The things that are nigh...

What does a temperature drop of 20 degrees and constant rain for three days tell you? Some say ‘who cares,’ others say ‘global warming did it.’ Me, I think the Apocalypse is coming. Not out of some religious belief or based on any hard evidence. I just sort of feel it. Like when an old man feels weather changes in his old rotten joints, only I feel the imminent end.

And really, why couldn’t I? These kinds of stories always have the one person who knows destruction is nigh and no one believes him. Did anyone listen to the sheriff in Jaws or the architect in Towering Inferno or the scientist in Day After Tomorrow? I don’t think so.

It came to me as the same sense of knowing you get right before a car hits you. Or when an unlikable hockey team is about to score against your guys and win. Or when you bet on a horse and then it trips. When the shit’s right about to hit the fan, the split second when you see it and know everything’s going to hell, that’s what I feel looking out my window.

Day one, everyone just said it’s raining and carried on. More layers of clothing, a lot more umbrellas in the streets. Someone occasionally stepping in a puddle or getting showered by a passing car hitting a pot hole. People complaining but generally not caring much. Me, this is when my feeling started.

Day two, some villages got flooded a bit, but it was hardly a reason to call Noah. People, still used to all that cancerous sun light, got annoyed by all the clouds and darkness. Dark clouds and even darker darkness, to be exact. Wet twilight all day long, that can spoil anybody’s day, right?

Day three, people are depressed and cold and some are angry and jumpy. Some start saying this is typical pollution weather. Other stopped caring, knowing they can’t do anything about it. Me, I fear every new hour, because it’s always an hour less till judgment day. Day three, I begin to more than just suspect everyone will die. I’m what you call 100% sure.

Day four, it never comes. Because on the night of day three, IT came. Around seven on that fateful last night, it really started pouring down. I mean, it was Saigon. Over the top. Rain so thick I couldn’t see across the street. City infrastructure gave up and streets turned into rivers. Basements were pools, roofs were sponges, gardens were swamps. Imagine a bucket of water dumped on you every second. Well, this was worse. And by this time, I wasn’t the only one saying the Second Coming is here. Actually, there were people screaming Jesus is coming back.

Not that I particularly believe in that stuff, but the weather was really becoming biblical in proportions. Noah’s little boat would’ve been screwed in this. I mean, when whales start drowning, you know you got a problem. When mountains become islands, it’s obvious you’re fucked. When the pope has nothing to say, it’s mayhem in the Western World.

By eleven o’clock, half my neighborhood drowned and the other half was about to. The feeling I had that the end was coming, well it was mutual. From something deep inside, it turned into an inevitable certainty. A hint of what was to come became the shit that hit the fan. And then some.

At midnight, the last person on Earth drowned, and that person was me. For some reason, I had to witness it all. For some reason, I’m now flying to a planet not so different from Earth, and telling this story to the masses. Not as a soon to be forgotten warning, but as an oral history of my home.

And people listened.

And it started raining.