The End of Days

Q: When will the world end?

A: Sooner than you think.

The worst part about the end of the world was how suddenly it happened. The end didn’t come the way most people expected- a slow, painful death to climate change or nuclear war or any other long-lasting issues. The end of the world was out of everyone’s control, coming impulsively and devastatingly. One day the world functioned as it had for millennia and the next it’d gone kablooie. 

No psychics (not even the highly-rated ones), no AI supercomputers; no one and nothing saw it beforehand. That just made it all that much worse. Everyone was completely and thoroughly unprepared for what awaited them. 

Alan began that day (if it could be called a day at all) as he usually did, by watching the sunrise. 

Alan was in most ways unremarkable; he stood at five-nine with shoes on, a completely average height for adult males where he lived. If he were speaking to his students, he would use his height as the median in a graph. The midpoint on a number line. His hair and eyes were the same shade of brown, barely above black. 

A habitual early riser for his thirty-three years of life, Alan always woke up before the sun. It was as if his internal clock had been cranked back several hours at birth, running on Hawaii time permanently. 

But he didn’t mind it. He found waking up early to have its unique perks. It was practical for his job, where he and the other teachers were expected to get to the school a half-hour before the doors opened to students. Where the other teachers dragged themselves out from inside their cars, eyes locked half-shut and mouths in a perpetual yawn, Alan was wide awake, prepared for another day of teaching apathetic kids topics that (at least to them) were boring. 

Likewise, the early mornings were the most peaceful time of the 24-hour cycle. The city was a swamp of hustle and bustle all late morning, afternoon, and evening. Even at night, the air was permeated with the sounds of people- with mile-long traffic; with blaring rock music from nearby bars; with cheering college students at drunken house parties. In the early mornings, the world was silent. It was uninhabited. 

They say the city never sleeps, but it takes a nap in the morning. The world felt a little smaller here, when the weight of the world was still hours away from applying force. It was as close to total silence as the city got, as close to peace. It was as close as it would get to the wilderness once present there, long since chopped down and built on top of and packed with people.

The best spot for watching the sunrise was from the rooftop of his apartment building. The door to the rooftop, small and black and only accessible by a set of narrow stairs, was always unlocked. No one else in his building seemed to know about the rooftop access, and if they did Alan never saw anyone else up there.

The early October chill scraped at Alan’s face as he opened the door. From the rooftop, the city spread out everywhere around him. Skyscrapers slowly broke out into smaller and smaller buildings, eventually plateauing at an expanse of suburbs. In the west, the moon was beginning to plunge into the horizon. Only the top half of it was visible from the rooftop, the rest obscured by low-hanging clouds. The city was a drab set of browns and grays this early. As the morning progressed and the Sun rose, everything would be painted with colors, with lights, with glinting sun. 

In the darkness, Alan fumbled through the air until he found the short wall that circled the edge of the rooftop, used to prevent any inebriates from falling ten stories to the street below. He leaned against it, having to bend his knees down slightly to reach a semi-comfortable position. Eventually, he would need to take a chair up here, he thought to himself. It’d be easier on his legs at the very least, which always seemed to gain a dull throb by the time he left for the day. 

But he could do that any other time. Now was the time to watch. 

Slowly the moon disappeared completely from view. The pale yellow lights from the neighboring apartment buildings blinked on one by one. The time of tranquility was almost over. Before long everyone would wake up, and the city would be thrown back into its regular busyness. 

For a very long time, Alan would look back at this memory. Of standing alone on the rooftop, awaiting the Sun. The last moments that his life was normal. The last moments that the world was normal. In that snapshot of time, Alan was unaware. Alan was ignorant. 

Nearly thirty minutes had passed before Alan started to grow uneasy. Not exactly nervous, but confused. The clouds had parted, revealing the moon to have completely sunken into the horizon, but still, the Sun hadn’t come up. 

The silence of the morning had faded away, and it wasn’t until Alan heard a scream that he snapped out of his daze and realized this. The cry was shrill and unharmonious and seemed to come from every side around him. Alan covered his ears. He’d never heard screaming like this before. This screaming wasn’t in amusement or surprise or fright.

It was in fear. Pure, unadulterated fear. 

Beyond the screams, the typical city sounds played, but differently. 

They sounded frantic, desperate. Louder. Like every single person was in a rush to get somewhere. To get away. 

All of a sudden, everyone was aware.

Alan was about to leave, to run back to his room when he heard the door behind him bang open. One of his neighbors on his floor emerged, an elderly man named Joe. Alan rarely ever saw him; the old man seldom left his room. Joe was quietly muttering something that Alan couldn’t make out.

The two neighbors stared at each other wordlessly. As Joe got closer Alan could hear him repeating the same thing over and over: It’s gone. It’s gone. It’s gone. It’s gone. It’s gone. It’s gone. It’s gone. It’s gone.

“Joe?” Alan finally said as Joe stopped a few feet away from him. Joe’s face was that of lunacy, his eyes bugged out and his upper lip quivering. The two neighbors stared at each other for a few seconds, unmoving and unspeaking. It was Alan who broke their silence, with the same question that lingered in the heads of every single person in the city, in the country, in the world:

“What’s going on?”