The Sixtieth Second

The Sixtieth Second

The evening of December 31, 2025 wasn’t like any other. A weird sense of foreboding lay over the world—not an exhilaration at new beginnings, but a kind of boniness in the air; like when there’s this too-silent hush before news comes down that shatters everything. Millions gathered in Times Square and throughout the world’s capitals. But from a screen in his darkened bedroom, Adam had watched the festivities with an unplaceable dread.

The global countdown began.

10... 9... 8...

Millions of people partied in the streets, and never had any human sound been heard so loud. But Adam sensed something was off; the digital clocks in his room had started to flash a dark, blood-red color.

3... 2... 1... 0...

And everyone waited for the popping of fireworks, the screams of joy and a hug from loved ones. But what happened was precisely the opposite. Then came a profound silence—a stillness of that mysterious nature which the Quaker poet hath described with so much force, telling how in such an hour The heart beats all alone And cannot even hear its own.
He glanced at the digital clock. It hadn’t clicked over to 00:00:01 in order to signify, you know, that it was now the beginning of 2026. Instead, it stopped at 00:00:60.

"Sixty seconds?" Adam whispered. “An electronic watch does not have 60 seconds, it should go back to zero!”

Then the screen went blank; what we heard was lost in transmission and a frozen shot of the square. The people on the street stood paralyzed like wax figures, their faces reaching to the heavens. But their eyes… their eyes were missing, replaced by bottomless black vacuum holes punched through to the void.

Behind him Adam made out a noise that sounded like metal on glass. He turned slowly
and his mirror failed to give back his reflection. It was only the image of the frozen block party that had been there before, nothing else visible but those people’s eyes and from them pictures formed in corruped, tiny black little devil micro form crawling out of these same fucked up eyes towards his screen… his room.

His phone buzzed incessantly. Texts began flowing in from numbers they didn't know, but all with the same message:

‘2026 is not a new year… it’s harvest season. Humanity’s trial period has ended."

The walls of his apartment crumbled apart into a black, viscous goo.
glassed over and he thought his breath was freezing in his lungs. Then, finally, on the digital clock face, the numbers changed.

It didn't say 2026. It read: "Year Zero."

An icy hand pressed down on Adam’s shoulder from behind and a voice hissed into his ear:

Thanks for staying up: …we like to make sure our food’s AWAKE when we tear into it.

No sound came out when Adam screamed. Time, in 2026, was no longer intended for the living.