The turquoise lantern shook, glistening and flickering in the wind. It was on the tip of the lamp post, dangling by a worn out wire, swaying to and fro with the breaths of the sea. Twenty or so yards out on the lake was a small wooden boat, gliding ominously toward the lantern, and there was no one inside. It silently brushed up to shore after a few minutes. The lantern went out as it rolled onto the sand. The sky was still dark since the explosion several days ago, and it was impossible to tell whether or not it was daytime. The people of the city were all asleep in their houses locked up safely, or at least as safe as they could be with the ashes choking out the oxygen in the air. By morning, or what could have been morning if time existed to anyone anymore, the boat was full of black dust, but nobody saw it.
The boat sat on the beach, thumping with the waves, clanking on the pieces of debris that had gathered there on the shoreline. The beach was full of pieces of wood, nails puncturing out at random angles, bent in half. There were rocks and boulders, sharp ones and smooth ones. There were spots of oil in the sand with cars strewn about adding to the oil. There were pieces of bedding, housing, and roofing. There wasn’t anything that you couldn’t find on the beach that day, but nobody did. The houses full of the sleeping people on the hill stayed quiet. Nobody moved around or did anything. The children had fallen asleep in their beds, some on the beach with their parents. Some were playing at the parks or sitting on the sidewalks when the eternal sleep came. Many stayed at home, sleeping through the day, and the next night… and forever after that.
Several weeks later, the beach wasn’t made up of sand; it was covered with a thick layer of black soot, choking out any kind of life that could have ever been there. The darkness was everywhere, and nobody knew.
If you had been there just a day before the explosion, you would have found a very lively place. There would have been millions of people walking along the shore, on the beautiful beaches here on these lovely islands. There would have been people sunbathing, enjoying the summer and the breeze. They would sit and feel the spray of the sea on their faces, the sun burning their skin, nearly sizzling them to a crisp, yet enjoying every moment of it. Not only would they have been on the beaches, though. There would have been more people indoors on the edge of the beach, and beyond in the city. There would have been people on the top floor looking down, seeing the little bitty people on the ground. There would have been people inside, feeling the lovely cool sensation of air conditioning. The feeling would make them hate the sun, so they shut their windows and locked their doors. They would hide on the inside, and look online with their hand held computers.
The computers would have social media websites on them, every so often the user would feel obliged to check in. Back on the beach, the people would have had their hand held computers, and be looking at them the same as the people inside. Nobody would have noticed the rumblings of the ground because they would have had their music on so loud everywhere that the ground would have been shaking constantly anyways. The sky was bright and sunny, but far underground there were boiling rocks and sizzling ice. There was an angry storm growing louder and bigger than any other storm that could have been on the surface.
Under the sea, a section of land cracked open and the water was gone in an instant. In the place of the water was steam, and in a second, the steam was gone, too. Back on land, the people didn’t notice. They were still talking to everyone else on the social media sites, talking about their sunburns and their issues with the air conditioning. One little girl would have been laughing about the kid down the street who was too poor to afford a hand held computer.
Then there was the explosion. The sky was lit with red, orange, white, and yellow. There were colors in beautiful patterns of flames for the people to see. The people were talking about their problems, and only a few actually saw it. Before most even knew it, the sky and the ground were gone, and they were dead. Some of them survived the initial blast, but they only lasted long enough to suffocate from the ash that filled their lungs as well as every imaginable surface. Back on the beach, after the weeks until now, billions of hand held computers floated onto shore, and billions more fell from the houses, and the skyscrapers higher on the island. The computers were gathering, and they could have been mistaken as tiles on the floor of a mansion, but nobody could tell. They were all dead, under the massive amounts of devastation.
There wasn’t anything anybody could do about it, because after the islands were cut off from the rest of the world, they just didn’t know what happened, and they absorbed the shock as if it were nothing. The rest of the world didn’t know what was coming for them, either. There was an incredible amount of dust, dirt, and ash from the islands that nobody from the rest of the world really knew about nor did they care. After two months, the rain was dirty, but nobody really bothered to wonder why. It was just from the people who don’t clean their exhaust, thought being what most of the people who bothered to think about it figured. There were only a couple of people who thought it was strange, so they shared it on their live feed, telling the world what they thought. But nobody listened, and they were shut out with the trillions of other people telling them what to do, so they stopped and gave up. By the end of the year, there was nothing left.
Nothing besides the computers that shined in the sun when the dust settled at the end of time.