The great Calamity of the 21st century was never seeing it coming in the first place.
My uncle, of dearest and constant, musty, pine-needle scent, would swear that the world would always end with a bang. Of course, he was right, but not in any way that he might have imagined. The culmination of years of bloodshed and disorder throughout the years gave way to the slow decent of an iron embedded rock blotted out by the glare of the sun as it gradually built up speed and hurdled towards the little blue marble that we called home.
Romantic?
Maybe.
Deadly?
Also a slightly more affirmative maybe.
The Cataclysm was never being able to admit that we had made a mistake. By the time the first bits of rock began to glow and frozen pockets of gas burst into flames as they rubbed against the outer layers of our atmosphere, a series of preplanned events had already been put into motion by a shadowy cult working behind the scenes. Years of dedicated deceit and concealed manipulation by organizations across the world had done more than our best to stop them, however our planet never ceased to exist. The Earth didn't stop spinning. Life went on.
We were the ones that had changed. For all intents and purposes, the world as we knew it had come to an end because our fate had been sealed, because we had failed to guard against malignancy during the most valuable pieces of time that had ever come to pass. And none of it could have been done without her.
Zoey was the Catastrophe of the second millennium. She became a tragedy that no one would ever be able to forget. Her face, forever preserved as a picture frozen in time, burned itself into the retinas of every man, woman, and child. The details of her life became ingrained on the surface of each beating heart, pulsating so deeply as to sink a gut feeling perfectly designed, pruned, manufactured and delivered to serve a single purpose: Fear.
For little Zoey, the day that started it would have begun like any other, but it wasn't until her mother slowly cracked open the door and tiptoed into her bedroom that all life was set to change. Had the woman known the truth of what lied ahead, she might not have ever pulled the blinds open and let the morning sun spill over onto her only daughter, the single best thing that had ever happened to her. She might not have leaned over the small shape underneath the covers and kissed the porcelain cheek of the greatest love of her life and embraced her delicate form, whispering over her ear.
“Wake up, sweetie. Do you remember what day it is?”
Zoey merely stirred and let out a gentle breath while her mother ran a hand through her dark hair, pulling a wisp away from her face.
“Go ahead and get dressed... I'm making your favorite.” She gave her arm one last squeeze and made it back to the door when Zoey called back for her.
“Mom...”
She stopped in the doorway and turned to stare at the cute little girl now sitting up, barely conscious as she rubbed the last of the night from her dreary eyes.
“Happy birthday.”
She couldn't help but smile. “You too, sweetie.” It was easy for her to wonder what the odds were to have gotten the best present year after year, but that wasn't something that Zoey paid any special attention to.
After just turning eleven years old, the fresh smell and sight of blueberry pancakes slid just beneath her nose as she took a seat at the kitchen table was much more interesting.
Her father joined soon after, hugging her from behind. “Happy birthday, pumpkin.” He kissed the top of her head and happily accepted the cup of coffee that was handed to him by his loving wife. “And you...”
Zoey absentmindedly watched the two lean over the counter for each other.
“It's good to have you home.”
“Not as good as it is for me...”
She watched her mother smile and they kissed again, her father taking a moment to sit and sip from his mug with a new sense of ease about him. She couldn't understand why he hadn't stayed home more often. Everything was always better when they were together. Why couldn't they see that?
The thought slowly faded away like her breath of warm air against the cool window of their sedan as it sped down the highway in the dew-filled morning. Her father caught a glimpse of her in the rear-view. “Do you remember where we're going, honey?”
This year they had promised to take her to the city. It was as good a place to die as any, really. She wouldn't know until the very end, of course, but the idea of being surrounded by hundreds of thousands of other human beings during the last moments would have been comforting. If she could have just seen the souls of those around her, felt their distant warmth and reassurance press in on her own, maybe she wouldn't have felt so alone.
The time finally came as her parents waited in line in the heart of the sprawling metropolis. Zoey looked towards a crowd. Her fingers passively slipped away from her mother's and she slowly drifted towards the commotion, only stopping to peer up and gaze at a square block column of compressed steel and concrete reaching into the sky above her. She peeked back at the men and women next to her, but couldn't quite figure out what everyone was looking at. Finally, one of them pointed and she traced the line into the clouds above her neck.
The first undeniable sign was the intense flash of light. The sudden intensity blinded her for a moment and burned a colorful blob into her eyelids that she had to blink away furiously. Then she saw it. Just above the horizon, a small speck of dust grew larger. It shimmered as it drew closer, the entire sky seeming to vibrate as it was pulled towards the ground. Another abrupt explosion burst the first light into smaller pieces that rained down from the original, but the crowds were star struck. They were powerless to do anything except watch.
Until the sound hit them.
The massive wave of pressure slammed into every building and bored down into the streets below like cracks underneath a storm surge. Zoey immediately threw her hands against her ears and dropped down onto her knees, screaming as the pain in her ears reverberated through her body and punched a hole inside of her chest.
She looked up to see the sudden anarchy that began to unfold around her in complete silence. She could see bodies scramble over each other in an attempt to get away, anywhere from the source of their new agony. She could see mouths open wide as others screamed for attention, for help, for warning, but nothing made it past the hands around her head. She had been thrust into a completely new world of her own, where the only sound she felt came from the vibrations within her bones.
Bodies knocked into her. They tripped over her and she began to cry. All she wanted was the relentless bombardment to end. She wanted her mother to hold her hand, to feel her embrace, but it never came. Instead, the ground shook and viciously tossed her forward as her hands met the concrete. She looked up and could see the source as ripples of tension exploded out of each floor in the building above her.
Suddenly, as each beam began to collapse under the weight of the immense strain, a green flame tore through the side of the structure and perturbed its delicate balance. An engulfing shroud of debris bellowed outwards and covered her last sight of the sky as metal, rock, and glass began to fall towards her. Her head immediately swung as she struggled to find some sort of protection: a larger rock, a car, a body, anything.
The building.
She sprinted and took off after the crumbling shelter. If she could just get out of the street, any piece of the lobby would be safe enough from the missiles that started to crash and splinter into the ground around her. She kept running even when a man covered in soot crossed her path and reached out for her. She held out her hand and could feel the cold texture of steel as an entire lattice brushed against her knuckles and forced his existence to expire in an instant.
The impact threw her away and she doubled over on to all fours. Her hand and arm began to burn, but she fought on. She looked up and struggled to blink the grime past her blurry vision. The lobby was just in sight. She could see a small crowd gathering inside behind shattered windows to stare at the scene in disbelief. She could see the cameras trained on her body.
The footage rolled.
The pictures were taken.
Zoey stood up and took a step, yet no sooner had her body moved than it stopped abruptly. She tried again, but nothing worked. She fought to breathe and the only air that had been left inside of her lungs heaved out from her in an uncontrollable sigh. She was so close, yet she was kept still. Why couldn't she move? She reached a hand out to see blood trickle down her arm in streams of ebony, but it wouldn't go any further.
Then she knew.
The numb realization began to dawn on her as a paralyzing agony ebbed its way throughout her entire chest and down into her abdomen. She still couldn't breathe. She couldn't even stand, but something kept her upright. She leaned forward and could see the opaque, subtle reflection of glass in front of her face as she stared into the shard that had pinned the entire core of her body into the ground.
The survivors in the building, only a matter of feet away from her, began to watch her die, and she watched them. She saw a few started to cry. Others forced themselves to look away while a small patter of blood began to drip from her lips onto the screen below. Even as her lungs continued to burn and her vision slowly faded, she finally managed to catch the eyes of the one she had been looking for, and she started to cry—not only because she was afraid—but because now she could see that her mother was too.
