I shiver against the abnormal algidity of a December afternoon as we slide through the revolving door of the restaurant. I cling to his arm as we make our way down the icy sidewalk to our car. I laugh, remembering the day I hugged my mother goodbye and she told me it would never snow in my backyard again.  Today I watched snowflakes tumble into rising ocean waves along with the cars that slid down the bridge as it buckled beneath the weight of ice sheets. The painted ladies cast their disapproval through frosted eyes as I reveled in the sight of such sweet calamity.

I indulge in one last longing stare down the snow-filled street as I slowly pull the car door closed. I turn to watch the scene grow smaller and smaller as we drive out of town. As we near SR-37, the night becomes illuminated by an endless stream of snaking headlights. They shine only one way, lighting a tempting vacancy sign on the other side. We come to a complete stop. Sigh. This is taking forever. I brush condensation from the glass and stare through the achromatic decadence into the delicate desolation that hides in dark houses. My brief attention span is captured by something soft and lifeless lying just a few feet from the front tire of our car. I unfasten my seatbelt and slide through the door.

"What the hell are you doing?" he asks me. "Get back in the car!"

I pay him no mind. He worries too much. A young rabbit is sprawled on the shoulder of the highway, dark and empty eyes open, stained sanguine. I press my hand to its soft fur. Cold.

"Julie, stop playing with roadkill! That's gross."

I climb back into the car.

"How many people have been roadkill here?" I say, placing one hand on the steering wheel and posing myself above him like an old school southern lawyer questioning a witness. "Would you have let them be too? Left to rot away, food for the scavengers, without as much as a simple wish to rest in peace?"

"You crazy hippie," he laughs. "Why do I love you?"

I fold my arms with a sigh and sink back into the cushiony leather seat.

The line begins to move again. I keep my gaze fixed on the outdoors. I want to savor these final fleeting moments of apocalypse. Suddenly I hear a soft thud against the car door as a hand appears pressed against the window. Have we hit a pedestrian? I attempt a scream but before I have the chance a blinding bright streak etches across the sky. The car lifts from the ground. Blur.

I open my eyes to find myself lying on my back against the rough pavement.  I lift myself to my feet and turn slowly, taking in the total carnage. Thin waves of smoke rise from the overturned vehicles like hamburgers on a grill. I hurry to the car I fell out of. The driver's window is cracked and smudged with blood. I peer inside through my blue-eyed reflection. His head rests against the steering wheel as the interior quickly becomes imbrued. I rap my fingers against the tinted pane; one, two, three taps.

"Can you hear me?"

Nothing. I kiss my fingertips and place them against the glass. The moment is almost cinematic. The cars around me are all quiet with death; many splattered against the concrete partition like night insects on a windshield. I wait for sounds, signs of imminent rescue. Still silent. I suppose the deceased will be scraped off the pavement when spring comes again.

I want to go home now. I step past the smoldering remnants, shedding my coat along the way as snowfall ceases and the ice begins to melt, dripping like a steamy spring rain from the light posts and buildings. At last, I enter my apartment around 5 am. I take a shower and pace the floor alone and impatient. Television personalities deliver anxious discourse to the waiting, watchful audience, spreading gory details from the far corners of the earth into my ears. The heat is permeating further as the fragile hours shatter. By midday air conditioning will be a technology in vain.

I lie down by the window, surveying the nightscape by streetlight dimmed with steam and particles that disseminate through the hastily drying air. I close my eyes. Soon the wind blows the curtains across my face. The taste of dust wears faint upon my lips. I don't remember opening the window. I reach up to close it but the glass is gone. Through its absence I hear emergency sirens in the distance.

The power flickers out. A scratchy voice fills the room. I search my apartment and discover the sound resonating from within the living room coat closet. I pull open the door and a myriad of musings spills forth. All the boxes of typed manuscripts, the shiny CDs, those impish little flash drives I was so apt to lose. They lie torn, boundless, pocked with bite marks. I run my fingers tenderly across the smudged letters of a page as tears fall upon the verbal graveyard. Through my mourning the voice does not dissipate, so disrespectful to the bereaved. I drudge through mounds and mounds of colloquial cadavers. Finally, at the floor of the untimely tomb I spy an old transistor radio. Haunting, the voice speaks on. I turn the dial. The frequency never shifts.

"Your purpose waits," it forebodes in crackling consonance. "Yo he estado aqui muchas veces antes y regreso para la ultima vez."

The recitation replicates. The voice grows louder with each refrain. I smash the radio sharp against the kitchen tile. Pieces cut my face. The phone rings.

"Hello?"

"Your purpose waits…"

Mystified, I drop the receiver and escape into the morning. Outside is bathed in blue and gray and stillness. The leaves of trees and the grass, encased in dormancy only yesterday, shine a deep shade of Technicolor green. The world is aberrant and intimate, clinging to the final fragments of a bitter denouement. The stillness tastes of cataclysm, like the hours before a tornado strikes. Buses snake down the street. Still in my pajamas I follow a crowd of screaming sheep onto a bus. We arrive at a door in the ground and descend below like burrowing animals, but with less civility.

The interior of the shelter stands dismal in contrast to the hallucinatory beauty reigning outdoors. Gray concrete walls, gray concrete floor. Hoards of people shiver beneath blankets despite the wretched heat bearing down from above. I fade into the corner, knowing no one. A woman kneels in the equidistance of the chamber, her eyes cast to the ceiling, shrieking doxology. Someone screams out the lines of Proverbs 12:21. Everyone is shouting, panicking, proliferating chaos.

Men and women in army fatigue are rounding the room with large trays of ambiguous meat. A broad, formidable woman of middle age ambulates about the periphery, casting animadversions upon her lessers. She approaches me, hovers, and offers me an unpalatable chunk of deceased animal. I refuse. She insists. I refuse.

"Listen, Miss," she barks. "This is not the time to bother with a political diet."

"Why not?" I reply. "I was raised quite well on a steady diet of politics."

"If you're going to starve yourself to death," she admonishes, choosing ignorance of the recalcitrant comment. "You may as well leave now and save room for someone who is more intent to survive."

She huffs away. I fold myself further into the corner. From nowhere, I recognize my name in the form of a crystalline call that resonates above the din. A young man speaks to me, a simple ray of light in sweatshirt and jeans.

"You can't mistake it, Julie," he proclaims. "And when you meet a chance you have to take it." His strange words echo oddly of consolation.

"How do you know my name?" my words form the shape of an obvious inquiry.

"I know things. I know you. We have met before."

His alexithymic words are stilted, as if each one must struggle for deliverance from his tongue.

"When have we met?" I query.

"1995. I remember everything. I remember you."

"I was just a kid then! When did I see you? At school? I don't remember."

"We were both 8. I walked into the building. I saw the flames and bathed in the ashes. I waited for you by the fence."

He lifts his right hand into the air, slowly turning his wrist toward my vision. His shirt sleeve falls backward a little, revealing a red chain link pattern pressed into his forearm. A puckered sheet of notebook paper and a dried bundle of flowers is tied around his wrist with a dingy and faded yellow ribbon. I remember now, the swift recollection of a little boy climbing the sprawling staircase of a tall building. His was the hand I felt push me to the bottom of the stairs as the flames rose up hot against my back and the ground shook. He cried "wait for me" as the rubble washed over him. His was the face I saw year after year, behind the chain link, behind the flowers, behind the notes I left. His was the face I saw night after night, behind the words as they marched across the screen, as I pecked away at the keyboard, sometimes so furiously the keys flew from beneath my fingertips and I was left to search the shaggy carpet for them.

"It's you," the words cross my breath in a whisper. "I always visited. I knew you would find me."

"Now you realize."

Twelve-hundred voices stand between us, yet we converse as though we were whispering closely. He is very much the same little boy I remember. He retains the thin build, the shaggy straight sable hair. We're still about the same height. His smooth pale skin now shows tiny lines graced with flecks of preternatural wisdom. His eyes are darker than I remember; the dark of the empty universe, illuminated with fractures of starlight and a hopeful glimmer which wanes by the second. I never knew his name. I ask him for it now.

"I don't recall," he answers.

I decide to myself that I will call him Chance. After all, when I meet a chance, I have to take it. I motion him to sit next to me. His movements are so swift and soundless; he practically materializes to my side. We ensconce ourselves upon the cool rigidity of the floor, positioned by authentic coincidence to mirror one another. Our eyes pierce into each other, unblinking. Slowly, I lift my hand ever closer, reaching out to lay my touch upon this empyreal being. My fingertips linger centimeters from his face. He gently covers my hand with both of his. Trembling, he presses my hand softly against his lips. Ardent rapture seeps into every corner of my existence. I shake. I pull my hand away. His salient stare never wavers.   

"Leave with me," he says.

Leaving is an abject proposition. Guards blockade the door in a feeble attempt to preserve as much human life as possible. Life, not lives. Chance moves toward the door and bids me to follow. I sit still. He takes hold of my tank top strap and pulls me onward. The guards are watching our every move. We manage to sneak through on a minute miracle, lost in a crowd of disparaged people as they descend, desperately seeking shelter. We emerge into the dying dawn.

The morning is awash with alluring phosphorescence, growing more ethereal by the second. We walk in silence past the wailing, the miserable, the frightened. They are immunized against the resplendence by a potent vaccine of trepidation. I lift my head to the blackening sky, beckoning the cinders and dust to dive deep into my lungs. We reach the edge of town. No one dares light here in the far reaches of evacuation; close enough to the city to flee underground and too far from the country to survive on one's own accord. An old pick up truck sits abandoned by the city limit sign. Chance opens the passenger door. I climb in and he takes the driver's seat.

"Where are we going?" I ask as the engine rumbles to life.

"We're going nowhere

Nowhere is where nothing goes

The Best is Nothing."

I settle into enthralling confusion as he speaks on in haiku. We turn onto a broken, overgrown highway, littered with the rusty corpses of mangled cars.

"What road is this?" I ask. "I have never seen it before."

"The road is highway

One Two, Two One, One and Two

It's always been here.

No one takes it since

The new highway bypassed it

Should not bypass things."

"I didn't know there could be so many numbers in a highway," I remark.

Signs of life begin to resume as we delve into the countryside, past the desecrated pear orchards, leveled vineyards, blackened pastures keeping their exanimate herds. And there are hundreds, no, thousands of rabbits bounding every which way. A few disenfranchised farmers wade through the overgrowth of parched weeds, scooping the animals up in nets as a supplement to their provisions. The rabbits leap high across the road, coming to untimely ends beneath our vehicle at regular intervals. I cringe each time I hear the thwack. I feel something soft and quick graze my cheek. I hear a thud and a squeak. A small peppered gray rabbit has flown through the window, landing in the seat next to me. I pick it up and cradle it in my lap. The peaceful presence comforts me.

"You can't save yourself," Chance says.

Perpetually puzzled, I cradle the rabbit to my cheek. We come to a stop at an old farmhouse with a big ramshackle barn looming wraithlike behind it. Clutching my new pet, I slide out of the truck.

"Why have we come to this place?"

"You question too much," he says, stepping toward the menacing structure. I can almost detect a molecule of laughter in his monotone speech.

"Is this a good idea?"

"Don't worry. I promise you will be safe."

The heat seems to have broken momentarily as winter puts up one last fight. A chill has consumed the air and a ceiling of silver clouds hangs low in the sky. Pillows of marshmallow white drift lower still, dripping liquid along the ground. A single drop lands upon my shoulder. It burns with cold, excoriating my skin. Chance seizes my arm and drags me into the barn. We fall breathless to the dirt floor as a stinging rainfall overspreads the landscape.

"Why did you bring me here?" I demand. "Why? We could have been safe! We could have waited it out in the shelter like the rest of the world! We could have seen the spring again! Now we're going to die here."

"Quiet," he commands. "I promised you, didn't I? And set that animal free. It doesn't belong here."

"Why should I?" I retort, stroking the rabbit's fur. "It means no harm."

He ensnares my wrists and pulls my hands away from the timid creature, which promptly skitters away, out the door and into the acid bath that falls from the sky. A sickening sound meets my ears as the defenseless rabbit meets its death. Sobs rise up from my chest. Chance retains his hold on my wrists, pinning me to the wall, his venomous gaze boring into my soul.

"Trust. Me."

He pulls me to my feet.

"Follow."

I obey hesitantly. We make our way down a long, dark passageway. At the end is a window so scratched and dingy we can't see through it. I watch, captivated, as he places his hands gently upon the glass and it fades into deliquescence. Chance steps through the opening and I accompany in silent succession. We wind our way through an abstruse labyrinth of corridors, emerging into a coruscated chamber at the pith of the complex.

Argent and recherché, it sprawls. Vines of spun silver cascade from the mirrored walls, dotted with blossoms of amaranth. The floor is carpeted with the most perfect clouds captured from the heavens and the ceiling is composed of an immaculate azure sky. I step gingerly through the doorway. My eyes pan the room in adoration. Chance touches my shoulder and spins me around. Our faces almost touch.

"You want something, don't you Julie?" he says. "But you didn't have faith. You spent your whole life buried in the comfort you know, true to your nature. You're alive and safe but what else are you? You're still nothing. Take your chance, Nothing. Believe me. Light the new world with that fire that burns inside your soul."

"How do you know these things? Why do you know these things? What are you?"

He ignores my questioning and moves closer.

"I know so much about you," he hisses. "More than you know about you. You know what's coming. You can stay here until you burn up or you can spread the fire through your words and they will stay. Stay long after the new world comes, long after those in hiding have come back out and died, into the next world and the next."

"What are you talking about?"

"You know what I'm talking about. You know what you want."

He encircles his arms around my waist. He pulls me close to him. An intolerable energy flows into me from each point of contact. He becomes the incarnation of every feeling that dwells within the bitterest recesses of my heart as he cages me in his grasp. I drop to my knees. I try to pull away. He holds ever tenaciously. He bears me down to the floor. I am blinded by the mist as his lips touch mine. I begin to asphyxiate. Darkness consumes everything. Darker. Darker. I push him away, choking violently. I feel the texture of paper and the taste of ink on my tongue. I reach into my mouth and produce a frayed fraction of paper. Scrawled across it in smeared lettering are my own words, taken from one of the hundreds of volumes that were tucked away in the coat closet. I look up from the floor at Chance. He leans against the wall, plucking precious blossoms from their vines and watching them drift along the fog. A soft smirk emanates from his face.

"Would you like the rest of them back?" he asks calmly.

I look down at the paper in my hand.

"The rest of them?"

The paper crumbles to dust. The room dims. Sparkles like the shatters of stars begin falling from above. Chance disappears into the caliginous perimeter as it closes in on me. In the blindness I feel something heavy being placed into my arms. As the light recrudesces, I can see that I am holding a weathered trunk-like box. Chance is standing in front of me. He opens the latch. Inside are words in alien form. They are all concrete objects, some are gleaming and bold, others cracked and faded. Some are so light they struggle to float into the air, others so heavy I can hardly bear the weight.

"They are yours," Chance says. "I brought them here. You can't keep them hidden. Go and give them to the world.

"You want me to go back out there?"

He nods.

"But, I'll die!"

"Yes."

He moves toward the exit. I stay. He looks over his shoulder. The star shatters fall heavier. The room grows colder. Terror rages within me.

"You promised!" I cry, slamming the box to the ground. "You said I would be ok. You liar! You murderer! Why do you hate me? Why did you trick me?"

"I cannot trick you. I am your design," he says coldly. "If I hate you then you hate yourself. If I kill you, it is suicide. It is sacrifice. Martyrdom."

His words harbor no logic. But the shatters are striking me with increasing speed as the freezing ensues. I have no choice. I pick up the trunk and we retrace our path in threefold time until we reach the exterior barn door. The atmosphere has metastasized into brilliant burning hues of amber and orange. I feel like I'm being ironed as the heat presses down. Dust and ashes fall, like snow once fell, as the wind blows them at a steep angle.

"Not much time," Chance informs me.

I open the box and begin my work. I sort through the mounds of words, choosing each one carefully, knowing I must use them all. I place them securely upon the scorching ground, leaving a message to outlive this civilization. Once the last letter is perfectly positioned, I return to the barn and collapse at Chance's feet, questioning why I can't return to the haven beneath the ground.

"You can't save yourself."

I rebel against his warning and bound down the hallway. The entrance has vanished.

"I told you." Chance says, appearing right behind me.

He takes my hand and leads me back into the rising maelstrom. He embraces me as the wind pushes us to the ground. I hold tight as debris strikes me like miniscule bullets and the sun's rays form needles as they become concentrated through the spaces between thick particles. I feel my arms become empty. Dust filters through my fingertips. I look up to see Chance stomping my words out of existence.

"What are you doing?!" I cry.

"You were wrong," he shouts through the swirling wind. "You should have known better than to trust your own creation."

Tears cannot fall from burned eyes. I reach for a piece of solid ground to no avail. A wave of dust sweeps darkness over the landscape. And in the last seconds of light I look into the dark, dead eyes of a pepper gray rabbit lying lifeless just inches from my face. Cold.