of gray; soft gray, dark gray, hot gray, a wall of particles fine as sugar powder, others big like moths, carried by a torrent of hot air that just wouldn’t stop screaming. It wasn’t the scream of a cat in heat at night that you would sometimes mistake for an abandoned baby. It wasn’t the howl of prairie dogs you saw on TV. It wasn’t the shriek of fear. It was the sound of the world ending, a steady buzz of a rushing wind that drowned out every other detail. And it just wouldn’t stop.

Steve had not imagined the end of the world to sound like white noise.

Steve had not imagined he would be too cowardly to take his own life rather than participate in this senseless agony, either.

Like every other nerd too smart for his own good, he had stashed and groomed and pampered his doomsday arsenal, using his elite knowledge of zombie movies as a golden reference. That, plus an occasional CDC comic book on disasters and epidemics. He had put away food, torches, blankets, even spare batteries for his laptop so he would never go offline (what a silly thought) and he had a first-class Rambo knife to fight off looters and bandits. The only problem was, his stash was back home.

And he didn’t know where his home was anymore.

He didn’t know if it existed. It probably didn’t.

It was so easy to get lost in your own city when you tore down all the buildings and road signs and the familiar landscape of houses and street corners and bird-crapped monuments became a uniform desolation of concrete debris. You really lost your sense of direction when all you could see was a gray sky without a sun in it, and a storm of dust blowing around you.

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.