END OF ALL TOMORROWS

Adder didn’t think he had survived. He thought he died and had woken up in hell.

This is hell, there is a hell for androids and I am there, God save us.

Plumes of swarthy smoke grew impossibly fast into a red sky, and the pain of shards of wood and glass embedded in his body couldn’t hold a candle to the swelling dread in his core. The world was aflame, roiling tar oozed from the hills like thick venom swirling through blood, traveling to the heart, their town. Then, the boulders began falling, dislodged from the convulsing earth, crashing back to the ground. The swarm of volcanic ash strafed overhead, and the earth trembled, threatening to open its jaws and eat them. With each explosion, every bone in Adder’s body vibrated and hammered, clanging violently against the bell tower that was his flesh.

His flickering talons slapped against the asphalt as he ventured into the crumbling street, hastily scrambling with the sea of fellow amicabots. Some were running to rescue their predecessors. He witnessed one woman trapped up to her breast in rubble being wrenched out by a frantic machine, while others were running to save themselves. He saw all the small houses were completely gone — and then he saw naked people, their clothes blasted off by the shockwave. Everywhere he looked, predecessors, shell-shocked and confused, were now eyeless and faceless — with their heads transformed into blackened alligator hides displaying red holes, indicating mouths. The alligator people did not scream. Their mouths could not form the sounds, their lungs were choked with soot. The noise they made was worse than screaming. They uttered a continuous, crackling murmur — like locusts on a midsummer night.

Those who weren’t rolling on the ground, were staggering to their basements en masse. These hopeless and shambling wounded followed each other in lines as they desperately sought help — like a march of ants across a garden path — blindly roaming the broken and corpse-filled streets of Pathos. Their skin had peeled off their bodies and faces and hung limply down on the ground, in ribbons. Their hair was burnt down to a few measly centimeters from the scalp. They moved like scarecrows, their arms held out from their bodies with forearms and hands dangling. It puzzled Adder until he suddenly realized that they had been burned and they were holding their arms out to prevent the painful friction of their tangles of raw meat rubbing together. Many of them collapsed as soon as they reached the bomb shelter entrance, forming a massive pile of contorted bodies. The stench and heat was unbearable.

The doctor wails in terror and grief at the destruction all around him, at the sweltering lava that swallowed buildings and the people who couldn’t outrun it, at the hurdling geodes that catapult into the ground dangerously close to him like asteroids. He couldn’t stop himself like the other brave souls, it was all too much. Was it selfish to survive? To abandon these people he was supposed to help in the name of self preservation? He runs, and runs, until the strength drains from his legs and he finds himself in a yellowish, bubbling swath of land where maimed railroads lay. The population is predominantly arid, howling winds ringing through the sky, answering the initial blasts, besides a pinkish-white speartail, degloved from the immense pressurized heat ripping all of its skin off, braying in pain. 

Complete silence fell over the field as he started to walk, finding trams stopped in the road which were full of bodies scalded beyond recognition. One of the passengers was a woman, the side of her temple peeled from leaning against the hot iron of the tram wall, revealing a fried brain that had spilled out her half-cremated skull.

Adder felt sick.

He swiftly averts his eyes, wishing to cleanse themselves. He felt so dirty, so helpless, and like there was something he could do about this. In an attempt to distract himself, his goggles focus on the lumps of coal on the tracks, but grow wide when the charcoal begins to squirm.

Dear god, no. Death, death all around me!

It wasn’t coal. There were more injured, sprawled out over the railroad tracks, scorched and black. There were about forty of them. When he plodded closer, they moaned in agony. “Water… water…”

Water will kill them, it’ll increase blood flow, and they have open wounds—

“Water… water…”

He knew that these people had hours, if not minutes, to live. These victims – they were no longer of this world. Adder decided to look for a water source. Luckily, he found a small puddle that had yet been scythed of its moisture, and a futon nearby engulfed in flames. The doctor tore a piece of it off, dipped it in the puddle, and wrang it over their gasping, cracked mouths. They drank the muddy water eagerly, like calves drinking milk, nursing themselves with the very thing that’d ultimately bleed them out. He went back and forth, from the puddle to the railroad tracks. Among these charred, writhing masses was a dear friend whose body and face were swollen to double its size. It was one of his patients that came in for dialysis every week.

“Ez- ra! Ezra!” Adder exclaimed, giddy to see a familiar face, but that glee was squashed when the doctor realized he was moribund. The man weakly clasped skinless fingers around Adder’s wrist and held it to his chest. As soon as his talons touched the surface, it cracked open like plaster, before sloughing right off.

“Water…” he murmured. Adder stares bleaky, searching for eyes that weren’t there, and wrang the water over his mouth. Five minutes later, he was dead.

In fact, most of the people he tended to were dead.

I killed those people.

In reply to their calls for succor, he had knowingly killed them. But it was far too late. This was the biggest mercy he could give to them.

Big black flies appeared and swarmed the motionless predecessors, and the injured he hadn’t nursed were so weak that they couldn't brush away the flies that nestled in their hands and necks. It wasn’t long before some were black in a crawling blanket of flies that covered them, feasting and laying eggs in their raw, suppurated flesh.

Tap, tap, tap

His ears focused, straining over the whispering air and fierce hum of ravenous insects.

Tap, tap, tap

It sounded like someone was tap dancing. Adder craned his head, brow furrowed in confusion, and when his eyes captured the full picture, he realized the truth. It was a predecessor sprinting across the plain away from the disaster, but… The predecessor wasn’t wearing shoes. It was the gnarled bones of his feet, tapping against the stone path. He inexplicably dove into the innards of a cottage that’d been buried with sizzling embers, the opaque, billowing smog swaddling him completely. Adder wondered if he was trying to save a wife or child, and if he realized it was already far too late for them.

Adder doubled over, pitifully whimpering. This was all too much. The emotional toll takes a baseball bat to his knees, forcing him to collapse to the scorched dirt. Long, yellow blades of grass caress him like a lover’s kiss, and whisper to him he shall be in a charnel-house with the rest of them, that soon this will all be over. Over the roar of the volcano, he hears the evil hiss of soot flying toward him, and all goes black.