It was the end of the world. The only ways we knew this were scattered earthquakes, the moon growing larger in the night sky, and increasingly, areas of the ground glowed red, which meant that soon at least one long- and dark-haired Japanese horror child would be birthed from it. They were good ways of knowing.
In a below-ground parking lot, my friends and I had managed to group together, perhaps eighteen or twenty of us. A nearby dark corner between two abandoned cars glowed red as if the concrete was molten hot but not melting. One of them would come through soon, and we started running up ramps to get away to the surface.
The surface was chaos. It was dark and charred paper and embers blew through the city streets. Sirens wailed in the distance but there were very few people. We ran through parks and vacant lots and back roads as though armageddon only took the highways.
We were separated and rejoined many times and a big part of the dream was my worry about being caught separate from the group. We managed to find an old van that was still running, and packed into it.
There was a steel-and-glass dome, some kind of a settlement where the richest man in the world lived. He had a survival plan. My friends stayed in the van while I walked up to him across a huge field with trees in planted rows. He was having dinner on a small linen-covered table with two girlfriends, eating while meteors burned overhead.
One of the women said “once this all really starts to happen, maybe we can see where the moon will land in the ocean, and we can move our survival ship there, for the view.” The man said, in an English accent, “perhaps we can use some of my equipment to guide the moon down to where we want it.”
The women left, and I said, “man, when you say that with a British accent it just sounds so smart and plausible. When those ladies said it it just sounded so stupid. ‘Let’s git th’ moon down here so’s we can look at it while we eat!’”
The man was not amused. He threw a small bomb at my friends’ van, still full, but the bomb didn’t explode the car. It created a flaming force-wall that shielded their view of what was to come. The man then got in his Aston Martin and expertly drove across the grass at me, to run me down. I hid among the line of trees, which was just ten oaks in a row. He started to slalom through them, but I found a place I could climb into the branches and wait.
He called up, “it doesn’t matter, we’re only taking people with first names that end in A or B. That’s a huge number of people for the survival craft anyway. What’s your name?” I told him. It certainly didn’t start with either of those letters. I realized I didn’t know anyone whose names did.
