Exit Music (For A Planet)

Dan Eady

Inhale.

With every passing day he knew it was coming; when, exactly, was still unclear.

He’d spent years leading a team of nineteen scientists from various fields, and now it had all come to this.

Winds and fire would sweep across the land and everything in their path would be gone; removed from existence. It wouldn’t be instant either, it would be slow and likely painful – for anything with a nervous system.

Exhale.

He was packing the last of his belongings into a metallic case. It would be shipped away and loaded into some grand underground vault, awaiting its reunification with him. When that eventually happened, such personal belongings, trinkets and memories might be utterly useless to him, or they might guide him through a winter of unknown lengths.

The sun was streaming through the windows that ran along the side of the house with the mountain view, an expanse of sharp points of beauty and danger. As he moved about the sparse room, a trail of dust motes spiralled in his wake. He thumbed the hangnail on his right index finger. The repetitive pain was at least something. Otherwise numbness had set in.

He closed the heavy wooden door for potentially the last time. He had moved here with his wife and two children, he remembered opening it for the first time and seeing the joy on the twins’ faces. They, like many others in the summer of 2047, had been taken by the first plague. His hilltop cabin now stood empty and alone. The gravel drive that led up to it shimmered white in sunlight. 

He loaded the case into the boot of his truck and took a last look; most of his life’s work had taken place there, in solitude – for the last decade – yet when he was presented with a future in solitude it sent glassy shards of fear up his spine.

The pod he had been assigned could sustain him for at least three years, in which time the surface would potentially be habitable again. He would drive to the base, hand over what was essentially his entire life, and then be shot into space. From there, he would have a front row seat to the apocalypse. 

He drove down the hill, away from the house. The gravel crackling and crunching beneath his truck, the only sound. Tears warmed his cheeks, but what was the point in tears in any forgone situation? 

He turned onto the sealed road, and soon the mountains and his cabin were but a memory moving away in silence. 

Silver touched the horizon. It was getting closer than what he had calculated. His mind went briefly to: Maybe if it happens now and I am vapourised with it – would that be such a problem? They wanted him safe, they wanted his mind – to be used for repopulation, but only when they saw fit.

Night had broken over the mountains when he cleared security at the base. He turned his vehicle and all that remained of his life over to some youthful-looking military police officers. Then he was transported to the launch centre.

Moving across great runways, lights flashed and pulsed on the launch towers, which stood hundreds of metres high. Each tower could jettison up to twenty pods in a sequence. In the underground bunker at the base, a monitoring crew would remain. He wondered who the nineteen other ‘lucky’ scientists were that would be propelled into the atmosphere, so as not to be immolated along with those deemed unworthy. This thought made him utterly nauseous. 

They made their final approach to Tower 313, which he only noted because of his fascination with the famous Zapruder film. 

He was under no confusion about the complex problem he had helped discover. It would appear soon. He knew what to expect; he had modelled it countless thousands of times. Billions didn’t know what he knew, and they would only have mere hours to find out.

He was strapped in and plugged in – every vital sign his body could emanate or produce would be monitored and controlled for some years – assuming there was something or someone running the systems on the surface. A technician ran him through the limited navigational controls he had – a simple guidance lever that could pivot and tilt the pod. Propulsion and gravity (or lack thereof) did the rest. 

Inhale.

The countdown commenced, and he remembered the David Bowie song his mother loved. His wife had also loved it, their two children were sadly not as enthusiastic about it, but they were all now stardust, like the singer.

Exhale.

Inhale.

Strapped into the shaking pod he was not stardust, but he was also only of this earth for a few more seconds.

Exhale.

As he rose through the atmosphere into darkness, below him the blue green sphere became red with fire, then black, as it spread across the planet’s surface. Its movement was not indiscriminate; as he had calculated, it didn’t simply destroy everything immediately. It hunted. It sought out its prey. All of the calculations he had done on this man-made terror; this cleansing; this unquenchable fire, had been correct. Eventually it could return and swallow what it didn’t take first. What survived could potentially flourish in what little sun would remain, but most of the surface would be under the cover of the ash cloud. 

The control was gone. With what little control of the pod he had, he grasped for the lever and turned away from the burning planet that was once his home, the home he had deliberately seen to its end. 

Before him was the black, endless, sprawling dark. An infinite stardust-covered expanse.

He let the stars inhale him.

—

Dan Eady is 46 years old and has been making up stories for at least 45 of these. Dan loves writing all types of genre fiction, with a particular bent for horror/thriller and crime fiction. Dan lives in a rural area of New Zealand and takes inspiration from the natural world around him, often using natural themes within his writing. Most recently his body horror story “Like, Share & Subgenerate” was published in the flash fiction anthology Flash of the Dead; Requiem by Wicked Shadow Press. This was followed by his short crime/horror story “Pica” appearing in the first anthology issue of The Dark Corner magazine. He also had a short story published in a horror anthology called Campfire Tales from Beware The Moon publishing; these stories were also performed live as part of the annual Featherston Booktown Festival in Featherston, New Zealand.

Featured image by NASA, via Unsplash, c. 2021.