The eye of the lion

One hour later, just past Puy de la Poche, we arrived at the place Aeesha had predicted: A rural road crossing the highway, next to a large oak tree with its trunk painted white.

We took the country road for about ten minutes and arrived at a clearing in a wood on a small hill. A farm-house rose silently in the middle of the clearing. It boasted a magnificent view.

Mark parked the RV and we all got out. There was not a soul to be seen. The lights of the farm-house were out. Neither could we see or hear any animals. The place seemed deserted.

We made our way towards the house and knocked on the door. Nobody answered or opened it. Aeesha had said that the house would be abandoned, and so it was, but we weren’t about to go into someone’s house just like that, even though we trusted the girl’s premonitions - well, almost all of us. It just didn’t seem right.

Finally, after confirming that the place was empty, we decided to go in. To our surprise, the front door was open.

We turned on the lights and looked around us. Everything seemed to indicate that the place had been empty for a couple of weeks. We looked at Aeesha, making her feel uncomfortable again.

“Don’t look at me,” she replied. “I don’t know if these people are going to come back or not.”

Minutes later we unloaded the provisions from the RV and brought them into the farmhouse. I still couldn’t be of much help, but I pretended to examine the condition of the house leaning on my stick, so as not to look like a slacker. In one of his trips inside, Mark approached me.

“What do we do now, sir?” he asked, assessing the state of the ceiling. “How long will we be here?”

“I don’t know, son. Maybe several months or more. The owners of this place aren’t coming back.”

“How do you know?” inquired Mark.

“Nobody leaves their house for several weeks, leaving everything inside and the front door unlocked. These people abandoned the house in a hurry. They’re not going to come back.”

Mark looked at me and nodded.

“But why would they leave?”

I shook my head. The truth is that I had no idea.

We went towards the door when we heard them. Jessica was shouting something to the girls, sounding very agitated. We rushed out and saw her pointing towards the sky. We looked up.

Silently, amid the stars, several points of light were moving, leaving faint white streaks in their wake.

As we stared at them, my mind dismissed the idea of UFOs, because to tell the truth I didn’t believe in extra-terrestrial hypotheses, and they were too fast to be high-flying airplanes. Neither did they shine like meteorites.

The answer came to us, silent and terrifying, in the form of a glare that made us turn and look towards the north.

Far beyond the valley, into the night, emerging with terrible majesty, illuminating the night with the brilliance of a thousand suns, rose a furious cloud of atomic smoke. It grew slowly and monstrously, bleeding into the darkness, with the power of God himself, almost proud of its total, uncontrollable ability to kill. The ground started to shake beneath our feet while all we could do, terrified and paralyzed by a blood-chilling panic, was watch the spectacle stupidly and scream without even being able to run, because that would’ve been impossible: The monster demanded all of our attention as it slaughtered, and to serve as a reminder a shock-wave came,

incredibly strong and inevitable, lashing everything like the charge of an angry elephant, flinging us down, whipping us like the hot, furious hand of a giant, shaking the whole farm-house to its foundations with a hot hurricane-force wind from the fires of hell.

Other hazy luminous forms, much farther off, started to emerge in the darkness of the night. Some to the north and others much more distant to the east.

Some of us kneeling on the ground and others standing shakily, we found ourselves in first-class seats in the royal box, viewing the spectacle of the end of the world, Armageddon, the Apocalypse unleashed from the deepest corner of the human mind, bellowing with joy at its newfound freedom, as demonstrated by its furious fiery display and deafening voice.

And we all wept bitter and painful tears as we realized that the ultimate stupidity had been committed. As we understood with our weakened minds that our race had been capable of the absurdest auto-immolation, mass-suicide.

We wept shamelessly as we realized that there would be no more beautiful days on the earth. No more operas, no more afternoon baseball. No more barbecues with friends, no more olympic games, no more shopping-days with the family. No more Christmases, no more school-mornings. No more kisses in the

drive-through, no more Nobel prizes. No more, ever again.

Mark raised his hands to his face. He screamed and ran randomly into the woods. No-one tried to stop him. We were all in shock.

Cole, on his knees, was watching the terrible spectacle, sobbing and saying over and over again: “They’ve done it, the bastards, they’ve done it...”

Marina and Aeesha were weeping with their arms around each other, sitting on the ground. Watching terrified as that night’s film was played: “The end of the stupid human race.”

I had stood up again and was walking aimlessly, rubbing my hair and murmuring phrases I never could remember, lost in total despair. I cried like a child, they told me, but I remember nothing more than being painfully certain that I was losing my mind.

We were there for hours, shattered, looking on in horror until the clouds of smoke slowly disappeared into the night. We went inside when the first specks of grey ash started to fall from the sky.

A part of us died that night, and the wounds in our souls would never completely heal.