Apocolyptic Short Story

Too Late

It was a bright, sunny day in Southern California, and I had a beautiful, new car parked in my driveway. The glimmering August sunshine glinted off the shiny paint, making it look like the car was alive.

It was alive, in a way. It was a life-giving force, one to solve all the air-pollution problems in my town – once a haven of the American Dream, now a hell of smog. It ran so clean I could drive it through my grandma’s living room, if only there were enough room, and it ran so fast I could outrun my little sister’s stuck up prom date in his fancy-schmancy (albeit fossil-fuel-guzzling) penis extension. It was pretty hot, too, I thought as I watched the dazzling sunrays reflecting in the windows of my house.

It was a modest house, for Southern California at least. I loved it, though. We had a host of solar panels on the roof, a small vegetable garden in the backyard, and best of all, a rope swing dangling from the tallest tree, where my sisters and I would twirl around until we couldn’t see the palm trees swaying in the sunset.

It was also the last day I’d ever see that house, but I didn’t know that when I buckled my seatbelt and revved up the 137 horsepower dead sexy electric engine.

It was too late. Too late for me, too late for California, too late for my country.

It was too late for my planet, actually.

It was 2:20 when I sped out of the driveway for my best friend Chelsea’s house. I parked the new machine in her driveway, and her whole family came out to oogle over it.

It was a graduation gift from my grandparents. My parents could never have afforded it, but here it was all the same, the EV1, with my hands gripping the wheel. Chelsea climbed into the passenger seat, grinning, and fastened her seatbelt. I asked her if she was ready for the cleanest, sweetest, fastest ride this side of the Mississippi, and she said Fuck Yes. I started it up again, and headed for the longest, straightest, clearest stretch of road I could find. Zero to sixty in less than three seconds.

It was glorious. The palm trees rushed by in a blur of green, the clear blue sky sang a halleluiah for my act of environmental benediction, and the soft wsssshhhh of the engine tingled beneath my body, vibrating to the tune of a new day.

It was over all too quickly. I rounded the only corner on the stretch of road, and a ringing sound comparable to the sound left after the explosion of a nuclear weapon assaulted my ears. Chelsea screamed, What The Fuck Was That? It wasn’t the car; I didn’t know what the hell it was.

It was a shadow. Several shadows, actually. I saw the faces of people I had seen at school floating around me, but that was impossible. Kyle Bradley, he had died of smoke inhalation last year. Tanya Redding, she had died of a fatal asthma attack a month ago. Mrs. Greenly, she had died of lung lesions in my sophomore year. And there were more faces, some I recognized, some I didn’t, but the only ones I knew were people I knew to be dead. They didn’t seem to want to harm me, but they were rushing around, sometimes in shadow, sometimes clearly visible. One by one, they threw their bodies in the sidewalks and the road, where they became fixed shadows, sucked into the pavement and staining it black with a shrieking volume of the dreadful ringing. Chelsea screamed again, and started choking. CHELSEA! I screamed, looking away from the road for a split second. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG? Chelsea didn’t say anything; she just turned white, then black, and then her body was whipped out of the window, where she joined the masses of swirling faces, and threw her body down in front of me, flat – black – ringing – and the car moved on.

It was not stopping. I tried the brakes, and nothing happened. I tried to move the steering wheel, nothing. The sky was gone, and in its place was a dark cloud of smog, raining black upon the top of silver car, staining the windshield and destroying my vision.

It was oil. Oil was raining down, blinding me, choking the swirling clouds of people above. It was getting harder for me to breathe; every breath felt like it made my lungs bleed, and worse yet, the noise was getting only louder. Suddenly the car hurdled around a corner, almost throwing me from my seat, and all at once it stopped. The oil dripped off of my windshield, and I had a cloudy view of my surroundings again. Immediately in front of the hood stood a most stunning creature, blinking at me as if nothing had happened.

It was a caribou. There was a lone tear dripping from its majestic eyes, and when the tear hit the ground, it too became oil. I blinked back at the caribou, wanting to help it, make it stop crying. Around it, there were hundreds of caribou-shadows on the pavement, as flat and dead as Kyles, Tanya’s, Chelsea’s. What’s Wrong? I whispered. What’s Happening?

It Was You, Humans, it said. I wondered for a second what he meant, but before I had a minute to figure it out, I stopped breathing. I opened my eyes as wide as I could, struggling for air, but only smog filled my lungs, and my body felt weak… transparent. I looked down at my fingers, and they had turned entirely white. I felt a tug on my shoulder, and I was sucked out of the car, and my blackened body began encircling the caribou, who watched me with a passive sadness.

It was over. I felt my shadow-body hit the pavement with surprising force for a body of smoke. My soul sifted through the sidewalk, and the ringing reached a fever pitch so that I thought surely what little was left of me would shatter. I watched myself drift earthward, as though my soul’s eyes were far above, and I saw that the shadow, like everything else, had turned to oil, and was slowly dripping towards the core of the earth.

It Was Bound To Happen, the earth whispered. You were all too greedy. You set yourselves up for this. My perception backed up even further, and I saw the planet, surrounded by a black haze, and as the last of the oil drops reached the core, the whole planet exploded, and the corpses of animals and trees rained across the solar system, dripping with the oil that had ended it all.

It was not supposed to end this way.