The End

                The girl trailed her fingers absently over the weather-roughened headstones as she passed them, soft skin on old stone. She had never been afraid of graveyards. They were a quiet place, an in-between place. They were the past and the future.

                A chilly breeze tousled her long auburn hair, brushing it back from her fine-boned face. Her heavy-lashed gray eyes darted around nervously. She didn’t know why she was here; she hadn’t come in years. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting, either, only that she was expecting something. And it would find her.

            She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

            The air smelled like rain. Far above the girl’s head, purple and black clouds swirled together, gaining momentum with every passing moment. There was a storm coming. The breeze picked up speed, whipping angrily around the girl and pulling urgently at her hair and clothes.

            There was a momentary lull in the storm, and she heard grass crunching under approaching footsteps. She froze. A peculiar sense of dread coiled tighter and tighter in the pit of her stomach, but she found her feet rooted to the spot.

            I shouldn’t have come, she thought desperately. She realized she couldn’t remember how she’d gotten to the graveyard in the first place.

            She felt a hand on her shoulder and forced herself to turn.

            She had to tilt her head all the way back to look into his face. The tips of his silky black hair fell into his dark eyes, and his skin had a light tan. His hand was heavy on her shoulder and his gaze held hers steadily.

            “I’m glad you’re here,” he said, with an odd sincerity in his voice. The girl wondered how she could even hear him above the rush and roar of the building storm. She said nothing, pinned by his stare. “It will be over soon,” he continued. “It’s coming.” 

            The girl opened her mouth to ask, “What is?” but some small place in the back of her mind unexpectedly answered her: the End.

…

            The firelight flickered on the faded floral wallpaper of the living room walls, giving the room a warm glow. Outside, the storm raged against the house. Allie’s mother sat in an overstuffed armchair near the fireplace, reading one of her magazines on her kindle. She seemed unperturbed by the power outage, unlike Allie, who paced nervously through the halls. Her dreams were upsetting her lately, dreams about graveyards and warnings, and terrible storms that carried over into her waking hours. She wanted electric lighting and Netflix; the flickering of the fireplace and candles was making her jittery.

            Allie ducked into her room and threw herself on the bed, dislodging several pillows and the ratty old Mr. Whiskers, a teddy bear she’d had for as long as she could remember, and whose name no one knew the origin of. Mr. Whiskers eyed her reproachfully with his stitched black button eyes.

            Allie’s head hurt. She closed her eyes against the odd gray half-light, but she couldn’t shut out the howling wind or the drumming of the rain on the roof above her head.

            There was a sharp tap at her window.

            Allie bit back a scream and shot to her feet, her hands grabbing for something to throw. Before she could find a potential weapon, though, her mind sluggishly processed the face at the window. She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and laughed shakily, moving to unlatch the window.

            “Damn, woman!” James complained in an indignantly loud whisper as he shoved his way past her into the room, his teeth chattering and dark blond hair plastered to his forehead. “I could’ve died.”

            “Would have served you right,” Allie whispered back. She shut the window as carefully as she could so that her mother wouldn’t hear it downstairs. She turned to face James, folding her arms across her chest and doing her best to look down at him, even though he was taller than she was. “What are you doing here?”

            James rubbed the back of his head nervously, an uncomfortable stalling gesture Allie was familiar with.

            “Things got crazy,” he said, and made no move to elaborate. After a moment Allie nodded and uncrossed her arms, accepting it. This had happened before, a couple times actually, in the time she’d known James. She’d learned it was better not to ask questions about his home.

            “You’re soaking the carpet,” she told him instead. He shook like a dog, and Allie had to cover her mouth to stifle her laughter.

            Later that night, Allie opened one eye, reaching for her phone to check the time. The bright white letters told her it was past one in the morning. She groaned and rolled over in bed to meet James’ gaze across the room. He was awake, too, watching her from where he was sprawled out on the sofa. He smiled a little and sat up.

            “Guess sleep might be a lost cause, on a night like this one.”

            Thunder crashed somewhere in the distance, as if to emphasize his words. Allie shook her head.

            “I don’t want to sleep,” she told him. “I never want to sleep lately.” James was her best friend; she knew she could tell him about the dreams. She told him everything.

            He listened without interrupting while she talked. A tiny smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as her words began to trail off.

            “The End is coming?” he repeated. It sounded so much more ridiculous in his voice. Allie threw a pillow at him.

            “I’m being serious!” she exclaimed, grabbing a blanket and moving over to the couch to sit next to him.

            “No, I know you are,” James said, a little softer. He wrapped an arm around her, and after a moment Allie curled up against his side. He ran a comforting hand over her hair.

            “It’s probably just stress, Allie,” he told her. “You can sleep. I’m right here.”

            That night, she didn’t dream.

…

            Somewhere on the other side of the world, Gabriel fired another round of bullets into the trees. The air was heavy and murky, and his silky black hair clung to his forehead. The sky above him was gray. The humidity pressed down on him from all sides.

            A skeletal hand clamped around his ankle.

…

            That night when the boy came into her dreams, it wasn’t storming. The graveyard was peaceful, the sky clear, the stars bright above the girl’s head. She sat against a headstone with a strange, dreamy kind of calm and waited.

            He found her, like he always did. He sat next to her.

            “What’s happening?” the girl asked, turning to him.

            “It’s going to hit us,” he replied. She wondered for a moment if he considered that enough of an answer; it seemed he did.

            “What is?” she asked, not sure that he would reply. But she had to try.

            “It.”

            The girl took a moment to mull that over. “It’s going to hit us? Us? You mean you and me?”

            “All of us.” He was so serious. The girl wondered if their conversation would even make sense in the daylight, when they weren’t both in this nameless, timeless gray dreamscape. But somehow, it made sense to her now. He gripped her hand with sudden urgency; his eyes meeting hers intensely. “It’s going to hit all of us. Sickness and skeletons. Planets colliding.” The End.

“I believe you,” the girl whispered, not knowing what else there was to say. The boy stood, and as he walked away she noticed that he walked with a slight limp.

…

            Mr. Whiskers turned his head slowly to look into Allie’s face. She was asleep, dreaming. If he wasn’t stuffed he would have let out a sigh of relief. His cold black button eyes took in the sight of James, passed out on Allie’s couch for the second night in a row. Mr. Whiskers didn’t like James.

            He gently extracted himself from underneath Allie’s covers, knowing he couldn’t wake her. He skipped gleefully over to where James slept. He needed both paws, but he managed to pull several strands of hair from his scalp. He had been waiting for this day for a long time.

            Mr. Whiskers took James’ hair and headed to the graveyard.

…

            The next week crawled by. Allie went to school. James worked. She saw him once or twice; he seemed fine. She was not expecting the phone call she got from the hospital Thursday afternoon.

            Daybrook Hospital was cold and white and sterile. Allie wrapped her arms around herself, shivering, although from cold or from the atmosphere of death she could not tell. Doctors and nurses and patients passed her, blurring into one another. None of them mattered to her.

James looked very small in his bed.

Allie never would have imagined James could look small, but he did. His face was pale

and sunken, his cheekbones sharp and his hair stringy. He had lost that glow that used to have girls chasing after him.

He could barely speak when she went to see him.

“Be careful,” he whispered hoarsely. “Be careful. It’s wrong.”

“What is?” Allie didn’t know why she responded in a whisper. The lights flickered, momentary but unsettling. “What’s wrong?”

“Everything.”

Far above them, a gargoyle detached itself from a nearby church and flapped in lazy circles, its stone wings clanking.

…

After James was gone, time stood still for Allie. He wasn't the only one; people all around the world were falling ill and dying, dropping like flies. Allie watched it on the news, curled up catlike in an armchair. She couldn't bring herself to believe it was real, any of it.

Months passed.

Maybe Allie moved from her chair, or maybe she didn't. All around her the world crumbled. The laws of nature were no longer in effect.

...

 "Can I stop it?" Allie asked, leaning her head back against the gravestone. The sky was sunny above her, a change from the real world. The weather there followed no order any longer. Lightning and storm clouds battled it out in flashes of red and gray and yellow on the horizon, day and night blending into one.

"Stop what?" He asked. His name was Gabriel. She had asked him once, not expecting an answer.

"The End." She paused, waiting for some reaction. "There must be a reason you warned me."

Gabriel shook his head. "I've been trying to stop it," he said, hopelessly. "Putting the dead back in their graves, looking for a cure for the sick. Trying to fix everything that's gone wrong. There's no helping it. When you correct one wrong, another shows up." He met her gaze, his expression hardening. "I don't think there's any way to stop it. I think it's just time."

"But why me?" Allie persisted. "Why did you pick me?"

"I thought... there was a time when I thought it was possible. I thought you were the answer."

"What could I have done?" Allie's voice fell to a whisper. "I'm just me. I can't save anyone, not even James."

"You don't know the power of your own will, Allie," Gabriel whispered back.

...

It was a planet.

That was it, the final abomination of nature.

"It's going to hit us," Gabriel had said. "All of us." And it was.

Allie stood in the road, the stormy gray sky rumbling angrily over her head and the ground dark with the shadow of the planet that would end them all.

Allie closed her eyes and thought of James. He was a good person, she thought fiercely. He didn't deserve this.

It's not fair.

There were other good people, people like James. Young people. People who were going to do amazing things with their lives. People who were meant for greatness. So much was still left; it couldn't be over.

It couldn't be.

"Don't," she said out loud, to whoever was doing this. She didn't know anymore. It didn't matter. "Don't." Her voice gained strength, until she was shouting into the wind as it picked up, shouting as the mass of another planet bore down ever closer to her. She shouted for James, she shouted for everyone who had died, and she shouted for everyone who still did not deserve to die.

"This. Cannot. Be. The. End."

The planets collided, a fiery inferno of death and chaos.

The End.