Short Story: Moonset
This story is a work of fiction and is Copyright 2010 Brandon Franklin. You may not copy or reprint it without my permission. However, I encourage you to share it and link to it if you like it.
I drove through the streets as quickly as reasonably possible, though my progress was severely impeded by the presence of nearly every imaginable obstacle. There were cars everywhere, either crashed or abandoned. As if that didn't make things difficult enough, there were various other items out there, too, like tipped over garbage cans, smashed televisions, large furniture items, and a seemingly endless ocean of tiny unidentifiables. It was as though the lives of the thousands of people living here had simply been emptied into the streets. I suppose in a way that's exactly what had happened once the rioting got into full swing, but I think a lot of it had been cast aside by its owners in a despairing expression of hopelessness, manifested as reckless abandon, brought on by the circumstances at hand.
My thoughts were interrupted as a figure suddenly appeared in my headlights and I slammed on the brakes. It was a girl, probably in her mid-twenties, and she ran directly toward my car, smacking her hands down on the hood as she threw herself forward. In an instant she ran up to the driver-side window and began frantically swatting at the glass, yelling incomprehensibly through tears. I was stunned by her sudden appearance, and hesitated for a moment, not out of callousness, but rather out of sheer surprise, and by the time I had processed the scene, she was glancing back in the direction from which she had come. My gaze instinctively followed hers, and I saw a group of three boys, similar in age to her, appear like a pack of hungry wolves, clearly in pursuit.
They paused for a moment in my headlights, until I suppose their eyes adjusted and they spotted the horrified girl, who immediately bolted from my window towards the back of the car and away. The boys sprinted past, one of them passing by the passenger side, and then I saw them regroup in my rearview mirror. They quickly overtook the girl and knocked her to the ground. It was obvious to me that they intended to rape her.
I opened my door and quickly stood up, turning to face the scene. The four were too far away for me to reach immediately, so I shouted something, I don't remember what, in an attempt to interrupt them. One of them looked up at me, assessed me, I suppose, as not a threat, and hurled a large glass bottle that he must have been carrying, which smashed against the back window of my car as he yelled "Fuck off!"
I had defensively covered my face with my arms as the glass shattered, and as I lowered them and looked up, a new figure rushed by me. It was another young man, sprinting toward the others. I suppose he had come from the same direction as the previous four people, but I quickly realized that he was not one of their cohorts, as he raised a long metal object of some kind, with a very visible square mounting surface at the end--maybe it was a table leg?--and screamed "Get the fuck away from her you piece of shit!" In perfect synchronization with that final syllable, he swung his makeshift weapon down into the upper back of one of the girl's assailants, producing a clearly audible thud, and driving the recipient into the ground.
What followed was a very confused and bloody melee, in which I sought no involvement. I got back into my car and closed the door, looking straight ahead for a second. I imagined that similar scenes, and maybe even worse, were taking place all over the city, all over the country, all over the world. The last sounds we, as a species, would make in the Universe were guttural screams of pain, hatred, and fear.
The car was still running, so I pressed the accelerator gently and resumed my progress. After I weaved through the wreckage of a trio of collided vehicles, and then slowly proceeded across what seemed to be several crushed cardboard boxes, the road opened up for a stretch and I was soon able to achieve a more reasonable cruising speed.
I felt my body finally relax a bit, and I leaned back in my seat, allowing myself a deep breath and a glance upward into the sky, where the Moon, the cause of all this misfortune, hovered massively, ominously, bearing down upon us with every passing moment. She was surrounded by a glowing halo of particles and fragments of varying sizes, like drowned Ophelia surrounded by petals; the remnants from the cataclysmic impact that had, mere days earlier, drastically altered our beloved satellite's trajectory, and sent her plummeting toward us, toward inescapable obliteration for us both.
I thought back to the memorable moments leading up to the impact. There had been the initial announcement that the extremely massive Potentially Hazardous Object designated 877 Kira was headed for a near-miss of the Earth. Then, later, the projections were revised to confirm that there would not be a near-miss, but rather a certain impact upon Luna, and that the event would be globally catastrophic for us, as it would cause her to fall out of orbit almost immediately. People were tense, but for the most part life had carried on normally despite the news, perhaps due to a collective need for denial.
Everything changed on the night of the Object's impact, though. People from every nation on the Western Hemisphere, myself included, watched in awestruck horror as a glowing form darted across the sky, followed soon after by that ghostly cloud of debris, spilling outward like pebbles scattering from a bucket kicked over by a careless child.
That was the moment when mankind's hope died, taking with it all sense of civility and restraint.
After about an hour, I had reached the outskirts of town and begun heading up into the hillside. The road began to twist and incline, and the burning homes and vehicles were gradually replaced by trees and blessed, empty darkness. No place on Earth could be called "safe," but my destination could, at least, be called "familiar," and I was determined to finish what I had started on my own terms, before being destroyed on Nature's.
The remainder of the drive was quiet and uneventful. The illumination afforded by the increased intensity of the moonlight lent the landscape a surreal clarity, as though previously invisible details were crying out to be noticed by my passing eyes before they were wiped from existence altogether. I slowed down as the crunching under the tires alerted me that the road had become gravel, and as I rounded the final bend, my headlights glinted off of the windows of my cabin.
The woods were absolutely silent. I found this strange at first, as I had expected that the bright moonlight would have the wildlife in an uproar. However, upon a moment's reflection, I determined that the exact opposite must be true, and the unprecedented luminosity had convinced the denizens of the forest that it was, in fact, still daytime. Hence, not a cricket was heard. Not an owl. But there was something...
I climbed the three steps leading up to the wooden deck that surrounded the cabin, and followed it around to the back. From here, the hillside fell away and one could see the city, from which I had just made egress, below. Ordinarily, this would have provided a relatively tranquil view, with the grid of streetlights twinkling as the residual heat radiated into the night sky, but things were different now. The city had been without power since shortly after the riots began, so rather than twinkling streetlights, the flickering flames from hundreds of burning buildings dominated the scene. Plumes of smoke rose from every corner, framed by the light of our Destroyer above. The unnatural silence of the forest allowed me to hear the sounds rising from that hellish cityscape, which had blended together into a sort of mid-pitched roar, like the cheering of a crowd at a distant ballgame, mixed with the chaotic popping of small firearms being discharged. This sound was further punctuated with periodic explosions, which were sometimes preceded by bright flashes of light that I could see at various points around the city.
I found it ironic how humanity's reaction to despair was noise, while the other animals reacted, instead, with silence.
I turned away from the dismal apocalyptic scene and entered the cabin through the back door.
The bright moonlight streaming through the windows made it easy enough to see without artificial aid. I retrieved my stored bottle of Jack Daniel's from the cupboard, along with the glass kept inverted atop it, and sat down at the circular wooden table in the middle of the room.
My drink accompanied my thoughts, poisonous and distracting as they both were. What would the moment of the end be like? Would the impact be oceanic, resulting in some impossibly massive tsunami? Or would we be blotted out in a direct crushing blow, our sky filled with flames and stone before a single piece of the Moon even touched the ground? I was sure that many scientists and astronomers knew the answer, but mass media had failed too soon after the riots began for any such information to be made available, at least to me, and surely the overwhelming majority of other people, who probably didn't really care anyway.
It was irrelevant in the end, wasn't it? The result would be the same.
My glass empty, I slid my chair back and stood up. I would finish what I had started.
The other door of the cabin was directly opposite the one through which I had entered. On the wall beside it hung a chainsaw, which I retrieved and placed on the floor. A large jug of gasoline sat nearby, and after I ensured that the chainsaw was properly fueled, I emptied the remainder of the jug's contents to form a shallow pool throughout the center of the cabin. Then I took the cigarette lighter, brought along for precisely this purpose, out of my pocket and set the pool ablaze, tossing the lighter in after. Hefting the saw into my hands, I pulled the door open and stepped into the night, letting the door slam upon the flames in the room behind me.
Again I could hear the screams and cacophony from the distant city. A couple of pulls on the saw's cord soon drowned them out with a much louder rumble. I allowed the saw to idle as I walked over to the covered woodcutting area a few yards to my left, where three young women were tied to the supporting columns. One of them appeared to be either unconscious or dead. The other two cowered and attempted fruitlessly to move away.
I spoke loudly to be heard over the growling saw.
"I'm sorry. I really hadn't planned on doing this yet, but as you can see, we've run short on time."
I pulled the throttle trigger of the saw and was pleased that it was effective at covering nearby screams as well as it did distant ones.
