[RiddleRose]: 298.Contest Entries.The Day Before the World Ends

The Day Before the World Ends

The day before the world ended was like any other day at first. It was perhaps a bit warmer than previous days, but that could have been the season. It was spring in New England, and the leaves were just coming out and covering the beech trees with brilliant green. Apple blossoms perfumed the air, and it was a Saturday, so children laughed and played in the light breeze.

A few brave souls went to the beach, and, having stuck a toe into the cold Atlantic water, decided that perhaps they had been over-optimistic, and sunbathed instead of swimming. The sun shone on them and the wind gently blew over their brightly colored umbrellas, causing them to leap up and scramble after them. One father and son flew a red kite high amidst the clear blue of the sky, where a seagull saw it and flew away in fright.

A girl had a sweet sixteen birthday party, with all of her best friends there, and they ate cake, and laughed and played as girls do. A man coming home from visiting his mother saw them and continued on. They inflated a beach ball, put on bathing suits, and swam in the girl's heated pool, pretending they were at the beach. 

A squirrel ran over a branch, where it was seen by a passing hawk. The hawk dove, the squirrel chattered, and dived into a hole in the tree. Foiled, the hawk circled lazily, waiting for a meal that was easier to catch. It circled above the party, and was interested by the bright beach ball. It soared closer, saw the water, and flew away.

In a barn somewhere, a cat had kittens. As each came into the world she licked them clean, and they began to nurse. The cat's people, a young boy and his mother and father watched with wonder and pride as the kittens squirmed to get closer to their mother. 

In a house in Concord Massachusetts a man and his wife were watching the daily news together. The sound on the television was turned down very low, because the wife wanted to be able to hear the new baby if she cried. The two new parents were very proud, and already tired. 

In a house across the street, a dog barked. In a field somewhere, the hawk screeched. In the hole in the tree, the squirrel chattered loudly. In the barn, the cat looked up from her kittens and yowled. Each tiny kitten mewed in response. In an apple tree, a bluejay imitated the call of a crow, and a real crow answered. High above the beach, the seagull cried loudly across the wide ocean. Deep below the waves, whales moaned and whistled to each other. All across the world animals cried out in warning, but humans, too blind, could not hear. Only the cockroaches were quiet.

The man turned the volume up on the TV, and the wife went to get the now crying child. On the television a red alert began flashing. The man called his wife back in to see. A bar of text began to scroll across the screen, telling the world that there had been an accident in a nuclear plant in Korea. At four thirty in the afternoon, eastern standard time, an experiment had backfired, causing a small explosion in a lab. A fire had caught, but the explosion had caused the automatic fire extinguishers to malfunction, and the fire spread too fast and too far. A foolish worker opened the wrong door in all of the confusion, and the fire leaped upon its new and far more powerful fuel.

The resulting nuclear explosion far surpassed anything before seen, and most of Korea was killed almost instantly. Another plant was set off by the first explosion, and added more momentum to the rapidly spreading cloud of nuclear fallout. Half of Asia was killed in the first two hours. 

The radioactive cloud spread up to Russia, where it reacted violently with the latent uranium fields there. Russia became a dead zone in the fourth hour. By the fifth hour, all of Asia had been consumed, and the cloud had grown with the addition of explosions in Iran and many other countries. The deadly cloud passed on to Europe, and then out over the Mediterranean Sea. All of northern Africa was dead by the seventh hour, and the cloud was now aided by winds blowing south from the Sahara desert. 

The central African rainforests with all of their life became radioactive death zones. In the eighth hour, the cloud reached Australia, and killed the rich life there. The Indian ocean had long since been turned into an underwater graveyard, and trade ships carrying goods from China and India drifted on the waves, some in pieces, some whole, all dead.

The cloud reached Iceland and Antarctica at the same time in the tenth hour. In Antarctica, it killed the penguins, the leopard seals, and the scientific researchers stationed there who were studying them. It struck the ice and melted some of it, laying bare the underwater wonders of the antarctic. They were annihilated in minutes. In Iceland, the reactive cloud set off a volcano that had lain dormant for many years. It spewed its lava guts onto the barren landscape, but it couldn't kill anything, because it was all already dead. 

The ash from the volcano traveled with the cloud to the north pole and Greenland, where it stained the pure ice black, and suffocated what wasn't killed by the cloud. It spread more slowly over the barren tundra of northern Canada, dealing silent death to the sharp grasses, the native Inuit tribes, and all of the rest. This was the eleventh hour.

At the same time, the cloud covered Antarctica and started slowly marching through South America. It set off another volcano in the Andes mountain range, and the ash from that came creeping over Brasil and Chile. Up through South America it swept, suffocating and deadly. It descended upon the ruins of Machu Picchu in the twelfth hour, and buried forever the old Incan temples. 

The Pacific ocean became a literal sea of the dead in the twelfth hour, and Hawai'i was eliminated without fuss. A volcano there erupted as well, but the wind blew the ash into the sea, where it could do no more than turn the waves gray and sluggish.

In the thirteenth hour the cloud reached Central America and the Caribbean. An oil liner crashed, and a dark stain spread across the waters that had once teemed with rich and vibrant life. Just as it began to eat away at the very tips of Florida and Texas, Maine and California also began to die. After that the cloud hit some more plants, and the cloud ate up America swiftly. In only thirteen hours all life had been extinguished from the earth.

In an old mine in Mexico something stirred. Deep in the bowels of the earth three cockroaches and a small stash of eggs lived still. The elder cockroaches died quickly, but the eggs slumbered, waiting to hatch. Waiting to live again.