N. White: The End - Visions of Apocalypse

“Daddy…I” Jake croaked through chattering teeth. “I’m cold.”

“I’m here, Jake,” Tim said, whipping off his backpack and jacket.

He pulled back the thick duvets to find Jake wrapped in one of Christine’s jacket. Where is she? he thought, tucking his son’s bony body under another layer as he scanned the room.

Tim’s gaze almost slid past the form of Christine, leant over the fireplace, arms outstretched but unmoving. No , he pleaded, scrambling around the bed as fear and denial pierced his chest like a hot knife.

Tim slumped down beside his wife and reached out to touch her ice-blue face. His sobbing soon replaced the silence. In her frozen hands, she held a lighter, long since out of gas. She had tried to start the fire again, but he had the only flint.

Minutes went by before Tim could scrounge together his courage and think about the situation. Christine had sacrificed her life for Jake. He forced himself to remember that… but it would be so easy to let his son drift off to join his mother. Maybe that was better, not just for Jake but for him as well. Maybe this world wasn’t worth living in anymore.

He shook the thoughts from his mind. Self-pity had long been ripped away from him.

Wiping his tears away, Tim got to his feet, retrieved his backpack and checked on Jake. He removed a small piece of steel wool and newspaper, then made his way back to the fireplace and knelt beside his wife.

He took the flint from his pocket and placed the tinder amongst the kindling that Christine had already prepared. As he had shown Lilly six months earlier, Tim pushed the steel down and forwards, sending tiny pieces of molten metal into the steel wool. It caught a spark and began to glow orange. Tim bent over and blew gently, trying to breath life into something that would save his son.

R. F. Dickson was born, a condition which persists to this day. One of the thirty-seven remaining native Floridians in the wild, he spends his non-cubicle time writing, gaming, watching movies, and standing by helplessly as yet another Tampa Bay Buccaneers season goes down in flames. He is also the author of The Daily Rich , a blog about stuff.

Empty Nestsprang from the idea that if the world was going to be destroyed, it should at least get a say in the matter. It’s only polite. Besides, just because it’s the end of everything we’ve ever known doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a little fun along the way.

For decades, accepted tectonic science stated that the East African Rift marked where the great African Tectonic Plate had been slowly splitting into two smaller plates over the last few million years, creating a valley that ran for some 4,000 miles down the eastern side of the continent. The two plates would continue racing apart, at least, racing on a geological scale, until the sea came flooding in, turning the East African coast into a brand new island and making the western side of the rift beachfront property. Of course, this would take millions more years, far beyond the time when it would be a problem for anyone currently alive. So said accepted tectonic science.

The seismographic station in Kilima Mbogo in southern Kenya detected it first, its needle beginning to scratch away shortly before midnight GMT. Minutes later, the Mt. Furi station in Ethiopia chimed in, followed by Ar Rayn in the Saudi peninsula and Mbarara in Uganda. Madagascar’s Ambohimpanompo station burst to life, Lusaka piped up in Zambia, and even Boshof perked up and brought South Africa to the party. Weaker activity was detected in Ankara, in Kabul, in Masuku. Across the globe, bleary-eyed seismologists roused from their beds and conferred with colleagues who’d been up all night monitoring the outbursts. They hurriedly examined the data pouring in from Africa, and determined Mother Earth was quite possibly gathering up for something big.

Actually, she was just clearing her throat.

“Hello?” her voice boomed from the East African Rift, shattering windows as far away as the East Coast of the United States, and sending tsunamis hurtling through the Indian Ocean to mercilessly pound the western end of Australia. “Oh my goodness,” she said somewhat more quietly, like an old grandmother who’d just spilled her tea. “It’s been so long, I’d forgotten what I sound like.” Despite her restraint, this utterance triggered avalanches in the Alps and the Himalayas. “Dear me, I guess I’ll have to whisper,” she said, this time with far less catastrophic results, only a few minor landslides up and down the length of the Rift. “Is there someone in charge I might possibly speak with?”

Those words snapped the world’s various powers from their collective shock and got them back to doing what they did best: bickering with one another. An emergency session of the United Nations Security Council nearly erupted into violence when each member claimed the planet was speaking in their language, and that therefore their representative should be the one to engage her in discussion. In the main assembly, delegates from Kenya and Tanzania rattled their sabers at one another, both sides laying claim to authority due to the Rift running directly through their respective countries. From Rome to Jerusalem to Mecca, clerics and scholars shouted and argued and prayed over how to reconcile this turn of events with everything their scriptures had told them. The American and Russian militaries escalated to the highest alerts seen since the Cold War, and the Arabian Sea and the Mozambique Channel became so crowded with ships, one could nearly walk from Madagascar to Oman without getting wet. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set their Doomsday Clock 11:59pm, its closest approach to midnight ever. As the day of Mother Earth’s awakening slowly slipped into night, many went to bed wondering if humanity would blow her up before they’d even said hello back.

However, as the next day dawned, the airport at Nairobi buzzed with activity, and a sleek black limousine, a blocky white van, and a barely-running rented coupe were soon racing across the Kenyan countryside, their occupants cringing and cursing at every bump in the road. Soon the Rift came into view, and around it the crowds of onlookers who’d been gathering since the previous day. The possibility of further quakes and aftershocks offering no deterrent to the growing city of tents and improvised shacks that had quickly sprung up. News crews were everywhere, set up in fleets of trailers and mobile satellite vans, their cameras trained on the Rift as talking heads sweated beneath their suit jackets and their caked on make-up, trying to find new and interesting ways to convey that nothing was really happening yet. The only beings in the area that seemed disinterested in the whole affair were the herds of zebra and gazelles that idly grazed nearby, sparing only an occasional glance at their strange new neighbors.

The motorcade came to a halt near the edge of the Rift, their kicked-up dust blowing over the crowd as they rushed forward to see the new arrivals. From the limousine, four large men in dark suits and sunglasses emerged. Their heads moved constantly, taking in everything and everyone, and only when each had given the other a quick, satisfied nod did they motion for a fifth man to climb out of the vehicle. He quickly buttoned his coat and strode with practiced authority, the other four men falling in formation around him. He’d seen the younger side of 50, and not many restful nights, judging by the creases around his eyes. He stopped and stood expectantly in front of the van.