End of the World

We were the only survivors. There were 62 of us that survived. One minute the world was there above us, that is before the silence hit. I was working as a plasma scientist at the Homestake Mine in South Dakota. The mine is home to one of the largest underground xenon detectors in the world. The detector is literally buried a mile beneath the Earth in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The mine was built to study dark matter and hunt for particles that could help explain the “Big Bang” event that gave birth to our universe. The experiments we conduct are spearheaded by an 815-pound xenon detector primed for particle detection deep below the Earth.

I guess you can say that working a mile below the ground has its advantages, especially if your world as you know it happens to be destroyed. In the dark confines of our underground world, void of the everyday dramas that plague everyday life, we started work on that fateful day just as we always did, oblivious to the cataclysmic events that would soon befall us!

We never even knew it happened…until it was all over. It all started when we lost all electronic transmission, radio and internet connections simultaneously. The science lab that I worked in went black. Our back-up generators eventually kicked in, but eventually they began to malfunction, leaving a group of us from my lab us at the mercy of hand-held flashlights. For unknown reasons, our entire underground grid system suddenly crashed shortly thereafter; a multi-million-dollar state of the art system that was so technologically advanced, that it was thought to be impossible for it to crash. Of course, we all speculated about the cause of the mysterious crash, that’s what scientists and engineers that find themselves in the dark do.

My name is Sky Harrington, a plasma scientist who has worked most of my life within the confines of a well-controlled lab, while trying to find out the greater mysteries of life are. In theory, It should have all worked out for me. I was engaged to the most talented, and well known astrophysics professor in the world. Dr. Andrew Pfizer. We met shortly after I graduated from Duke University on a sweltering on hot in July. I took my dog Jack to a dog park. Andrew brought his dog to the dog park that day. One thing led to another and our dogs sort of introduced us to each other. We dated for 2 years before he built up the courage to ask me to marry him at the same dog park. My fairytale wedding and honeymoon to Bali awaited! I was only months away from the big day…when my world suddenly came to end.

After the generators began to fail, a small group of us in the lab decided we needed to take matters into our own hands. The state-of-the-art elevator shafts that fed into our underground world were all inoperable. So I joined my small group of my colleges as we decided to trek up the never ending staircase shaft towards the surface. Because our science lab was housed much closer to the surface, above the main housing unit for the underground xenon detector, we only had 200 feet of stairs to traverse to reach the surface.

None of us were prepared for the apocalyptic scene that lay before us as the first scientist cracked open the door that stood between us and the rest of the world. Instead of the early morning sunlight blinding us as we each stepped out of the underground labyrinth, we were greeted by something entirely different. We embarked upon a dark and gaseous sky below a scorched and barren landscape. At first I thought a forest fire had come through the area and burned all the trees down. But then the logic of that notation soon escaped me as I noticed that the landscape was void of the typical, charred debris that one would expect to find after a fire storm. But what really took my breath away was the fact that the landscape had been altered, as if parts of the Earth itself had shifted out of it’s natural place. The beautiful Black Hills and towering peaks that I expected to see off in the distance no longer stood, in their place another worldly landscape dotted with deep depressions and fiery ravines. It was as if the earth itself had been attacked by some unseen force.

I tried to take in the heavy scene before me with each collapsing breath I took. The air felt heavy and smoky. My eyes burned as I strained to see through the heavily laden smoke that rose up around us. As far as I could see there were no charred trees to speak of. What ever came through the area incinerated every tree and living thing in its path. I’ll never forget the color of the sky that day! It was like a blood bath of fiery colors against a backdrop of fluorescent red hues!

We all stood there in silence taking in the unspeakable scene before us. In that moment, the world seemed to stand still, if only for a moment, as world stared back at us with an incomprehensible, maddening story to tell us. My thoughts seemed to be paralyzed in that awful moment; transfixed on the periless scene that played out before me!

Just moments before, our lively, chipper group was trekking up the stairs in high spirits. We talked about the things that were going on in our lived. I was sharing my all of my wedding plans with the group. Some in the group were glad to get their mid-morning workout in before lunch time. But now, as the apocalyptic landscape threatened to drown out our silence, our IT specialist Chase was the first to break the deafening silence.

After we reached the surface Chase began to read a text that must have come through before everything had crashed. The text message was from a ex-colleague that now worked at CERN.

“The text said that this is happening all over the world…that most of the world is just….is just gone!” Chase exclaimed, with more fear in his eyes than I’d ever seen.

“We…we should somehow get help.” Chase continued.

“Get help!” Our lab manager cried out in an almost hysterical, uncanny way…”From who? If the rest of the world looks like this, just who”-

“Stop…just stop all of you!” Colleen, our Geomatic Engineer snapped! Her voice seemed to cut across the barren landscape before us like a frenzied broken record. She was matriarch among us female scientists in science lab. She graduated back in the 80’s from MIT. She was always the voice of reason when things got heated up in the lab.

As a small amount of unfettered light poked through the fiery clouds above, momentarily lighting up the scorched earth around us, Colleen attempted to console us all in that moment, just as she always had.

Carefully choosing her words. “Now, I don’t care what Chase’s friend told him. We really don’t know what’s happened here. Before anyone declares this as an “end of the world” scenario, I suggest that as good scientists and engineers we get all the facts in first!”

“I agree”, Pete Thomson added. “let’s go back to the lab and try to figure all this out”. Pete was a theoretical physicist who normally kept to himself and was quite reserved.

As we turned to make our way back down the shaft, black smoke rose from scored earth around us as I clutched the heart shaped locket around my neck. Andrew gave it to me just before I took this assignment. He told me that if things ever got too tough to handle at my new job, to hold the locket close to me and he would be there with me, if only in spirt. As I clutched the locket with tear of resentment for never being able to say good bye to the only man I ever loved, I heard a siren of screams rise from my colleagues.

The Earth below us began to crumble, the world as I knew it dropped from underneath me. As I fell into the dark abyss of the earth I thought of Andrew. It seemed like I was falling forever. I held onto the locket as long as I could as my world grew very cold and then very dark. The world as I knew it and as we all knew it, was just gone…and I never knew why.