Fade Away

finale

NOTE: This is it. The final part. Listen to GHOSTTOWN BY MADONNA for this chapter.

It's over. Everything's gone. It's only ashes and scraps now. It's only the remnants of what used to be, that lives like the dead now. The buildings, houses, swings, people, children and laughter and all those lights - are no more. The sun looks like flames and dark clouds like all hope disappearing, fading away. It doesn't rain or snow anymore. There's only dust everywhere. And when the last lights go off, there'll be only two souls in a ghost town.

* * *

The sky is weeping tears of dew and snow in utter silence, while the city is still awake. The clock in Wren's room had stopped at twenty minutes past two. Wren gingerly pulls the ear-phones out of her ears and looks at iPod for time.

8:23 PM

Wren's eyebrows furrow, making deep indentations on her forehead. In a spur of anger and confusion and not-knowing-things, she throws the iPod away and sends it flying across the room. It lands just near the dust-bin, with a crack or two gracing its screen. From her recliner, Wren groans in frustration and clutches her light-blonde hair in her hands. Pulling her hair, she stomps down on the urge to scream.

Then something strikes her.

She grabs her bag and heads out of the dorm room. Walking out of the campus grounds, all she can think is about the terrible, terrible scene that seemed to be forever indented into her mind and his face. So many questions but not one answer. She had to tell someone about this, she decides.

Wren avoids any form of music on her way out. She blatantly ignores all forms of sound. She doesn't want to drown again and come back up, alive but nearly dead. The corpses keep coming back into her head and the song keeps playing on its own.

When she reaches the main division of roads, Wren gets into a taxi without seeing and sits herself in the back-seat.

"2-11, Bradbury Avenue, please," she gives the taxi-driver the address and leans back. Being an insomniac was one thing and not sleeping because of the shivers is another. Wren keeps her eyes closed but her mind alert. And somewhere in between a signal stop and a traffic jam, the driver turns on the radio. Music starts and the world looks bleak, hopeless. Unable to fight it, Wren consciously sighs in defeat and drifts away.

It's apocalypse. The end of the world.

Buildings and houses have come down to the ground, crumbling to dust and debris. All life is gone. Every single tree and plant and insect - everything is wiped out. There's only dust strewn everywhere. Hope is as bleak as a small flame dying to live, fighting its death. The air is poisonous, polluted. There are thick, grey clouds, but they don't rain. They're made of something else. In a long distance, a small ball of flames burns, trying to shine through the almost-opaque clouds.

Maybe it's all too much,

Too much for a man to take.

Everything's bound to break,

Sooner or later, sooner or later.

The world has crashed, the world is burnt to its own ashes, Wren realizes.

A nuclear disaster with the intensity of a burning star wiped away all the life on the planet.

She looks around. The atmosphere is too polluted. The clouds are all radioactive dust collected and swirling. The dust is nuclear dust.