It was the end and that was certain. The average temperature everyday was a high of 155º and a lot of folks were sick with a terminal illness. It didn’t make them violent or bloodthirsty, but it did make them zombies. Their skin was pale, decaying, rotting off the bone, but they just wandered around in the extreme heat hoping to die soon. They didn’t have the energy to rip anyone’s head off.
Me, my dream girl and my father wandered around in the underground shopping malls, which were doing terrible in business, so everything was cheap. We wandered into a Chukkee Cheez and were
playing those claw machine games with stuffed animals as prizes and we fed a coin into some chance machine and it shot out a thousand tickets. Great. What now? It felt so empty to win.
News came that a giant meteor was aimed right at the center of the city, so we ran to the beach and negotiated with a boat rental person. We told her she could escape with us if she didn’t make us pay, but she made us pay anyway, so we gave her the tickets, pushed her down and said, “Fuck it.” The boats were the kind of kiddie-paddle boats that they let you rent in small lakes, but we paddled as hard as we could.
We turned and saw the meteor descending slowly, like that ball in Times Square. People were running in all directions, but those that were sick were running toward it. They didn’t want to wait days or even months to die. They wanted an easy out. There was a flash and then a crater. But we kept paddling. We weren’t giving up that easy.