Some people were calling it the rapture.
Some gathered together in droves in front of all manner of theological representations, on their knees with their hands in the air, and actually welcomed the event with tears in their eyes and a smile on their lips, held fast in the belief that it was some kind of divine event being put in place by a savior returning to strip them of their mortal lives.
Some waited in churches, laid on pews with their families, quiet collections of four or five person colonies, while others waited in the yards, calmly digging their own shallow graves while trying to convince their distraught children that everything would be okay.
Others gathered with weapons and fire and set to destroying shelters. "Repent and be saved" was their message, howling of the hellfire and misery that waited for any soul too lost in their own fear and decadence to turn their heart to God and await the celestial intervention with anything but hope and prayer.
Peter Kirkland thinks that all of them were insane and that any person with half a brain in their head should have known exactly what it was.
The end of the world. Armageddon. The apocalypse.
Scientists put a nicer word on it. They called it 'The Calamity' as if it were a simple misfortune and not the extinction of mankind, and the papers ate it right up. It was softer. A kinder, gentler presentation of information; an elbow in the ribs on the subway rather than a terrified man in the terminal with a cardboard sign shrieking in the face of passers by. Newscasters were more than happy to speculate that, while life would be changing, it was certainly not the end of man so long as every one was to get to a shelter in time.
More people perished killing each other over the scarce places in the bunkers than in the first flash.
In the days preceding The Calamity, Sealand was not sure what to think. He had been in England during the event on June seventh on a 'diplomatic visit' to his part time guardian, waiting in a huddled mass of nerves and fear in Arthur's sitting room while the frazzled Englishmen ran, metaphorically, back and forth between various other representations of the European nations, trying to get the situation under control by getting his terrified people to the shelters or, at the very least, into sturdy buildings that might make it through the first hits.
They were supposed to have another week to prepare when the first flash came.
A horrifying heat, hotter than anything Peter has ever known, swept over them all in one pure, white burst of light, and immediately burnt anything and anyone in the bare air into nothing more than a greasy streak of a shadow on streets and building walls, bricks melting and pavement turning to steaming, black soup beneath their feet. Millions, simply gone in an instant.
The earthquakes did not come until after the second flash decimated the southern hemisphere a day later. All radio contact with Asia was cut in less than an hour followed by Italy, Greece, and Turkey soon after. Sinkholes opened in thousands of cities and with them came tsunamis and floods and soon, low-lying cities were drowning and the nations were crumbling as quickly as their buildings.
The third flash hit central and northern Europe again several days later, but by that time, Peter was already too far gone with fever to remember it, still tucked away in England's sitting room beneath what was left of the collapsed ceiling, pressed between the backs of Arthur Kirkland and Francis Bonnefoy, soaked with the sweat of their own sickness as England weakly hammered away at the broken radio, hoarsely screaming for the help of anyone still left breathing.
Peter cannot remember who it was that finally came for them or how many days later it was.
He had floated in and out of consciousness, barely aware of the heavy rocking of the ground beneath him and the overpowering scent of rust and salt and sulphur and blood, and smoke. Faintly, he had known he was on a boat but his knowledge stopped at that fact and it wouldn't be until nearly a month later that he would learn that it had been a civilian envoy who had pulled him out of the rubble and taken him to the bunker in Munich.
