Honey Grove, Texas, United States
July 18th | 7:51 PM | 27 degrees

Roof duty, as Ryan had expected, sucked.

The metal barrel of crackling firewood did little to push back against the cold that had rapidly descended over town, the temperature dropping to 27 degrees as the unseen blizzard approached. The sky was once again a black and starless void that pressed down on the rooftops and filled him with dread, crushing him down against the world by the overwhelming weight of nothingness, the presence of an empty darkness that was both infinitely far off and right in front of his face at the same time. Carlos’s equipment showed another strong drop in pressure that warned of the approaching system, the wind speed cups spinning into a single blur from a passing gust before falling still again. 

That was almost worse than the dark, those sudden blasts of cold wind that whipped away any warmth the fire might have provided and left nothing but the faintest memory of heat in its wake.

He and Carlos had both bundled up in jackets and gloves before starting their shift, but neither had thought to look for a scarf to protect their faces. They sniffled and wiped at their noses and stood huddled near the barrel, teeth chattering and voices jittery with the shivers that seized through their bodies.

“This sucks,” Carlos grumbled, jamming his hands into his coat pockets.

“I thought you meteorologists lived for this kind of thing,” Ryan said. “You know, first to run out into a hurricane and show everyone what it looks like, evacuation orders be damned.”

A quick snort of laughter. “You watch too much CNN. Those guys are actors, in it for the glory more than the research. Give me a cramped room full of computer monitors and data readouts and I’m the happiest weather man alive.”

“Except when you chase tornadoes,” Ryan pointed out.

Carlos frowned. “It’s not like I go stand in the middle of one. I keep a safe distance and film it, take pictures, record the data. Nerd stuff. I’m usually not in any danger. And I’m definitely not worrying about frostbite.” He turned from the wind and groaned. “I wasn’t made for blizzards.”

Ryan laughed, but he understood. Having lived in southern Florida his entire life, winters had felt more like late spring compared to other places in the country. This balmy acclimation, combined with the abrupt transition from 110 degrees only a week ago, made the cold wind feel that much colder.

“On the plus side,” he said, checking his watch, “we only have two more hours until shift change.”

“It’s only been one hour?”

“Fifty-three minutes, technically.”

Carlos sighed and reached for his thermos to refill their cups. “New rule: no more time updates.”

Ryan held the fresh coffee close to his face and breathed the pungent steam into his lungs, not caring that whoever brewed it had used way too much coffee grounds. It was warm and it was caffeinated, so who was he to complain? 

He looked westward, where he could just make out the lights of the Mobil glowing in the dark. Terri and the others were finishing up the defenses about now, going by what he’d overheard on the walkie, but they would be spending the next few hours keeping watch at the gas station. Which almost sounded worse than roof duty. At least when the roof watch changed shifts they wouldn’t have to walk a mile back through the cold.

“How long do you think this will last?” Carlos asked after a few moments. “The Sun, I mean.”

Ryan sipped his coffee. “Honestly, I’ve been trying not to think about it.”

“It can’t stay like this forever, though, right? Stars don’t just disappear out of the sky. We’d have seen it happen before if that were the case.”

“Maybe we just never saw it before,” Ryan suggested. “I don’t know much about space, but we’ve only been studying it for, what, a few hundred years? And we’ve only really started learning anything over the last few decades. Who knows? Maybe stars disappear all the time and we’ve not been looking long enough to notice.”

“Yeah, but how? How does something as big as a star vanish in just a few seconds? It doesn’t make sense. Where could it go? And why?”

He didn’t have an answer. These were questions better suited for Rivera, but he knew the last thing Carlos wanted to do was make her think about the Sun any more than she had to. Ryan had spent the first few nights after The Blink trying to think up some kind of rational explanation and all it had gotten him was a headache and an inability to fall asleep, so he stopped thinking about it. Or tried to, anyway.

“I’m–” Carlos hesitated. “I’m worried. I try to keep a brave face for Kit, I do, but the more I think about it the more I worry about what we’re going to do if this is permanent. Because if it is, she’s right, like she always is. Nothing will survive if it stays like this.”

“All we can do is deal with one problem at a time,” Ryan said, channeling an optimism he didn’t think was genuine. “We have to put out the fires around us before worrying about the forest.”

“I don’t think that’s enough,” Carlos said into his cup, then lowered it before he even took a sip. “I mean, where’s the government in all this? I know radios and phones are down, but you’d think we’d hear . . . I don’t know, something by now. Pamphlets dropped from planes or soldiers driving by in an army truck, anything that says, ‘Help is on the way.’ Hell, I’d settle for a ‘Sorry! You’re shit out of luck!’ at this point. Something to let us know if we even have a functioning government anymore.”

“What, like we had one before?” Ryan gestured vaguely into the darkness. “They’re probably too busy fighting over whether or not the Sun’s actually gone to come to an agreement over what to do about it.”

Carlos laughed at that. “You sound like Kit.”

“It’s the truth. Who knows, maybe they’ll come up with some kind of plan to find out what happened, but I don’t think even their best idea can help us in the long run.”

“The radio said they’ve got those warming centers open in Dallas. That’s probably the government.” Carlos said. “And the broadcast said they were open for anyone who needed them. There’s probably places like that all over the country.” 

“Maybe. But how many people do you think actually heard that broadcast? We wouldn’t have if you hadn’t got your radio working, and I’m willing to bet most people don’t own a shortwave radio. Then there’s the matter of resources, of keeping the shelters running when supplies start to run out.” He shook his head. “Either way it goes, I think we’re on our own.”

They braced as another frigid gust of wind tore across the rooftop and left them in cold silence. The brief optimism Ryan had felt was gone, snuffed out by his own words. Even if someone did figure out what happened, even if NASA or the ESA’s brightest minds knew exactly what caused the Blink, how could they do anything about it? The Sun was millions of miles away if it was still there at all. And if the rest of the world was getting on anything like Honey Grove, there was no hope for people coming together long enough to launch some kind of mission to turn the Sun back on. Assuming that was even a possibility.

So where did that leave humanity? At the mercy of chance? Little pockets of people huddled around fires in the dark, all of them waiting around as the snow piled up and the fires died down, waiting either for death or a sunrise that was only hypothetical? What else could they do? Death, extinction was coming and there wasn’t a single device in humanity’s arsenal of 21st Century technology that could stop it.

The End was officially here.

Ryan had tried his best to avoid dwelling on that thought ever since Rivera’s bleak prediction of the future had planted it in his mind, but it was an inevitability that could no longer be ignored. The world was ending. His parents would be dead in a matter of weeks, all his friends from college, everyone he had ever known would follow not long after. And hewould be among them, one more frozen face in a sea of nameless dead. Not dead warm in his bed surrounded by children and grandchildren, but a slow and unrelenting fade, cold and alone and in the dark.

Someone once said that you die twice, once when you stop breathing and again when someone says your name for the last time. A death of the body and a death of the memory. Everyone who ever lived and died on Earth was now waiting to die twice over, forgotten simply because there would be no one left to remember.

Ryan’s chest grew tight. How had it taken a whole week for reality to settle in? He thought not thinking about the future had helped him through those first days following the Blink, but now all those lurking thoughts he had ignored were coalescing, clawing their way to the surface and demanding his attention. They had been quietened by apathy but not eliminated–thoughts like that could never be eliminated with such a tactic, only hidden beneath a thin veil of willful ignorance. And now that veil was torn and he saw what struggled to escape, the shackled darkness spilling out into an even darker world.

Everything he hadn’t accomplished. Places he’d never been to. People he’d never spoken with. Stories he’d never written. Chances he never took. Moving to Texas was supposed to have been the start of all that, the first chapter of his own story after a long and unambitious prologue, but he’d only made it a single paragraph in and the book had run out of pages.

“I told her we’d see all the state parks,” Carlos said quietly, drawing Ryan out of his thoughts. “Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Denali, all of them.” He sniffed, maybe from the cold, maybe from a lifetime of regrets he also hadn’t realized he had until then. “There’s so much we didn’t get to do.”

“It’s not fair,” Ryan said, feeling childish as the words left him, but what else could he say? It wasn’t fair, not even close to fair.

Carlos finished his coffee. “The worst part is I can’t even tell her she’s wrong for being pessimistic. She knows the world’s dying, just like I know it is. I don’t–How are you supposed to give someone hope when you don’t know how to find it for them?” His voice grew louder, more frustrated. “What am I supposed to tell her if she says she doesn’t see the point in going on? What do I do if she–” The words caught in his throat, strangled, but Ryan didn’t know if Carlos had stopped them or if it was the other way around.

He stood there and said nothing, trying and failing to think of the right thing to say to make Carlos feel better, the way it always goes when you’re the only one in the room to give someone the advice they need to hear. But nothing came to his mind. All he could think about was the unfairness of it all, the rage he felt at being completely helpless to do anything to change what was coming. He should have felt sorrow for the world and all those who would die in the coming weeks, but he just felt anger.

The words came to him as if carried by the wind.

“Tell her to rage.”

Carlos glanced at him, his anger momentarily replaced with confusion. “What?”

Ryan summoned all the concentration the coffee could give him and recited the lines as best he could remember from one of his graduate classes. “Do not go gentle into that good night, / Old age should burn and rave at close of day; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

A moment passed, the wind taking the words back into the night like some kind of Muse that had other places to be. “She’ll like that.” Carlos said, his expression softer. “It’s one of her favorite movies,” 

Ryan blinked. “Movie?”

“Yeah, that’s from the sci-fi one with McConaughey, right?”

“No, I’m pretty sure that was from Dylan Thomas.”

“The singer?”

“The poet.”

Carlos frowned. “You sure?”

“I’ve got about twenty thousand in student loan debt I’m willing to bet on it.” Ryan froze, his eyes growing wide. “Oh my God.”

“What?”

“I’m not in debt anymore.”

A loud wheeze of laughter escaped from Carlos, the sound somehow making the fire seem a little warmer. “I guess there really is a bright side to everything.”

Ryan finished the rest of his coffee, wishing the hot liquid would burn away the feelings that still lingered inside him, feelings that the laughter had tamped down but not eradicated. He knew they were still there, waiting for a break in conversation or a moment of silence to start creeping back up like cockroaches waiting for the light to turn off.

 “OK, new rule,” he said, placing his empty cup by the thermos. “No more sad talk. It’s too damn cold for that.”

Carlos held his hands over the fire and nodded. “Good rule.”

The two of them stared silently over the quiet town and watched for something to happen.

Not far to the south, the first snowflakes began to fall.