In A Minute We Were Dead

My boyfriend Jack and I decided we would sleep outside tonight. The sky was beautiful.

We laughed as we lay our air bed on the ground. We were counting stars, and I kept miscounting them.

"I'm telling you, there are only thirty in the sky!" I told Jack as we both lay down, observing the sky.

"No!" Jack told me, still laughing.

"There are thirty-six!"

I knew there was no point in arguing, so I laughed at him and replied, "Whatever!"

I loved observing the sky at night, it was my favourite hobby. I loved having Jack around on nights like these. He had humor, and he was great company to be around.

Suddenly, something flew across the sky. It was too big to be a star, and it had a tail of fire trailing behind it.

It screeched loudly. It flew past us within a minute, shaking the ground as it passed.

"Jack! What was that?" I asked.

My breath leapt out of my body. I had seen many stars, but nothing like this.

Something told me it wasn't a star at all.

A plume of smoke erupted from behind a hill in the distance.

Jack stared at it in silence.

"Jack! JACK! What was that?" I asked him, shaking him to try and get him out of the stunned shock he seemed to have fallen into.

"I don't know!" he answered, looking at the ground.

Jack was puzzled. We had only been out here a minute, and disaster had struck. He could smell a strong scent of burning surrounding them. Fire engines were already on the scene.

A minute wasn't enough to process what Jack knew they had seen.

"Did a giant asteroid just hit Earth?" he muttered under his breath.

He looked at me in silence, then said,

"We better get out of here."

As soon he managed to speak the words, the ground shook violently.

I screamed as huge cracks in the ground below us started to form.

"JACK! Tell me what the hell is happening here?" I screamed at him again.

I could see some houses were on fire in the distance, and plumes of fireballs were falling from the sky and hitting the ground around us.

"Just MOVE!" Jack shouted.

We tried to run towards the car, but we had to stop a few times and choose a different direction as the ground below us opened up fast.

The weather suddenly changed to rain, though it wasn't the usual warm rain that fell during this time of year.

The rain was hot against our skin, and it was contaminated with black soot which peeled our skin layers.

"This is no good. We're not going to make it to the car!" I told Jack, as we dodged another crack in the ground.

I was out of breath and tired.

We still had a couple of miles to go before we could get to the car, but my legs hurt like they had been broken, and my skin was peeling and bleeding. A loud rumble came from behind us, followed by a large flash of lightning. The ground shook violently beneath us, and Jack screamed as he fell on a glowing, hot cinder.

I grabbed him by the hand, and shouted, "Get up! Get up Now!"

Jack got up, and we kept moving.

We were wearing hooded jackets, so we pulled the hood over our heads to shield us from the fireballs and hot, sooty rain falling from the sky, though we could still feel the heat coming through the hood.

We couldn't change into anything else, because the rest of our clothes were locked in the car.

The fireballs were coming down faster than ever now, then there was another flash of lightning before darkness.

Everything was black, and we weren't breathing,

In a minute we were dead,

and, the world had ended.