Have you ever seen a city die before?
Seventeen seconds – that’s all it takes. An impressive, towering facility that belches clouds of pure white; it houses a monster about to rear its ugly head. Rocks pulled from the core of the Earth will to return to it again, reacting angrily in the heart of a steaming metal shell. Lights flash; alarms go off; people flee in terror. The futility – no amount of visual warning can prepare anyone for what happens next.
There’s a sense of deep foreboding just before it happens. For one short moment, just one moment, the world stops turning. You could hear a pin drop. Heartbeat. At the moment of impact, a metropolis transforms into an inferno of unprecedented proportions. A large globe of light precedes the cataclysm, bathing the face of the Moon in a lurid orange. It almost seems beautiful - romantic, even. It starts off as a small polyp blooming in the middle of the continent; as it grows it nudges itself between clouds, a convex-topped column of rapidly expanding gases. The heat beneath the mushroom cloud is immense. Steel boils right off the framework of a skyscraper, shooting high into the atmosphere on a jet of superheated air. People disintegrate instantly, their bodies broken down into an invisible mixture of excited atoms and molecules that race each other out of the blast. Those further away are treated more kindly; the heat wave cuts straight to the bone but spares the physical body. Viscera and fluids vaporise and are sucked out of every pore and orifice, mummifying the body perfectly and instantly (there are no shamanistic rituals, no last rites, no time to whisper a prayer and ruminate - just the scorching on the heels and the perpetual ringing in the ears).
Decades later, you travel to ground zero and stand on the edge of a precipitous cliff overlooking the ruined scabland below. Your shoes are caked in wet ash and sleet – the land bleeds grey effluent from caches of irradiated water deep within the ground. A mile away there is a scar seared into the crust of the Earth, a deep crater pitted with numerous cracks and fissured down the middle. It is the aged mycelium, the remains of the mushroom all those years ago.
There is a certain stillness to the pieced land. Even during the day the terrain is hoary and dead in the light of the grieving sun. Vast and empty, bereft of life. Bleached skeletons lie half-buried in the ground, dry skin still stretched tightly over demineralised bones. The faces of the charred, blackened skulls mired in the soil and rock coagulate are split open in silent screams, mouths twisted and howling. A fossilised tree stands solidly, carbonized and monolithic, the sole guardian of this massive sepulchre. Stop for a moment and breathe in the fuliginous, vile air; a mask does very little to filter out the scent of death. The silence is deafening. Cough lightly to remind yourself of the existence of sound. Look to the obsidian skies and watch the sooty snow fall. (Here's a tidbit: hailstones glow in the dark.) Every bullet point in the landscape a skull the equivalent of every hair follicle on the back of your neck incited to horripilation. Turn to the waking light and accept the horrid truth. This is the present. This is the future.
You shiver, and try to convince yourself it is from the cold.
(One summer afternoon, you decided to take a drive.)
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I know that this is a rather shameless rip-off off The Road, but in my defence it is really never stated how the world actually ended. Think of it as a fanfic that isn't really connected to the book.