Two Loves, Armageddon (Chapter One)

Chapter One

The First Second

I can never remember their names. A blessing and a curse, that their faces are painted upon my skull as in the high arches of the chapel. Fright in their eyes ever yet. Helpless to save them, protect them, hold them or ever see them again. Gone with the faintest touch, forever I wish to be awakened from this reality.

It started as all do, in a haze that became clear. Lucidity is lost in the initial hours. Maybe half a second, maybe more, it couldn’t have been very long from what I understand.

The mind files images, stores them away until perchance they are needed again.

I walked outside. A mob fled from right to left. I knew that they were all heading toward a brick wall covered in ivy at the end of the street, but I didn't say anything. To do anything would simply add a bitter smile to futilities steel grasp. I doubt my loudest screams could have put a squeak into the ear of a single member of the crowd. I joined the flee, even as the dead end for which we all headed was well known to me.

A large mass of water was moving towards me. At first, puddles at my feet were a mere nuisance. But as the trends went, things rarely got better, they merely worsened, and at times gave glimpses of hope with the intention of crushing them for added effect.

Soon, we all had to clinch the fence that lined the street, to keep from being washed away. It was the cruel torture of the deities. I always envisioned Armageddon rather generically, flames, monsters, and so forth. None such fantasies attended this destructions of existence.

Perhaps the gods felt, that if humans were at all correct in their description of the end that it would give us some arrogant sense of hubris and divinity. For all intents and purposes, I suspect no greater being would let those left to suffer the rath of the rapture feel the slightest bit of accuracy and truthfulness in their predictions before death.

The mind orders images by importance.

Tearing at the seams, only a celestial entity would be so merciless as to have the waters recede to a trickle and then once again return twenty feet overhead. Repeatedly we arrived on the verge of drowning and a blink away from breathing in the liquid. We endured valiantly. I can’t remember if it was hot or cold but pain engulfed us. Soon the water ended, and a slightly more frightening stage was about to begin.

Along the avenue hundreds of people regained their steady breathing rate and their footing on the deteriorating world. At the end of the causeway, maybe three hundred yards from where I stood, was a large vintage hotel. The earth shook and somehow instinctively I turned to look at the old high rise. Several individuals stood on the top balcony watching the hell down below. Another jolt from underneath and a piece of that balcony snapped. One poor soul fell immediately. Every spectator followed the corpse as it fell almost twenty stories. An eternity passed and thousands of eyes could only watch. How I longed to catch the falling stone. Lucidity is lost by our own perceptions, and so was this diminishing pebble.

The body hit hard. Even though I could not hear it from where I stood, the momentum it had gained along the way and as it disappeared below the sliver of a horizon gave doubt a bad reputation. Speculation was the truth here. My gaze returned to the top balcony where another hopeless soul clinged by one hand to a swinging piece of the broken balcony.

I would have run for the hotel, if my legs had not felt as if they were tightly wrapped or perhaps if her fate had not been sealed. It was sealed long before I had ever seen her. I sealed here fate, I know that only now. I had complete control and none to save her.

The metal she grasped broke free. She fell, rickashaying of the balcony below. As the scenario repeated itself with this other ill fated resident of the ledge, the sky ripped open just above the hotel. Everything near it was powerless to avoid the vacuum.

The falling stone slowly stopped in mid air. In an almost beautiful ballet it rounded its course and then began a rapid acceleration into the horror in the sky. Unfortunately I knew that hope was even more exhausted for the second stone. With the world winding down, nothing good could lay beyond that void. Perhaps the first stone was the luckiest of us all.

The mind often betrays us when we need it most.