The radio screams like some poor woman aborting a fax-machine mid-term. Reality seems to bleed, a painful bursting of crimson rain that comes from every direction at once. Dripping upwards even as droplets descend down.

We’re sitting together in a café that’s nowhere. We’re waiting for the world to end. Well, we were waiting. It’s here now, the end. The final bit. The last drop at the bottom of the bottle. We’re it. Swallow us up and go.

The air shutters like it’s in pain, and I think it is. Great cracklings of thunder tore the clouds apart, and now some great beast, some insane living construct with eyeballs a thousand miles wide and a throat that goes deeper than anything on Earth, it’s tearing its way out of its world, and into ours.

The ground goes black. Our waitress is curled up on the floor, crying about some city where machines are built to rape human souls, where every home is a hungry mouth, where cold hands reach out from the darkness. She screams, as her body and psyche give way to the terrible pressures of our age. Her body contorts, painfully, impossibly, hands becoming flippers, ears giving way to gills… Skin becomes scales that fall to floor in bloody fistfuls.

The day is ending. The world is dying. All the Kings and Queens are being chopped up and served on the good China; cut up with the nicest cutlery we had. The Presidents and Prime Ministers have all been beheaded and offered up as gifts to the uncaring beasts that split our sky and poison our air.

All that’s left now is us, the common folk, the ones with nothing to offer and nowhere to run.

And soon there’ll be nothing left of us, either.

Outside, the wind gives a final cry before it is ripped asunder, and laid out across the land in barely-twitching scraps. Outside, something larger than the earth peels back the atmosphere. There’s a scream, a long, endless scream, of traumatized atoms, burning and burning until the last life finally goes out.