Hypersonic Missiles

Ada

It felt like the end of the world but in truth it had been the end of the world for a long time now.
I wasn't sure how many days and night I'd been alone for, nor was I sure how long it had been since the first impact, the war which had followed, or the second. Nor the silence which had followed that.

I'd not had the most interesting of lives to leave behind when the meteors hit, and even that, the first impact, hadn't really seen my life changed in many ways at all, but the collapse of society, the slow ripple effect that first meteor shower had had on the world, the downfall of civilisation, had eventually torn through my life just as it had torn through everyone else's.

I wasn't alone in my loss, in my grief, in my desolation, but I was alone now.

At the end of my world. That is to say the little world I had left, the ashes of the city id grown up in, the streets I barely recognised but couldn't bare to move on from in the vague and painful hope that one day someone I knew would come back.

I stood on the edge of the Tyne Bridge looking down at the water below. It didn't look like water tonight, it didn't look like anything human. It was inky and thick. When it swallowed me whole I'd cease to exist. A comforting thought for a violent night.

I felt the gale tugging at me, yanking me back, pushing me, coaxing me, teasing and taunting me closer and closer to the edge. Threatening me with a good time.
I wasn't sure why I was hesitating now, or whether you could call it hesitating at all. I wasn't sure if it was really possible to hesitate anymore in this world where no one ever really saw anyone else, or at least paid no mind to others as long as others paid no mind to them.

I knew as I stood there, that anyone watching me would pity and forget me, they'd shake their head and they wouldn't blame me. And they'd wonder if they would be next.

Next to give in and throw themselves off into oblivion.

There was little left in our world now. Little left in the city I'd grown up. Nothing of the future my parents had imagined for me. Nothing of my parents left but the home we'd lived in burnt to the ground, shattered by a homemade bomb after the second impact. Raised to the ground in an electric storm a night or so ago.

It was raining, the kind of strange, hot rain I wasnt ever going to get used to. The kind of strange static charged weather i didn't want to accept as the normal though it had been this way for a long time now.

My shoes were soaked, my jeans heavy and weighed so that they were almost slipping down over my hips. My tshirt was bloodstained, the blood slowly washing out in the storm.

They weren't the clothes I'd have chosen to bow out in if I'd had a choice, but they were the clothes I was wearing when the notion took me.

And I hadn't looked back since the notion took me.

Tired. I was tired.

My eyes stung, perhaps the rain, perhaps the sleep I hadn't had since I started sleeping in the footwell of an abandoned car.

My arm stung but I knew the cause of that - there was a reason my top was stained with blood.

I chewed my cheek, suddenly emotional, suddenly desperate, suddenly full of dismay and self pity and miserable, bitter woe.

What a miserable way to die. What a miserable life.

What a pathetic dwindling of youth.

I'd had so much, once. Now I was waiting for the right moment to step off the Tyne Bridge and join all the other bodies who jumped, fell or were pushed. All the other miserable people who gave up.

Their only consolation that they gave up sooner, that they got out before they lived to see it get worse.

That's what I was doing now.