The Vacant Sky

Prologue: Lines & Dots

-From the journal of George Harson: first entry.

      We beheld a black sky.  There were no clouds, nor was there a single glimmer of light.  The stars were gone, and the blackness of space felt close, as though it was encroaching upon the earth like a forceful hug.  The void was not miles above, but meters.  It was a Tuesday when the heavens blinked out of existence.  There was nothing remarkable about that day in particular; it wasn't even a federal holiday.  Mothers picked up their kids from latchkey, and fathers slaved away in the plant, surely nobody looked up.  The crossing guard was pining for the bottle of gin in her freezer, nary a thought of sudden dark in her mind.  When the light went out and the crosswalk became a massacre, her final thought as she looked up at the cold and empty sky was a longing for that bottle of gin.  Nobody would ever drink it.  That is how it went; there was no explosion, nor was there a wheeze or rattle.  It was as though a switch was flipped, and the universe beyond our atmosphere was gone.  We called it The Darkening.  It was 4:32 PM, an oddly specific time that no scientist could lend significance to.  By the end of the first dayless day, and the beginning of the first nightless night, the death toll was in the millions.  By the following week, billions.

      The first wave of deaths came in the immediate aftermath of The Darkening, as the world lost its breath and panicked like a trapped animal.  Car accidents were in the thousands, work related incidents were inumerable.  Explosions rocked major cities as the population rioted and stampeded through the streets, setting fires to replace the light they had suddenly lost.  In an instant, humanity was unified as though a loved one shared by all was dead.  We ravaged, raved, and mourned.  The heavens never returned.  As the following days unfolded, the fiery chaos dwindled down and ultimately fizzled out, replaced by a societal sense of depression and despair.  There were no longer mornings, so the sun did not rise, and there were no longer nights, as there was no sun to set and no moon to reflect its light.  Perhaps worst of all, there was nothing left to wish upon.  Time took on strange dimensions, as clocks seemed to mark arbitrary measurements to lives that no longer fit.  We destroyed the clocks; they made us remember, they drove us to madness.  We stopped using words like "Day" and "Night".  Today was no more, and Tomorrow didn't exist.  There was only now. 

      The suicides started by what would have been the third day had the sun ever rose again.  With no more use of time, we stopped going to work, there hardly seemed like any point.  The best laid plans of mice and men were but a pipe dream of dead writers from an era that knew horizons and the clouds that laid upon them; their world was dead, replaced by the coldness of The Darkening.  Those who had held out hope for it all to be some kind of fluke, a wrinkle that would iron itself out as the fabric of space stretched across the ironing board of infinity, began to realize their hope was for not.  Faced with a new reality, they turned to nooses, needles and knives.  Husbands helped wives tie ropes to the rafters, children steadied the chairs while their siblings placed their heads within the final loops.  There were mass immolations at local churches, overdose parties at county hospitals.  So many creative ways to remove yourself from the blackened board.  One man laid out yards of chain link fence in his yard, hooked it up to the power lines and created a voluntary killing floor; it was an instant hit among his neighbors.  The stench of rot and decay sat putrid in the stagnant air.  The wind never blew again, so the smell had no choice but to linger in every space where people once lived.  Nobody came for the bodies, so those of us who chose to live wore gas masks as we navigated the world.  Eventually, we got used to the smell.

      There was no way to measure the damage. As the dayless weeks crawled by, the consequences of this fireless hell began to reveal themselves, slowly at first but quicker as the darkening continued.  If I had to guess, half of the world was dead by what would have been the Tuesday after.  The streets were sparse with living faces, and the spaces between the living grew larger.  It wasn't long before the power grids went down for good, having spent the last of their juices to deliver mercy to those who knew how to manipulate them.  It was then that we knew true darkness, as the last of the street lights flickered out against the suffocating void of the dead sky.  If the blackness felt like it was too close before, it now had it's hands around our necks, squeezing the last bit of resolve from the remaining survivors.  With the absence of power, so too went the luxuries of running water, central heating, and cellphones.  We fumbled in the darkness for flashlights and batteries, now the most precious resources in all of existence.  Once, in a memory that was beginning to fade, we had faces and bodies, and features that our loved ones could remember; now, we had been reduced to miniscule points of light.  There was another problem, one we had failed to anticipate.  The ecosystem was powered by sunshine and rain, and with the death of the sun and the demise of the clouds, the crops slowly withered and died.  Those of us who stumbled our way to farms and fields found nothing but dead grass and dust.  We could scavenge a sea of empty homes, now housing the dead, for cans and bottles of degrading food, but in the end we would starve; all life would starve.

      It has been a long time since I have seen another beam of light, longer still since I have seen a person attached to one.  I have lived off cans of Chef Boyardee and slept on couches that were feet away from corpses.  I no longer have to worry about the smell; all that is left of most is bones.  On my left arm, I wear five watches.  They are all digital, and they all share the same time.  Part of me likes the comfort of the small amount of blue and green light that emanates from their screens, but mostly I wear them so I do not lose track.  By my count, it has been 637 days since The Darkening began, possibly more.  I go to sleep in the darkness and I wake up in the same.  In the beginning, I tried to keep to my normal schedule, but it hardly seems to matter now.  I travel with a suitcase full of flashlights and batteries, some that I wear on the straps of my backpack, and some to replace the lamp on my forehead.  I have become convinced that I am the last man on earth, or at the very least, the last man in my city.  I walk the streets as a beacon of light in the infinite black, knowing that humanity may perish when I draw my last breath.  This idea fills me with a sickening combination of purpose and dread.  Someone needs to be here, someone needs to witness the sky if it ever returns.  I have begun to forget what it ever looked like.  Every day in my past life, I saw the horizon and the clouds, I witnessed the glory of the sun and the specter of the moon, and I took for granted their permanence.  In the darkness, I find myself grateful, and longing.  I am unnerved by the temperature of the still air, as it never became frigid as we feared it would; surely the planet would have frozen over by now.  It is an idea that gives me the tiniest morsel of hope, even though I know such notions are foolish.  When I grow tired on my current path, I will raid the next house in a neighborhood that is as vast as it is empty, and I will pull from my pack a notebook that has frayed at the edges. In addition to documenting my journey, I have taken to drawing the constellations, or at least the ones I can recall from memory.  As I lay among the skeletons of this dying world, I will dot the sheet of paper with a smattering of stars, and trace the dots with my pen.  Orion's belt, little dipper, and a red dot for mars.  I cannot let them be forgotten.  Maybe a dark world has no place for an old journalist, but I must do what I can to preserve history, even if the world no longer cares.

-End of entry.