A-Sides

by Victor Allen

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  Kenny thrashed the blankets off the bed and barely held back a shriek as he woke up. A black, horrible dream capered darkly in his mind’s eye, barely discernible now.

  He cast a worried eye at his windup clock, but it was still too dark to read it. It was only then he noticed the wailing of the wind and the rain pelting savagely against the house. Eldritch lightning aliens shadow danced on the walls and pirouetted away.

  His bedroom door clicked open and he saw his mother’s silhouette. She wore her bathroom and her graying hair hung in her face. Dark half moons napped beneath her eyes, but that might have been only shadows.

  “You awake, honey?”

  “Uhm,” Kenny said. “What time is it, mom?”

  “6:30, I think.”

  “6:30? Why is it still dark. There’s a storm outside, I know, but….”

  “Shh, there’s nothing to worry about.” She reached out and put a hand on Kenny’s sweaty forehead.

  “But it’s dark,” Kenny protested, working himself to within a hairsbreadth of panic. “It’s like my dream, everything was dark and nothing was like it should be….”

  John Ross appeared in the doorway. He had dressed hurriedly and his hair was plastered to his head in thick lumps. A few outlaw sheaves went their own way in corkscrew curls.

  “Phone’s out, too,” he said to his wife. “When the rain slacks off some, I’m going to go next door and see if Henry and Grace have heard anything about this.”

  “Don’t go, dad,” Kenny said. His words were just under sharp with fear.

  John smiled grimly at his son. “Don’t worry about me, Kenny. I’m just going to try to find out how long the lights are going to be out. I’ve ever seen a storm like this.” He couldn’t tell Kenny he was afraid. “Why don’t you go ahead and get up? Come in the kitchen and keep your mother company.”

  Kenny followed his folks into the kitchen. His mind worried over the dream and little bits and pieces of it began to come back to him. Outside, lightning streaked the skies and thunder rolled, but the rain seemed to have slackened some.

  John looked back from his inspection through the window. “I’m going to run across the street to Henry’s, see if he knows anything about this.”

  Both Nancy and Kenny looked at him, concerned and frightened.

  “You’ll be careful,” Nancy asked.

  John hugged her clumsily and gave Kenny a kiss on top of his head.

  “I’m just going across the street. I’ll be back in no time.”

  John grabbed his jacket and went to the front door, Kenny and Nancy trailing him like a train. John stood by the door as a particularly intense bolt of lightning rent the dark skies. In the light he saw his wife’s worried eyes. Then he was gone.

  John stumbled across the lawn with his collar turned up, bent at an impossible angle against the buffeting winds, struggling even to put one foot before the other.

  Kenny felt the ash-laden air began to thicken, catching in his throat. He opened his mouth to call out to his father, but the words were too heavy on his lips.

  As if sensing that his son was trying to call to him, John looked toward his home. For a long moment his rain bedraggled features were visible in the uncertain skylights. His eyes glowed with an eerie electric flame before the bolt of lightning screamed down from the sky and struck him.

  A blue wreath of St. Elmo’s Fire outlined his form before he was knocked twenty feet away, practically back up to the porch steps. An instantaneous clap of thunder smashed through the house like colliding freight trains.

  Nancy screamed and stumbled out of the house, across the porch and down the two cinder block steps. It was only with effort that she struggled against the lashing winds and sagged next to her husband’s body. Her rain soaked robe snapped in the winds.

  Kenny followed in a stupid daze, his vision still cracked by white after-images of the lightning bolt. His ears rang and the rain pummeled him like a million stinging needles.

  The storm continued unallayed as Kenny reached his father’s body. John’s open eyes stared at the sky and the lightning illuminated John’s dead face in a horror show of light and shadow. Nancy cried and repeated her husband’s name over and over. Through his own tears and sorrow, it took a few seconds for it to register on Kenny when the real change began.

  The rain slacked off and the wind calmed. For no apparent reason, Kenny suddenly found it harder to breathe, as if he were on a three mile high mountaintop. There were sudden, soft thumps all around him on the sodden grass. Birds -birds of all sizes and shades- had suddenly plummeted to the ground, dead and dying, gasping for air. Perceptibly, the sky began to lighten and Kenny saw the welcoming yellow of the sun, still obscured by the clouds, begin to peek through.

  The wind that had so recently been still picked up at the same moment the sun became brighter and the sky bluer. Kenny gasped a couple of times, his chest heavy.

  He heard his mother’s breath hitch and he looked towards her. She stared upward, goggle-eyed and fearful. He tracked her gaze, staring up into the now clear blue sky.

  A dark sphere hung high in the ether like an evil moon, well above the horizon. It pulsed ever so slightly with a liquid sheen, as if it were the most prized, polished onyx. It doubled the breadth of the normal full moon and it seemed to stare carelessly down like a black eye, a disinterested observer of a world’s death.

  Still over a million miles away, the black hole -not Kenny’s wished for star- had come to wipe the slate clean, consuming everything in its wide swath with an unquenchable gluttony. Kenny could see the spiraling trail of dust and gas and debris being funneled from somewhere below the horizon and reaching towards the maw of the black hole. The cloud of debris tapered towards the black hole, like railroad tracks converging in the distance, but the tip of the cloud never touched the black hole, seeming to stand off from it as if repelled by a physical force field.

  That’s the event horizon, Kenny thought dimly. Where the matter has begun to move at the speed of light. And that matter was the earth’s atmosphere and its life-giving oxygen, the first line of defense to fall in a wholesale planetary destruction. Kenny felt the wind freshen to near hurricane force as the sky darkened to pitch black. The stars popped out as the atmosphere was siphoned away, unable to scatter the blue light of the as yet untouched sun.

  Without oxygen, the uncountable fires that raged all around the planet smoldered and died, some from lack of oxygen, others from the wind that now blasted across the scorched earth at a thousand miles per hour as it streamed towards the black hole.

  The friction from the churning winds, sudden negative air pressure, and the gravity from the black hole boiled the earth’s oceans, though there was by that time no-one and nothing left alive to see it.

  The earth’s thin blanket of topsoil was yanked away in the blink of an eye, then the rocky crust began to crack and flake, fueling the gravity of the black hole to even greater destruction. The bedrock stripped away, then the molten magma, and finally the iron core vaporized and was no more.

  The entire mass of the earth, everything living and dead on the planet was whirled and crushed to near light speed towards the singularity; the point at the center of the black hole where time and space were not virtually indistinguishable, but absolutely indistinguishable. All possible times and all possible places were now. All possible pasts and futures were imprinted on a single, infinitesimal point less than the breadth of an atom but with the weight of a million galaxies, and burning with the heat and energy of a trillion suns. And all the hopes, dreams, laughter and pain of six billion souls swirled down into that universe-crushing point and were no more….