The Last Day
By: Prince Wang
The meadow was green and lush, flowers bloomed, and the tree in the center of the patch swayed with the wind, and around that last patch of green in the world, laid a wasteland. Earth had always been the ideal planet to live on but not now, for all traces of its past civilizations, historical victories, and all human and animal life were gone, except for the last patch, the last living things on planet earth, but not for long. The people of earth had been warned more than once by both nature and their own kind. Scientists had warned the governments of the world about the impending doom, about how the ozone layer was almost sixty percent depleted and how life on earth had only approximately five years left. Mutations of different animals rose to the speculations of man, and many lives were extinguished by new forms of incurable diseases. Earth was falling into chaos, and when the last day came, humanity, live and order came to a sudden catastrophic end.
Gary had the perfect life; he had a beautiful home with two beautiful children and a terrific wife. He had everything any man had ever wanted, until his last day. It started off just like any normal Sunday morning; Gary went outside in his robe and a cup of coffee and picked up the Sunday bulletin, and Completely disregarding the headlines which blasted out: SCIENTISTS WARN THAT EARTHS LAST DAY MAY COME SOON, flipped instead to the sports page to check out which horse had won the Kentucky Derby just yesterday. When Gary saw that he had lost nearly 30 million dollars from a faulty bet, he hurriedly went to the work to escape his wife’s wrath. In his car, Gary sped down the highway singing along to AC/DC’s Highway to Hell playing on the radio. This was like any typical day commute to the office, heavy traffic on the five, but today, Gary was preoccupied by his own thoughts and did not even notice the traffic. He always felt like there always something that he should be worried about, something bad. Little did he know that was true. Something was going to happen, something catastrophic.
It was a chilly afternoon when Gary left the office to go buy a lunch. The line in McDonalds was not that long, only about a five minute wait, but when Gary stepped out into the day light, he felt as if the temperature had risen about twenty degrees. It was hot and very sunny. Shedding off this coat, Gary began to whistle a happy tune as he made his way back to the building. Unwrapping his cheeseburger in front of his computer, he began to eat while getting up to date with then news. Major headlines of the day did not sound good, whales dies by the hundreds when the water of the Atlantic suddenly became too hot for the animals to live in, packs of animal mutations attacked a safari tour killing everyone, on the tour, just bad news after the other.
“Almost as if the worlds going to end” Gary chuckled to himself. When Gary had finished all his work, he went outside for some fresh air, and right when he stepped foot outside the doors of the office, he immediately noticed a difference in the temperature. It felt as if he were standing right in front of an open oven. Nobody could sweat because whatever moisture that came out of the body immediately dried up from the extreme heat. Then he felt the jolt. It ground continued to shake Gary fell down and rolled hard to the left to avoid a falling streetlamp. Around him, he saw people thrown out of the windows on the top floor of his office building to fall silently to land with a sickening splat on the pavement a hundred stories down. Their lives snuffed out like a candle in a strong breeze. Around him buildings collapsed and alarms sounded. Smoke and dust obscured Gary’s vision. The shaking lasted close to 2 minutes and in those two minutes, billions of people worldwide died immediately from the first impact. Gary’s whole office building had collapsed debris laying just inches from his head. Then, one thought flashed into his head; family!! Grabbing a still sputtering minivan, Gary floored the pedal and raced home in madman speeds. And when he got to his beautiful twenty acre house, all that was left of it was a piling heap of rubble and black smoke was billowing from the middle of the wreckage. Gary ran toward his house yelling his wife and children’s name. Again and again he yelled until his voice broke. He began to dig like a fiend pulling out only one living body, the family dog. Weeping bitterly on what used to be the steps of his house he contemplated on why. Why had this happened to him?
The reason had already been in the making ever since mankind came to the face of earth. People have always treated their planet with no respect. Trashing parts of it, releasing materials not meant to be discovered into the air, befouling seas, oceans, rivers, and never giving a thought about the consequences of their actions. Now Earth has finally had enough, and has spoken up a warning in the form of a shake. It was a clear message: you are about to receive what you have asked for. Nobody anywhere knew if the coming year, month, day, hour, minute, or even second or millisecond would bring the end, a quick swift blow to end the misery of the people abusing their planet. Gary still sitting at the steps of his collapsed home shook his head, tears still flowing as freely as a river stopped crying and then thought of another thing, he needed supplies to survive. Tossing the dog into the backseat of the minivan, he drove to the convenience store right by his house. It was chaos inside. People yelled shouted, cursed, and fought over the supplies. Gary filled six twelve gallon drums of fuel and tossed them into the back of the car and entered the fray. Pushing and shoving, Gary came out torn up with a huge bag of dog food, six two gallon jugs of water, and four duffel bags full of emergency equipment and rations. In his hand, he held a rifle. Gary began to notice that again the air had become unbearably hot. The sun was huge, covering almost half of the sky, and steam was literally coming out from the ground. There were already unconscious victims to heatstroke on the sides of the road. And trees were beginning to smother. The temperature kept on rising and rising until the thermometer on the car dashboard read 180 degrees. All around the world, the same things were happening. Another major quake struck that after noon destroying the remaining buildings. Gary kept on driving until his engine over heated. All the air conditioning turned off and Gary began to feel the heat. He could not sweat because whatever body moisture that left the body was immediately dried but the intense heat. Clambering out of the car Gary stripped down to shorts and a t shirt. Sitting outside on the top of his car, Gary looked into the horizon and thought about why. Why was this happening? Why this why that just why? Gary slowly began to lose consciousness as the heat continued to rise. And before the last moment, he found the answer. Silently accepting his fate, Gary laid down flat on the top of his car. When the air had reached two hundred degrees, Gary died, sitting on the top of his car. His body though was different; it had a smile on the face, a peaceful smile, because he had finally found the answer to why.
Gary was one of the lucky ones, death came quick for him. For others, the heat meant being trapped for hours in their disabled cars until the bridges, overpasses, until, their clothes caught fire from the intense heat, and stone and metal melted dropping those on bridges into waters at near boiling temperatures. Their deaths were painful, long, and violent, but not for Gary, because Gary new why, and Gary accepted it. Gary died peacefully, painlessly, and he whispered some words before forever embarking on his last journey: “everyone is equal after death. Everything has a beginning and an end; it doesn’t matter about the beginning or the end. What matters is what you did in between the beginning and end. Marsha, Nick, Hannah, my beautiful wife and two children, I love you. I will see you soon.”
The last hour came, then the last minute, then the last second. Earth, reaching unbearable temperatures on the inside and outside finally exploded into a dazzling array of colors. The last patch vanished and every trace of human advancements, failures, achievements, and history, every animal, every plant, every insect all gone, disappeared in the explosion, never to ever be found again. No traces ever to be found ever again. Life is fair though, because three hundred billion light years away, the first creature with the power of thought emerged from the shifting forests of a planet never discovered by man, a planet from a different universe, time, and dimension. Each planet had its turn. How the people treated it determined how long that planted would’ve existed. Earths turn is over however, so it’s time to move on.
