drabbles

on apocalypses

It was 3:42 in the afternoon when the sky began to fall.

Really, the imaginative science fiction books and movies never did it justice. The sky morphed from a calm, endless stretch of blue to a cracking, fading grey in the span of a single breath. The sun flickered and died, while the crumbling pieces of darkness around it seemed to almost fall to the ground in slow motion, descending silently from the heavens like dark angels.

Contrary to their quiet fall, the terrible sounds they made when they impacted the earth were much more than silent.

It was unexplainable. It was incomprehensible. It was ridiculous and fantastical and completely illogical, but yet it was the reality. The sky, once filling those below with peace and joy, crushed the very same creatures that looked to it with hope in their eyes.

The death of the sun didn't help, given that it was impossible to see anything unless it was held up to your face. Nothing could be seen, and even with the flashlight that was declared to be the brightest of them all you could only see an inch before you.

The feeble and pathetic artificial light was created by equally feeble and pathetic humans, after all. Humans could not even hold a candle to the natural phenomenon that is the sun.

For days, humans and animals alike scattered in fear and ran from every single sound, until the quiet pieces of the falling sky crushed them to death. At least their deaths were swift and painless, was whispered by the few that still stuck together, their hands interwoven as they tucked themselves away in shelters deep underground, waiting in terror for the booming crashes to stop sounding from above.

A week after it all started, it finally ended.

Shivering, dust-covered figures crawled from holes underground, to be met with a ravaged world.

Those who miraculously survived a Skyfall—which is what most people had decided to call them—were left with ruptured eardrums, lung damage and multiple severe injuries that required immediate medical care. Those who had been hidden away while the Skyfalls happened overhead were mostly unscathed, but terribly shaken and lacking supplies from the week of waiting with bated breath.

People roamed the streets, crying for their loved ones both missing and dead alike. Some mustered the courage to help, handing out bandages and food indiscriminately. Some collapsed on the broken concrete, sobbing heart-wrenchingly for hours on end. Others looked at everyone around them in suspicion and fear, choosing to venture out alone and ransack every decently-intact place they found.

It was essentially what hundreds of books and movies had dictated the apocalypse to be like. It does hit different when it happens to you, and when it's happening in real life, but she supposed that was already a given.

Oh, and, did she mention every living thing that was crushed by Skyfall essentially became zombies that attacked everything that moved? Because, yeah, that was a thing now.

Decaying corpses of humans and animals alike dragged themselves at alarming speeds towards anything in their field of vision that attracted their attention. It was essentially a zombie apocalypse.

Unfortunately, there was no sweaty main character in a tank top to save the world from destruction. The world's scientists, once communication was up and working properly, dove into a year of intensive research on the mysterious crumbling substance from the sky and the countless zombies that roamed about.