The Sound of Everything Ending

The Sound of Everything Ending

I woke up because the car stopped screaming.

That’s what I remember most. Not the crash. Not the screech of metal or my mother shouting. The quiet after. The kind of quiet that fills your ears like water and makes you wonder if you went deaf without noticing.

My cheek was cold against the window glass. There was a smear of breath-fog where my face had been, and I watched it fade while my heart tried to remember how to beat normally. My hands were shaking. I didn’t know why they were shaking until I looked down and saw my knuckles white-knuckled around the seatbelt strap, like I’d been holding on even though I was asleep.

“Sam?”

My father’s voice. Different. I didn’t know how to name the difference then. I know it now. It was the voice of a man who had just realized he couldn’t protect us from whatever came next.

“What happened?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He just sat there with his hands on the steering wheel, staring through the windshield at nothing. The dashboard was dark. The radio was dark. Everything was dark except the sky, which was that pale November blue that looks like it’s lying about how cold it is.

My father got out of the car. I watched him walk to the front and pop the hood. He stood there for a long time, just looking at the engine like it was a dead animal he didn’t know what to do with. The wind caught his jacket and made it flap against his legs. He looked smaller than he had that morning. I didn’t know a person could shrink in a few hours.

My mother turned around in her seat. Her face was pale, the kind of pale that makes you think of milk or paper or the inside of an eggshell. “Are you okay?”

“I think so.” I touched my forehead. There was a bump forming, tender and warm. I hadn’t even felt myself hit anything.

“Good. Stay here.”

She got out too. I watched them stand together by the open hood, their breath making little clouds that vanished almost instantly. They were talking, but I couldn’t hear the words. Just the shapes of their mouths moving. Just the way my mother kept touching my father’s arm like she was checking if he was real.

I unbuckled my seatbelt. The latch made a sound like a small bone breaking. I opened the door and the cold hit me so hard I forgot how to breathe for a second. It wasn’t like the cold in the car. It was a living cold, a mean cold, the kind that gets inside your clothes and touches your skin with fingers made of ice.

There were other people on the highway. I hadn’t noticed them before. A man in a suit was walking between the stopped cars, his tie loose, his shoes making clicking sounds on the pavement. A woman was standing by a minivan with a baby on her hip, the baby crying in that thin, exhausted way that means it’s been crying for a long time. A teenager about my age was sitting on the guardrail, staring at his phone like he could will it back to life.

No one was driving. No one was moving. The cars stretched in both directions like a line of dead animals, and the silence was so complete I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears.

“Sam, get back in the car.”

My father’s voice again. Sharper now. I turned and saw him walking toward me, his face set in that expression he gets when he’s trying not to show what he’s feeling. He was holding something. A black thing. A shape I recognized from movies and news reports and the locked drawer in his study that I wasn’t supposed to know about.

He was holding a gun.

“Dad?”

“Get in the car. Now.”

I got in the car. I didn’t argue. There was something in his voice that I had never heard before, something that made my legs move before my brain could catch up. My mother got back in too. She sat in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap, her fingers laced together so tight the knuckles were white.

My father stood outside for another minute, looking at the gun in his hands like he was trying to remember what it was for. Then he tucked it into his waistband and got back in the car.

The car was cold now. The heat had died with the engine. I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, trying to make myself small, trying to disappear into the space between the seats.

“We’re going to walk,” my father said. “We passed a town a few miles back. We’ll find shelter there.”

“What about the car?” I asked.

“The car is dead.”

He said it like he was talking about a person. Like the car had been alive and now it wasn’t. I looked at the dashboard, at the dark screens and silent dials, and I understood what he meant. The car wasn’t broken. It was gone. Whatever had made it run had left, and it wasn’t coming back.

My mother opened her door. “Sam, grab your backpack. Take only what you can carry.”

I reached for my bag on the floor. It was heavy with schoolbooks and homework I would never turn in. I thought about my desk at school, about the half-finished worksheet sitting on it, about how the teacher would probably get mad at me for not finishing it before she realized that none of it mattered anymore.

The woman from the minivan walked over. She had the baby on her hip, and a little boy holding her hand. The boy was crying silently, tears running down his face without any sound, like he had already learned that crying didn’t help.

“Are you heading south?” the woman asked. “We could travel together. Safety in numbers.”

I watched my father’s face. I saw something move behind his eyes, something I didn’t have a name for. He looked at the woman. He looked at the children. He looked at my mother, and then at me.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We travel alone.”

The woman’s face crumpled. She nodded once, a small jerky movement, and walked back to her minivan without saying another word. The little boy looked back at me over his shoulder. His eyes were the color of the sky, pale and empty.

I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell my father that we should help them, that it wasn’t right to leave them alone, that the old rules said you don’t abandon people on the side of the road. But I didn’t say anything. Because I had seen the gun in his waistband, and I had seen the way he looked at the woman, and I understood that the old rules didn’t apply anymore.

We started walking. My father in front, my mother behind him, me in the back. I kept turning around to look at the minivan, at the woman standing beside it with her children, watching us go. She got smaller and smaller until she was just a dot in the distance, and then she was gone.

My feet hurt. My backpack was heavy. The cold was eating through my jacket like it was made of paper. I wanted to ask where we were going, how far the town was, what we would do when we got there. But I didn’t ask. Because I knew my father didn’t have answers, and I didn’t want to hear him say it.

We walked for what felt like hours. The highway was a graveyard of cars, and the people who had been in them were standing around like ghosts, not sure what to do with themselves. Some were crying. Some were shouting at their phones. Some were just standing, staring at the sky like they expected an answer to appear.

My father didn’t look at any of them. He kept his eyes forward, one hand on the gun under his jacket, the other holding my mother’s hand. I watched their fingers laced together, and I thought about how strange it was that they were holding hands. They never held hands. Not in public. Not like that. It was like they were afraid of losing each other in the crowd, even though there was no crowd, just us and the dead cars and the cold.

I don’t know when I stopped being a kid. I think it happened somewhere between the crash and the walking, somewhere between seeing the gun and watching the woman’s face fall. I think it happened without my permission, without any ceremony, without anyone telling me it was happening. One minute I was a girl in the back seat of a car, and the next I was something else.

Something harder. Something colder. Something that knew the world had ended and wasn’t coming back.

I looked up at the sky. No planes. No contrails. Just that pale November blue, empty and indifferent. I thought about how the sky didn’t care. It had been there before us, and it would be there after, and nothing we did would make any difference to the sky.

My father stopped walking. He turned around and looked at me, really looked at me, like he was seeing me for the first time. “You okay, Sam?”

“I’m fine.”

He nodded. He didn’t believe me. I could see it in his eyes, the way they flickered with something that might have been grief or might have been fear. But he didn’t push. He just turned around and kept walking, and I followed, because there was nothing else to do.

The town appeared on the horizon like a mirage. A cluster of buildings, dark and silent. No lights. No smoke. No signs of life. My father picked up his pace, and my mother matched him, and I stumbled along behind them, my legs aching, my lungs burning, my heart doing something I couldn’t name.

We reached the edge of town as the sun started to set. The sky turned orange and pink and purple, the colors bleeding into each other like a bruise. My father stopped at the first house, a small white thing with a porch and a dead lawn. He looked at the windows. He listened.

“Stay behind me,” he said.

He pulled out the gun. I watched him hold it, watched his finger rest against the trigger guard, watched his shoulders square like he was getting ready for something. He walked up to the front door. He knocked.

No answer.

He tried the handle. It was locked. He looked at the door for a long moment, then stepped back and kicked it. The wood splintered. The door swung open. He went inside.

I stood on the porch with my mother, listening to the sounds of his footsteps moving through the house. A door opening. A closet. A bathroom. Then silence, and then his voice: “It’s clear.”

We went inside. The house was cold and dark and smelled like dust and old carpet. There was a couch, a television, a kitchen with dishes in the sink. Someone had left a coffee cup on the counter. The coffee inside was cold and had a skin on top.

My father closed the door behind us. He pushed a chair under the handle. He checked the windows. He pulled the curtains shut.

“We stay here tonight,” he said. “We rest. We figure out what’s next.”

I sat on the floor with my back against the wall. The carpet was rough under my hands. I could hear my own breathing, too fast, too shallow. I tried to slow it down. I tried to think about something other than the fact that we were in a stranger’s house, in a dead town, in a world that had stopped working.

My mother sat down next to me. She put her arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. She smelled like sweat and cold air and something else, something I couldn’t name but that made my throat tight.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said.

I didn’t believe her. I could tell she didn’t believe herself. But I nodded anyway, because that’s what you do when the world ends and your mother needs you to pretend.

I closed my eyes. I listened to the silence. I waited for whatever came next.

This is just one moment from The Last Day. If you want to experience the full story, it’s available on Amazon.

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