How the World Ends

Everyone who thought the world would end in fire was right.

Red, gold, orange burned on the horizon everywhere in the beginning. From coast to coast, north to south, people wandered along abandoned and cracked highways littered with rusting cars and spoiling humans. Sometimes, if they were too close to the fires, the air would burn through their clothes, burning their flesh, and their blood would boil in their veins, liquifying them from the inside out. In the beginning, it was so hot that all lips were cracked and white with dead, atrophied skin that would flake and rub with a simple attempt to speak. All skin was ashy and patchy, burnt and crisped no matter the level of melanin. Tongues and eyes and fingers and feet swelled, sometimes burst. Lungs bled crimson on the inside from the ash that they breathed and swallowed, but they were the lucky ones. The ones who died from coughing in the night – choking on their own liquid iron – were envied. It was worse to be burned, to be caught in the fire or the raging heat it emitted, taking desperate steps to run away but being stuck by the soles of their shoes melting onto the tarmac. I had heard that, in the beginning, there were some that were petrified by the falling ash and the heat. The muscle and skin rotted inside their casings so when the gray shell was broken, there was nothing but bones seared and cracked from the pressure.

The trees were gone, the rivers were polluted with ash and dust and human remains, the crops and grass and animals were but black, tarry, congealed masses. The shorelines ebbed and flowed with there being enough compacted ash to extend the borders but the melted glaciers had swept it away and flooded some levels. The world burned for seven-hundred and eighty-three days.

But everyone who thought the world would end in ice was also right.

The fires didn’t settle because humans had banded together to fight them; the ash clouded the air and slowly began choking out the oxygen in the atmosphere. And while it choked the fire, it also choked us. I called it the day of the dark sun but it really is more fitting to call it the day of the dying sun. The ash cloud was so thick and so dense and so much that it changed the color of the sky. It was a scary orange and red during the time the fires were burning. Then it turned to gray and only gray, and that was terrifying. Every day, unendingly, the sky would be gray and the light would be so diffused or blocked it was hard to tell if it was day or night. There was no outline of the sun, not even a vague one. No one felt it at first – that deceiving decline in temperatures – until people began falling asleep and not waking up. After those first few people, the shivers became more pronounced and even tiny breaths created white clouds. Instead of being stuck to the pavement by heat, people simply stopped walking. No one was prepared for the cold, the silent killer; all warm clothes had been shed during the time of the fires. We had nothing.

We were lucky to have been in the southeast region when the fires began – the weather there had been so damp that the fires didn’t spread too far, slowed down by the marshes and swamps. And when the snow came, it melted soon enough because we were closer to the equator, leaving ashy water for us to drink. It may kill us in the long run, but it’s the freshest water source we have, and we won’t even have it for long.

It’s all changing; the storms are moving south and the weather is growing colder every day. There was a scientist in the group – a meteorologist – who predicted it was because the biggest clouds of dust were moving, blown off course by the wind, and something about a changing atmosphere. None of us knew what he was saying and he died before he could really explain. He had asthma and choked on the ash. There was nothing any of us could do but take his belongings and leave his body in a lake. Normally, we leave our bodies on the sides of roads or underground – far enough away so no one could get sick – but this lake was already a mucky gray green. Stagnant and diseased. Adding a body would hardly make it any worse and if anyone died from it, well, they should have known better than to drink there.

The one thing we all remembered from the meteorologist was that we needed to keep heading south and west. Maybe, just maybe, he’d said, we could beat the worst of the storms. If the storms from the north and the south collided, there would be no hope. But, according to the projections of some illegible diagrams and equations he had scribbled in a little composition notebook, we could slide by the southern storm. The clash between the two ash tempests could slow down the storm, maybe even lessen them. Even he wasn’t sure.

It’s a funny thing, basing your entire life on estimates from a half-raving, starving meteorologist who died after five weeks of traveling together. It’s a funny thing.

Not everyone feels the same, and that’s what separates survivors from the dead. We expected this, and so, when two more people didn’t wake up last week, we were quick to pilfer them and leave the bodies away from the crowds. Our group grows smaller each week but we grow stronger too. Each body – dead from their own hand or nature’s – strengthens our resolves. It has too, because, after all, life is a funny thing. There was a saying my father used to tell me. ‘If you can laugh at it, you can live with it.’ The people who didn’t wake up never laughed. The ones who rose, did. Death, too, is a funny thing.

Weeks ago, we came upon a place all dark and burnt. There was nothing but white dusted charred shapes. Trees, houses, animals, people…we couldn’t tell. We weren’t sure if we wanted, but we had to rest for the night. There was a wind at our backs and that night would have frozen us. The storm was coming closer. We gathered some of the black pieces and made a ‘fort.’ We used our tarps and tents we had raided from a fishing and camping store dozens of miles back to provide some cover. It was a long night, and when we popped our heads out, we counted only three other tents. There had been four. We couldn’t waste too much time but we found the missing people within an hour. They hadn’t pitched their tent correctly and, under the force of the wind and biting cold, it had ripped open and collapsed. Their limbs were entangled together, as if seeking heat in their last few moments. Their clothes were frozen onto their skin so we didn’t take them, but we used a knife to cut apart the tent. And then we left.

There aren’t many children in our small group and most of the ones we had were lost within the first days of the fire. More were lost in the first storms. Always tired and hungry and sick and curious, they were easy to lose. Many of their mother’s didn’t last long afterwards – they wandered off in the night or into the fire and storms. They went for the same ending as their child. We didn’t go after them. As we neared the border, one of the surviving children pointed out the glass-like reflection on the horizon. The ocean moved sluggishly up the sand before dying and being dragged back. The adults watched it from a distance, perhaps remembering what it had been like before. Green and blue and brown. Warm. They’d worn their bathing suits and splashed about it without a care, avoiding jellyfish while they dove into waves. That’s what I remembered when I watched the waves break and fold and recede.

The beach we stood on was lined with decomposing fish and bodies. We made sure to steer the children far from those, designating a few to watch them while the rest went back to see if there was something on their bodies that could be used. We got a ragged shirt and some socks with holes. There was a reusable water bottle and there was a backpack with a broken zipper. We stuffed them in with all the other materials and then we sat.

That had been a slow day, the first we’d had since the fires started and the world ended. The adults rested back on the dusty sand and pretended the sun could actually shine through the clouds. The children, some of who’d quite forgotten what the ocean looked like, kicked off their shoes and waded ankles deep. Most were smart enough not to risk getting themselves very wet, and only one child fully submerged herself in the water. We tried to dry her off as much as possible but there was water and ash in her lungs. The girl died four days later. Her mother and baby brother had died several months earlier so there was no one to mourn her. We let the ocean take her body and moved on. The next time we saw the ocean, none of the children pointed it out and we silently travelled onward.

We stopped again at the base of a tall stone monument. We stayed there for longer than we’d stayed any other place because it was surrounded by stone houses that provided cover. One of the older adults – she was nearing fifty – told us it was a village from when the indigenous people had ruled the area and that the monument (temple she called it) was used for religious worship and social ceremonies. Said they were thousands of years old. I don’t know if she was lying or delusional but it sounded like it could be true. It didn’t matter to me who built it or what cultural significance it may have had. It was shelter and that’s all it needed to be. We were there for a week before the first casualty occurred. A boy, maybe two years younger than me, was found at the base of the monument with a red and pink fleshy halo around his head. He’d been dared to climb to the top when his foot slipped on the ice and ash.

The one of the two boys who had dared him tied his belt around his neck the next day. They must have been close friends. The other shrugged it off and went about his day. That was the first warning sign and the adults started keeping a closer eye on him. When they found him tormenting a girl his age and stealing food, they kicked him out. No one ever wonders what happened to him or if he’s alive or dead.

Our group is not compassionate. We are not caring. We are not generous. We are not kind. We can’t afford to be, a mistake we learned during the early stages of the fire. At the time, we had all just been strangers to one another. We were all distrustful but there was strength in numbers and there was a mutual agreement that it was better to die with someone else than to die alone. So we banded together. It was only five in the beginning but then it grew to twelve, then eighteen, then larger. We found another group and accompanied them. Never again, we promised ourselves, never again. In the night a week after travelling together, they killed us. They stole our food and our packs and our clothes. They silently cut whoever they thought was the strongest and the fastest and the nimblest. They killed who they thought was the leader. We had agreed that, for night watches, one member from each group would stand guard. They killed ours and ran so that, when the fire came, we were caught in the embers and the raging flames.

I have scars, burn marks on my left ribs and arm. Anyone who survived that night has scars, physically and mentally. For a long time, we didn’t accept anyone we found on the road and we stayed together, the eight that survived. It wasn’t until the fires had gone and the storms swept in did we slowly start to rebuilt. Currently, we’re at fifteen, a number that fluctuates. Every month we lose three to five members and sometimes we can make up that difference with stragglers, but the amount of people we find is dwindling.

Everything is dwindling except the storms.

If the meteorologist’s predictions are correct, we have three weeks until the storms meet and we’ll be caught in the middle. None of us are laughing very much now and the nights pass quietly and dauntingly. The wind is loud but I can’t tell if it’s screaming and laughing at us, warning or goading. One of the members kicks out the gray slush that’s made it past the flap of our tent. The other two occupants are huddling together, whispering quietly. They’re young but, then again, we all are. The oldest of the group is the woman who knew about the stone monument, but she’s sick and probably won’t last much longer. The next oldest is in his early forties. Most of the group is in their teens to early thirties, most have already lived half of their life. I have already lived half of my life.

If we don’t make it, we will die. If we die, no one will remember us. We’ll slowly decompose into more ash and dust if we’re lucky. If we’re not, we’ll remain frozen, a statue warning for everyone else – if there is anyone else alive. Tomorrow, we move as fast as possible, but, in the likely chance we don’t make it, I want to record something. I don’t know the date and I don’t know our ages. I don’t know where we’re all from. But I do know our names, and they are:

Jorge, Andrew, Christian, Alex, Alexandra, Michael, Marlee, June, Marcus, Heather, Ananya, Brian, Tarryn, Kaitlin, and Pavel.