Chapter 2: Am I Living in This Place?
CRAAAAACK!
A sound as if the world itself were splitting apart pierced the ears of everyone still alive on this sickened Earth. It didn't sound like shattering glass or a collapsing building. It was something deeper, as if the universe were sighing its final breath.
I lifted my head along with the few million others who could still make the motion. And we all looked up.
The sky was cracking.
Thick black lines tore through the blue dome we were accustomed to, as if someone held a cosmic knife and was slitting the skin of the world. Around me, I heard hoarse voices whispering, "This is an illusion... It must be an illusion..." But the chill of dread seeping into my bones was more real than anything I had ever known in my short life.
The animals began to groan. Dogs howled, cats tore at their fur, birds crashed into the ground in a frenzy. Even the insects stopped crawling. They knew. They were warning us. But we, as always, were slow to understand.
My name isn't important. But if you must know, I am one of the "lucky ones."
The word lucky sticks in my throat like a fishbone. Yes, I survived when six billion humans died. I survived because my friend—or the one I thought was my friend—dared me to venture into the old labyrinth beneath our city.
"Tunnels from World War I!" he said with a cunning smile. "Whoever goes deepest wins!"
It was our strange game. We'd been exploring those forgotten tunnels for years. But that day was different.
"I'll time you!" he said, pressing the stopwatch.
I closed my eyes and plunged into the darkness.
Three thousand, six hundred, and ninety-seven seconds. A full hour of stumbling in pitch blackness, my hands feeling the cold concrete walls, my footsteps echoing as if I were in the belly of a sleeping beast.
When I finally emerged, I expected to see my friend's mocking face, jeering at my slowness.
But what I saw made mockery seem like a blessing.
My city was a corpse.
Buildings snapped like matchsticks, cars burned like dead insects, and the sky... my God, the sky was orange and black, a color I'd only seen in the paintings of madmen. And there was no sound. No sirens, no crying, not even wind. A silence heavy as a tomb.
I ran. I ran toward our neighborhood. Toward the house where I'd left my mother preparing lunch, my father reading the newspaper, my little sister drawing on the floor.
But when I arrived, I stopped suddenly.
The house wasn't there.
Not collapsed or burned... it had disappeared. Completely. The ground was level and clean as if a house had never stood there. No debris, no trace of furniture, not even the metal door frame. A void.
Had I been deceived my whole life? Had I lived on the wrong street? I looked around. All the other houses were destroyed, but they existed. Ours alone was absent.
Then I heard the sound again: CRAAAAACK!
I looked up, and the cracks in the sky were widening. Then, in a moment that froze the blood in my veins, a passing bird flew through one of the cracks... and did not return.
CRACK! BOOM!
The largest crack opened like a giant eyelid, and from behind it... an eye appeared.
Not the eye of a bird or an animal. An eye that did not belong to this world, so large that an entire continent was merely a speck of white within it. It stared downward, moving slowly as if inspecting everything. Then it reddened, its veins bulged, and a voice emanated from it:
"Utterly useless."
The voice was like an earthquake in my skull. Every bone in my body vibrated. Then the eye closed, and the crack vanished as if it had been a nightmare.
But the real nightmare began after that.
New holes began to open in the sky—colored whirlpools, some as black as nothingness, others glowing with colors I had never seen before. They resembled the wormholes I'd read about in science fiction novels... but these were real.
And the question that kept buzzing in my head, more terrifying than the giant eye itself:
Am I really living in this world? Or am I just someone else's dream?
And what I fear most... is that the holes in the sky might be gateways for something that has come to finish what the bombs started.