Daybreak

There it was again, a deep rumbling followed by that now-familiar sensation of falling. A few scattered rocks bounced into the air momentarily as the pulse raced past through the ground. I stood up and dug out my earmuffs, pulling them on over my head. Twenty seconds after the initial pulse a torrent of sound assaulted me, the noise of continents jousting. I did a quick mental calculation, I was roughly six kilometres away from the epicentre. I freed my ears once more, and listened to the echoes from the lifeless crags surrounding me. Months of relentless hammering had shaped the landscape around me into concentric rings, and obliterated any life that has dared to try and return since initial impact. I was the only living creature here larger than a microbe. Looking ahead in the morning light I could see the leviathan monolith hanging in the sky, the instigator of the apocalypse.

No-one knows where it came from, what it is trying to accomplish, or how it manages to do any of what it does. Almost a year ago it came careening out of the sky, from the direction of the sun. It came screeching into our atmosphere like a lance of fire, and struck the ground once, here, in the remote wastes of Siberia. The impact kicked up a dust cloud that enshrouded the world in darkness, and ignited a firestorm of biblical proportions, consuming acres of forest in minutes. The heat generated melted the very bedrock itself, creating the hellish jagged landscape of shattered rock that besieged the angry, molten epicentre.

I had been within a few hundred kilometres of the initial impact site on the day the world ended. A few comrades and I were emptying out up an old Soviet bunker we had been assigned to decommission, off in the frozen Siberian forest. Borya, my commander, had just given the order over the radio to pack up when the sky split apart in a great line of fire, casting us all into silence. I was still inside the entrance to the bunker at the time, and as the heat assaulted me I staggered back into the hallway, falling over a final crate of antiquated tech I had been removing. The ground shook violently, knocking me over as I tried to stand.  I heard the distant sound of something heavy fall, my comrades were outside, packing the truck further down the hill. I never saw them again after that day.

This bunker had been designed to withstand a small nuclear blast, and I knew that I had been very fortunate to be so close at this time. I hurriedly retreated back further into the building as the seismic shock subsided, and managed to drag the huge main door shut before the main shockwave hit. Even with the metres of rock and concrete between me and the surface the noise was deafening, as if the heavens themselves had crashed down to earth to wage war against the planet. When the noise subsided my ears were ringing, so to distract myself from the reality of my situation I turned on my torch and took stock, I had enough canned goods and decades old water to last me far into whatever future I had. I had no idea then the magnitude of the disaster that I had so narrowly survived, I didn't appreciate it. Yet, at the thought of my comrades outside, stuck in the near-nuclear hellfire, I collapsed to the ground and cried.