Doomesday

Hello, is there anybody out there....

The Ragman Sings....

The stars stood at the brink of twilight. It was like the darkness had eaten the whole sky. My best friend Barry was suddenly at my side. “What’s happening?” He yelled above the din.

A jet right over our heads revved up trying to gain altitude. The nose slowly lifted and then there was an explosion, and the huge plane went down.

Suddenly something gigantic blocked out the sun.

The crowd began to move like a wave on the ocean. Kids were stomped into the dirt. A security guard yelled. “Stay away from the buildings.” They were teenagers, so no one listened. They all ran towards the bathrooms and snack bar.

The giant screen toppled over into the crowd. “Kaboom!” The pyro fax tanks ignited one at a time. Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom!

The huge thing over our heads which was as big as a city and was somehow displacing gravity like a big ship displaces sea water. “We learned about them before I got expelled from MIT. It somehow creates a heavy gravity field in front of the ship and a weaker one behind actually dragging the ship from one field to another. The residual effects are what we’re seeing the displacement of massive amounts of gravitons .”

“What?”

“Gravity Barry.”

We rode up on the crest of graviton waves and then tumbled to the ground. It growled from down deep and then flung itself forward. Such a field would be much more graceful in deep space. Close to a planet like this it was a bomb creating tornadic winds.

“Ours?” Barry asked.

“No way,” I replied.

Like everybody else we just ran blindly. It was either run or get trampled. I saw a couple people go down under the mob, but I couldn’t get to them. We ran until we were blocked either by lava or gushing water and then changed directions.

In class we had discussed that such a drive might be able to stop or alter magma flow at the Earth’s core. But this wasn’t a speculation of dooms day. This was happening and it wasn’t us. “We’re nowhere near this kind of technology Barry. The fear is, and why NASA quit working on it, was that a graviton drive near a planet was actually a doomsday machine.

Suddenly, the main snack bar, the whole block building began to sink just like a ship at sea. Once it started it went down quickly there were people hanging out the windows and caught in the doorways. With an ear-shattering explosion the earth split open, and the structure disappeared. Blood was spattered in the lifeless ash and absorbed instantly by the flames. Cars became movable coffins where only the dead resided. Soaked in flies and blood worms they incinerated in an instant. As the earth roared and belched all around us.

We stood there like everybody else, slaves to the wind and thick smoke. “Which way?” Barry yelled. But his voice was instantly drowned out by the engines on the massive ship.

“What’s happening? He cried.

“It doesn’t matter; we’re blocked in, trapped like rats.” I told him.

Grabbing my arm, he yelled. “What is that thing?”

“It’s shouldn’t even exist my friend it’s a doomsday machine.” I replied.

“What do we do?”

“Even a rat can avoid the trap long enough to conquer the maze. Follow me.” I yelled. “We have to get out from under it.”

It was like being under power lines. A very large ultramagnetic field was created that repulsed gravity making it a very dangerous place to be. We are basically made up of electromagnetic fields ourselves.

As we made our way through the thick smoke I yelled. “Where are the rest of the guys?”

There were three couples, Carol and Ted, Terra and Ralph and Barry and me. We never went to the Overview Drive-In, but we thought it might be fun to see the new Blade Runner movie. It was summer and we had two whole months of bad choices to make. Everybody was drunk anyhow.

He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know they took off when everything started... Shit!” He exclaimed as a girl ran up to us with her hair on fire. Barry tried to help her, but she was already gone, her face was already melted to the bone. Her nerves were just doing their final dance. Barry jumped aside while the goo that had been her face slid off to the ground.

I could hear a truck. I grabbed Barry’s arm. “Wait! A way out.” I yelled. We stood there and waited anxiously as the truck got closer. We could hear it through the thick smoke. It was close and then it was there right in front of us going like a bat out of hell. It hit Barry and he flew up and landed on the hood. I dove to the side and the bumper clipped my leg.

The three drunk assholes that were in it I knew from school they were jocks and they never slowed down and if I hadn’t quickly dragged Barry’s lifeless body out of the way they would have run over him again as they roared by.

I looked at Barry, his body was all broken up. His head was almost completely crushed in, and his arms and legs were all twisted around backwards. “Bastards!” I screamed. I had promised his mom I’d take care of him. Barry had been many things, a poet, an artist, and a lover but he hadn’t been very good at watching out for himself and his mother had known that.

Clouds of smoke boiled and churned with only a brief glimpse of the massive ship above us. Like a shadow I hobbled through the chaos carrying my lover until I could go no further and then I cursed my weakness and begged him to forgive me.

Between the hot rocks and pumice stones. My sneakers were all but gone, burnt away, nothing but my bare feet as I fled through hell. That was what the drive-in had turned into a hell on earth right there in upstate New York and now Barry, my best friend and lover, was dead. “I’m so sorry,” I sobbed.

On charred wings birds desperately tried to escape the smoke and fumes. Running dead and dried the bodies stunk of burning flesh and feathers. With dead eyes I stared out across a shattered drive-in. Spread eagle the bodies lay charred flesh and bones turned to ash. The dying moans and groans became the world around me. Consumed each boy and girl charred to the bone. Thousands of them burnt to ash by the graviton drive. That ship should never have been close to any planetary body, much less a planet thriving with life like Earth. Such a drive sucked life out of any world that it came near. It was truly the end of times. That was why NASA had given up the research. Bottom line work on any kind of gravity drive was very risky. It was also possible to create a miniature black hole and suck the whole universe inside it.

Screeching blasts drowned out the silence as the parked cars seemed to explode one right after the other. Live wires sparked on the ground as generators burst into flames. My rasping breath in this sunless world brought me to my knees. I had asthma. I dug deep into my pocket for my inhaler and yanked it out.

It was with great sorrow. Overwhelming emotion. Tears and sadness, that I surveyed my surroundings. In our dreams we are brave, but we never consider that we might already be impaired and overcome with grief. The world all around me was rolled in sticky red blood. I could taste my salty tears on the tip of my tongue. In my head the words kept repeating. “The road not taken.” The sky was bruised purple, and it wept floods. Rivers overflowed their banks and lakes and ponds became giant marshes. Extremely high tides were the cherry on top of the sundae.

The night split into two skies. One with stars and one dominated by the huge ship and its pulsing graviton engines. A man appeared out of nowhere and he just came running right at me through the thick black smoke. He was waving his arms like he was trying to get my attention. It's Barry, I thought. I made a mistake, a horrible, horrible mistake. He wasn’t dead he had been only sleeping. “When the brimstone fell to the ground hell was revealed.” He cried but his words were cut short as the same truck that had gotten Barry stopped dead and the three jocks dragged him into the back and started beating on him. I listened to him scream and pray but it was too late in an instant they were gone. A light came out of the bottom of the huge ship and just touched the truck, and it blew to pieces. It hadn’t been my Barry, just some other poor slob that had been preaching the end of the world from his Gideon’s Bible. You know the kind you can steal from any laundromat.

Others rushed by, but they were just nameless faces lost to the smoke. Turning away was the hardest thing. I was trying to save myself and without that I had no chance of helping others. I started running slow at first and kept going faster and faster across the drive-in towards the exit. Ducking around speaker poles jumping over the mounds. Horrible things appeared out of the smoke. Bodies were piled one on top of each other.

I was not brave. I tripped and stumbled over the corpse of a young girl her face was frozen in agony. Her mouth all stretched out of shape in a silent scream that no one would ever hear. Darkness still covered the land and the huge ship just sat there above our heads. As stupid as it sounded the thought of emigration occurred to me. We thought we had trouble with our borders before. There was no way we could secure this one.

The ship began to change color. It was composed of all darkness with a certain transparency. I could see the moon right through it. I knew that darkness was composed of an infinite number of particles like the stars in the universe.

In 1974 SETI, Search for Extra- Terrestrial, Intelligence, sent out a message. This message was called Arecibo and what it did was give the universe our name and address. Guess what? The invitations were sent, and the guests were beginning to arrive.

THE END

Bio: Timothy Wilkie is a local hero in the Hudson Valley. From his music to his art and storytelling. He's an old hippy and a storyteller in the truest sense of the word. He has two grown sons and loves to spend time with them. His writing credits include Aphelion, Horror-zine, Dark Dossier and many more.

E-mail: Timothy Wilkie

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