Title: "This Is It"

Status: Finished

Last touched: Mid-late 2018, written for a contest a Wattpad user had hosted

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I stared at the smoke as it slowly drifted into the sky overhead. I had known the world was going to end, we all did, but none of us realized it would happen this... Early. This soon into the updated world of New Earth.

I adjusted the mask across my face, making sure the oxygen tube was securely connected. I was sweaty as hell, but I wasn't going to take the mask off and risk overexposure to the polluted air.

I tapped a button on the side of my goggles and a shaded screen covered the lenses, darkening the world slightly. If I was going to die, I could at least die knowing my eyes were safe from the sun and its burning rays.

My goggles made a buzzing sound and a message popped into the screen:

Please seek shelter! Please seek shelter! Please seek shelter!

The goggles buzzed several times before they figured out that I probably understood the message and stopped, the words fading into the message icon.

It wasn't like I hadn't gotten thousands of messages like those in the past. After all, I was seventeen, going on eighteen. Now that I thought about it, it was sad that I would never be able to classify myself as an adult, a full grown woman.

With all of the young deaths from overexposure and recent parasites, making it to adulthood was something to celebrate with huge parties and parades. I was disappointed, even though I was disappointed, I had learned not to get my hopes up to live this long anyway.

I tried to ignore the growing cloud of smoke as I walked home, my combat boots scuffing the dusty ground below me. Despite all the high tech mechanisms and huge skyscrapers downtown, there were definitely places that could be described as the "outskirts of town", and they could be described as wonderful or horrible. There was no in-between.

I focused my attention on the sparse metal shacks scattered across the barren environment, my eyes automatically (with the help of my goggles, or course) spotting my own house (if you could even call it that) nestled between a broken down oily vessel that I think used to be called a car, and the remnants of a dead tree.

The house itself was really just a rusted metal shack. Scratch that, more like a couple of sheets of rusty metal nailed together to make a haphazard roof. But if was my home. And for that, I was grateful for it.

As I made my way inside and settled myself on the weathered cushions and torn blankets that inhabited the "house's floor", I heard the distinct sound of screaming. At the same time, I also sucked in a breath of sharp-smelling gas.

My head whipped to the sky as I watched the large cloud drifting ever closer. It was starting to hover over the city buildings, and the screaming was loud and painful to my ears, even from this far away.

The day started to grow darker as the cloud of death made its way through the sky. It was almost a beautiful sight, once you knew that you were, indeed, going to die.

I almost clicked the button on my goggles to snap a picture, but my finger only hovered over that button as my vision grew dark and I collapsed on the floor.

My goggles slipped off my face for the first time since birth and suddenly the world was so much clearer. My vision blurred and I was suddenly aware of the fact that the world has gone quiet. No more screams killing my ears. No more helicopters spinning around, capturing evidence of the extinction of humanity. And no more pattering of feet as people hurried to attempt to escape the storm.

This was it. And that's when my vision went black.

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My Thoughts:

Reading through this, the first thing that popped into my mind was the number of typos in this piece. Considering that it was submitted for a contest—an unofficial one, but a contest nonetheless—you'd think I would have done some more proofreading and edited the errors.

I seem to remember being pretty proud of this piece when I had first written it, so... That's kind of funny.

This almost seems like an earlier, mistake-filled version of the first story I shared in this book, in that a character is dealing with the end of the world.

It's not a super dynamic story, so it's debatable as to whether I'd write something like this nowadays. Something with this plot, maybe. Hopefully not something with this many typos, though.