The first thing that happens during the end of the world is the music stops. In most cases, WEA (or Wireless Emergency Alert) protocol overrides your phone’s audio at a hardware level. There’s a pregnant pause of confused silence before the alarm goes off, begging you to wake up one last time.
In increasingly fewer cases, your FM radio drops its broadcast of Christmas music and opens on an EAS relay channel where you’re met with something called “attention tones”. Two sine waves, 853 Hz and 960 Hz, indicate to you your last eight seconds of ignorance.
Within about a minute, you’re on to the second thing that happens during the end of the world: fear.
Fear arrives in layers, and rarely in order. First is the inventory of names: the people you know. The ones you can’t immediately account for, the ones you hope are somewhere else. Then comes uncertainty. Information that contradicts itself, reports that don’t align, signals that cut in and out as the infrastructure begins to fail. Most people don’t fear impact or radiation the same way they fear the blank spaces in their understanding.
Questions about “Why God allows suffering” are so tired, and in your newfound experience, they take too long to answer. You wonder if this is Judgment. You wonder if God, personally, is attacking you. You wonder, if in this moment, fear and guilt are the same thing. I suppose between a razor and a gavel, I can only hurt myself so much. You wonder if the ledger of your life will withstand the blast radius.
You wish the radio would turn Silent Night back on.
You see the Great White Flash of God.
You wish your bones at least could have been found next to your wife’s bones, or your dog’s, except you had to go to the store.
Except you had to go to the store.
Except there won’t be any bones at all.
Accept there won’t be any bones at all.