The End of Hope

     Thunder shook the walls of the abandoned building Shelby was crouching within. Shelby. That was the name she had chosen for herself the day her family was ripped from her. Mom. Dad. Little brother. It was a Shelby GT that took their place, back when it all began. One moment, her parents were walking a few feet away to her left, swinging ‘Little Bubba,’ as he was affectionately called, between them, making him kick and laugh hysterically. The next moment, there was a giant thunder clap loud and violent right next to her, throwing her to the ground. She had lost part of her hearing that day because of it. Regaining her senses, she had looked over, and found they were replaced with a Shelby GT convertible.  Well, part of one. Parts of her family were still there as well.

    All she had left of them was her mom’s necklace and her father’s red, paisley handkerchief. The necklace was long with a heart shaped pendant on it, a locket containing a picture of the four of them smiling and happy. She had to smash the windows of their car to get in and retrieve them. Her father had the keys in his pocket when “it” happened. She broke in with a baseball bat she found in someone else’s abandoned van. The handkerchief she kept in her back pocket, sometimes around her forehead. The necklace she kept around her neck at all times, hidden behind her shirt.

     She shook her head to clear the memory from her head. That was two years ago now, when the world fell apart. Not just the world, but her world. She realized she was clutching the necklace through the shirt between her breasts. She let go. She was tired, filthy and emotionally numb. She could have easily stood up and looked out the windowless gap above her, but she knew what she’d see. A mix of beauty and horror. It’s all she’d seen for two years now, ever since “the bubbling.”

     The Bubbling. She sniffed in derision at the thought of the name. What a dumb name. But it only made sense. It was, after all, a world-breaking, apocalyptic-making phenomena of reality-altering… well, bubbles. They varied in size, but from what she had seen, the majority of them were at least eight feet in diameter

     The air thrummed with the vibrations of more thunder rending earth and sky further away than the last bubble.

     Yeah, it was the bubbles creating the thunder.

     Shelby had almost gotten used to the nearly ceaseless thunder, and the sound of completely random things crashing to the ground from sightless heights, or exploding upwards from the ground. It was a miracle she’d lived this long, honestly, and she carried with her no expectation of living another moment. There were survivors out there, sure, but not many.

     She sat there in her dirty corner of a room that had probably once been the office of a successful day trader or something. On hot days like today, she chose one of the higher rooms of the tallest buildings she could find still standing. Her goal was to find a room where a bubble had left no windows in the wall and a strong breeze could be found constantly blowing.

     She normally tried to stay away from tall buildings because the bubbles could form any number of places and cause the building to collapse. Lately, though, she had been caring less and less. Sometimes, the heaviness of hopelessness, sorrow and depression were more than she could handle. The longer she dealt with said heaviness, the more numb she seemed to feel.

     The wind whipped through the room and tossed her hair as she sat with her back against the wall, and it felt good. The hot Florida sun was brutal, but the summer evenings brought with it a refreshing feeling that nothing else could quite bring. She found pleasure and comfort in as many little things as she could find, and those things were becoming fewer and fewer.

     She reveled in the breeze on her skin, her eyes closed.

    Without warning, her moment of peace vanished, stolen from her by the muffled sound of a nearby bubble and the feeling of quaking in the floor beneath her. It must have been a smaller bubble that had formed somewhere in the building. This time the clap of thunder was quickly followed by a shrill screaming, like the desperate cry of a man suddenly caught in the painful grip of a bear trap, while staring down the very bear the trap was meant for.

     She sighed heavily and reluctantly got to her feet. She shouldered her backpack she had picked up at the Bass Pro Shop she found last year. There had thankfully been a plethora of things left for her to pillage. It hadn’t looked like many others had the idea of going to this outdoor gear paradise, because it still looked intact with hardly a thing out of place. Maybe it was because there really weren’t that many people left, and/or they just couldn’t get there. Going anywhere was a trial of patience and fitness. Sections of road gone, giant stone bricks that had fallen from the sky from who-knows-where in the world, and sometimes even wildlife from another part of the planet. It was a wild, destroyed place.

     There had been one living soul there at Bass Pro, but they had just looked at each other and carried on doing what they were doing. She had gotten everything she could think of for survival, and of course she picked out the nicest of everything. I mean, why not, she thought to herself as she rampaged about the store. Backpack, sleeping bag, tent, cookware, medical kit, food. Name it and she stocked up. She had thrown up when she was going through the clothing section and found a pair of legs lying in a pool of blood and sea water. Evidently the bubble that got that guy was trading places with somewhere in the ocean.

     That’s what happened. The bubbles swapped out the things that were within the sphere they formed and an evidently identical bubble from who knows wherever else in the world.

    Hmmm. I  wonder if they actually ARE the same bubble somehow, she thought to herself, and not for the first time.

    Being that the earth contained a lot of sea water on it, it was a fairly common thing to appear out of no where after a bubble thundered into being. Sometimes it was dirt or sand, sometimes pine trees heavy with snow, and sometimes parts of buildings, with architecture that placed it coming from the exotic places of the world. It didn’t always happen at ground level either. There was always debris or water, or whatever else, to be seen falling from pockets in the sky, from as high up as the clouds. People had even survived the transfer on occasion. Not many, but a few. Sometimes there were parts of people that came through. The screams coming from somewhere below her told her that someone had probably not been quite so lucky.

     Backpack in place, she shouldered her shotgun and pulled out her Canik nine millimeter from its holster on her right hip and pulled the slide back as she walked, putting a bullet in the chamber. Another gift from Bass Pro. Shelby fortunately had experience with guns, her dad having taken her to the shooting range several times. She knew her way around guns a little bit from that, but she had gotten better having had plenty of practice, and plenty of time to train herself this past year.

    Lumbering down the staircase that followed the outside wall of the building, she walked past a large gap in the wall, granting a phenomenal view of the world below. Miami really was beautiful. The hurricane that had ravaged it just months after The Bubbling, in addition to the damage and chaos wrought the past couple of years, had left it in a horrible disarray. It was still a beautiful sight from up here.

    She kept on, the screams turning into more of a lamenting cry of hopelessness and pain, the initial shock having wore off. She was sure it was either another human transfer, or there had been someone downstairs that had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, having picked the wrong room to rest in. 

    She only had to go two floors down, the crying becoming louder as she approached. There, about fifteen yards down she could see a figure lying half way into one of the offices. The evening light streaming in from windows and gaps to the outdoors revealed a man in a pool of blood and debris. He was already getting obviously weaker and weaker from the loss of blood. He saw her when she was about twenty feet from him, and his volume returned with vigor as he began begging her for help.

    She felt sorry for him, she really did, but she had no hope for him. As she approached him, she saw that a good chunk of him was just gone, parts of his scalp and ear, his left arm, and both of his legs just underneath his knees. Those parts were just gone. It looked like the bubble had almost cauterized the wound, but not enough. Though she could tell he was beginning to fade from the loss of blood, his body was racked with incomprehensible agony from the intensity of his pain, keeping him from passing out. His eyes were pleading. 

    Shelby lifted her nine millimeter, and without hesitation, pulled the trigger. Twice to make sure.

    The screaming stopped immediately. She turned and walked away. She didn’t want to see any more. No desire to search through pockets. No desire for even the shortest of respectful ceremonies. She was cold, and she was numb inside.

    When she got back to the stairs, she just stared at the Atlantic Ocean now shadowed by sunset. She took out her father’s handkerchief, and held it in one hand while pulling her mother’s necklace out from behind her shirt and holding it in her other hand.  Though below was darkening due to the coming of night, the sky was still vibrant with color from the sun setting on the horizon seen from the opposite side of the building she was on.

    One rare tear made an unexpected entrance, rolling down, making a furrow in the dirt of one cheek; the sun working it’s glorious magic as it slipped in a vanishing act to the other side of this crazy and insane, wild and terrifying, beautiful and horrible, world.