Heat pushing at his back like a dozen fists; his surroundings of broken glass, tears in the concrete and the tarmac, and rubble from the ruined buildings lit by the rich red of the flames. All of it blazing like the sun at the end of the day—the sun the sole light left in the solar system.

He pressed the shard of glass against his wrist until it drew blood from a thin cut. Pressed harder. The blood dribbled through the grime on his skin; the pain hummed and he hummed with it, trying to find a beat or a rhythm in the sting. Another building fell down; its descent and the scattering masonry and splintering glass coughed up larger clouds of dust and smoke to go with the dirty fog spreading through the city. Through the country. He cringed at the din, but it was an instinctive reaction. The noise was ever-present: a world collapsing into broken pieces as flames and winds consumed the wreckage. And how long had it been? Three months? Four? He’d lost count of the days and the nights. In their place, he had this little moment of the heat and his thirst, the blood welling from his wrist, and the racket of a world turning inside out while the silence crawled across the universe.

“Sarah?” He said his wife’s name, the syllables sharp on his dry tongue. He had enough of his thinking mind left to know there was no way he’d heard her in the distance, shouting for him. He’d seen her body in what had been the living room; there with the bedroom and the roof on top of her and Gus and Fran. So, she wasn’t anywhere near him. Nor were his kids.

“Sarah?” He bellowed it and broke into a fit of coughing from the smoke. He spat until his mouth cleared and peered into the surrounding red. Even the shade was hot, and not solely from the flames belching out of ruined gas lines or wrecked buildings. The air baked; the sky cooked. He tried to generate spit, then staggered from the side of the car he’d been resting against. Debris littered the road and pavement. He stepped through it until he found a clear section and listened for anything beyond the fires and the wind while his eyes teared against the climbing temperature.

There it was, again. A dim shriek. His name.

He ran without thought, somehow finding even ground in the mess, jumping from chunks of the ruined structures, dodging holes in the ground, crushing glass until he reached a junction. Panting, wet with sweat and barely able to smell it under the smoke, he bent double and fought for breath. Abandoned vehicles met wrecks on all sides; traffic lights had snapped free from their supports. A few sparked half-heartedly while water bubbled from crushed pipes. He didn’t know this city, but then he hadn’t known most of the areas he’d run through recently on the hunt for food, water, or shelter. Or any chance of hiding from what was coming. The landmarks were mostly gone, although he could guess the remains of a massive block, obviously 1980s, was a shopping centre. Roads surrounded it, all choked and ruptured.

Another cry of his name; someone begging for help. Sarah begging for help.

“Where are you?”

He wiped the tacky blood from his wrist. At some point in the last few minutes, he’d dropped the glass and had no memory of doing so.

She isn’t here. She can’t be here.

He knew it. He was cursed to face this with his sanity holding firm instead of being lucky enough to believe his wife and children were still alive.

“Okay. Fine. It’s not her. Who is it, then?”

Someone out there in the burning and the ending. Someone who needed help.

“So, what? Everyone needs help.”

This is it, then? Walk away? Bleed and die? Burn with everyone else before it all falls apart?

He laughed for the first time in weeks. Falls apart? That was classic. It had already fallen apart. This was just . . .

“Noise.”

The noise of a world in its death throes, crying out against the silence in the universe. Crying one final time.

The scream came from all sides, high and desperate. His name born from the flames and the rubble. He bellowed nonsense, torn with frustration and helpless rage. In answer, others echoed his cry. Shadowy figures crept into the edges of his vision, each too indistinct for him to make out clearly. Human-shaped. Featureless. Some hunched; others seeming to possess too many arms. Half a dozen of them at first, then another three or four. They spread apart, moving without walking, passing over the mess on the pavements without touching it.

This was it. He’d lost his mind.

No, you haven’t. They’re real.

The calm voice inside told the truth. Which meant he had to run.

Sprinting, chest and throat tight, he went straight for the road with its cracks and pits. The shapes gave chase immediately, screeching like wounded birds. And in those alien voices, his name tried to break free. He sobbed as he ran, tasting blood and fire. His stomach was a fist ready to punch free from his body, and his mind was right behind it.

The shadows—whatever the hell they were—were right behind.

He slipped on rubble, went down to one knee, and pain turned his vision white. Ice enveloped his ankle, then turned to fire. Fingers made of fire.

He ran on, not sure how he’d risen, not wanting to look at his leg or know why his shin burned. The shadows howled; they were right beside him, closing in to his peripheral vision like darting clouds, and it was only then he realised he’d been crying Sarah’s name since the second he moved.

Fingers like knives came for his face. He jerked away, spinning, seconds from falling again. He saw a leering face; the mouth open in a snarl, and smelled something foul. It was a wild stink: ugly and violent and frightened. Something that didn’t know anything about control and would tear and smash because it knew nothing else.

The nearest of the shadows formed a human face for a moment. A man wrapped in rags, his face smeared with red, his teeth like daggers. They were all men, not shadows; all human, not monsters. Men with knives and clubs.

He tried to roar at them, couldn’t find his breath, and settled for bearing down on one of the few buildings that stood relatively whole. A squat structure with wide windows forming the front. He aimed straight for it, aware they’d see and follow, but knowing he had no choice. He moved on desperation, not strength, powered by the cry of his name from inside the building.

Saving his remaining breath to keep him moving, he veered to the right sharply, mounted the pavement, and jumped over exposed pipes. He came down hard, jarring his legs and gut, then reached a pathway between his destination and the neighbouring structure. Glass from broken windows covered the ground; it snapped below his shoes and the men right at his back swung their knives. He heard the hiss, breathed the reek of the men, and smacked into a set of double doors.

They opened, spilling him to the dirty carpet. Rolling over, weeping and trying to shout for his family, he saw nothing but the air tinged red pushing through the doors.

His name, a hurting sob from somewhere nearby. His ankle and lower leg burning.

He managed to stand and looked down. His trousers and skin were shredded as if by claws.

Limping, bleeding, and still wishing he was insane, he followed the cry of his name.

*     *     *
The building was a library, he realised within a few moments. Not that there were many shelving units or books left. As with almost everywhere else, it had been ransacked; anything useful stolen to burn or be made into a weapon. He shoved more doors wide and fell against them. His leg wept blood; his ankle had been dipped into the flames outside.

“Sarah, where are you?”

She hadn’t called for him in the last few minutes; the only sounds had come from another building collapsing with an echoing, rolling thud, and there behind those echoes, the chatters and shrieks of the shadows.

They were still out there. They might not have followed him inside, but they remained close with their teeth and their claws.

“Keep going,” he told himself and limped into the main area of the library. Furniture was piled into kindling; rags could have been clothing or discarded boots, and one of the walls had come down near the stairs, effectively blocking them with a high mound of rubble. The shelves were tossed in all directions along with dozens of shredded books. He took careful steps through the wreckage, flinched when a window broke somewhere, and tried to call for Sarah and the kids without raising his voice. Resting against one of the supporting pillars, he checked his ankle again and knew running out of here wasn’t happening. How the hell he was still upright, he had no idea.

Clawed. It clawed me.

But he couldn’t think of that now. Couldn’t handle the shadow men—not when Sarah was here, somewhere.

She isn’t. You’re lying to yourself.

Maybe. Maybe not. Anything was possible.

Grunting, he pushed away from the post and saw her.

She lay on a spongy sofa, the material red and wet; her clothes as torn as his leg, and her face white like exposed bone.

Weeping, he lumbered towards her as she opened her eyes, and he fell beside her as she screamed his name.

The shadows screeched in time with the sudden punch of another explosion that jetted heat and light through the library. He pushed the sounds along with everything else to some far corner of his mind and tried to focus on Sarah’s face.

She was not Sarah.

He held her hand, cold and hard. A girl, maybe yet to see thirteen. Sarah, here for a few seconds, now a kid he didn’t know.

Her eyes rolled. Blood trickled from unseen wounds beneath her matted hair. The red dribbled into one eye; she closed it and tried to focus on him.

“Don’t speak. I’ll get you out of here.” He knew he was lying to himself as much as he was to the girl. The shadows were still around the building, still howling. Beyond them, the fires blazed.

Sarah? Where are you?

The girl’s single open eye blazed. The red of the blood welling from the cut in his wrist; the red of the world as it cooked in its final days and nights.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

As she had changed from his dead wife to a dying child, she changed again. He saw mountains, the oceans, deserts, and frozen wastelands—every landscape in his eyes at once. Jutting cliff edges of ancient rock, massive as they hung thousands of feet over crevasses, were there with the countless square miles of deep seas, waves and currents hiding their secrets in the pitch-black depths. And rock and water married to brown and yellow dunes, arid sheets from horizon to horizon cooking in hellish temperatures that lived with and inside blinding white; mountains and flat fields of ice forever cold and the sun turned off as it hung over the white. No warmth there; nothing but nothing.

Everything all at once inside his eyes. The world’s seas and lands and air a carpet he hung over, endless vision he was forced to absorb.

He gagged, eyes shut as tightly as possible. Her icy hand remained in his, fingers linked like they were the same bone. The shadows wailed for him, mad laughter flowing under the cries. Insanity was here, but not inside. It was outside, searching for a way through. A way in.

He croaked the words as she did the same; the saying, the prayer, the lament known throughout countries and nations for months.

“The stars have stopped singing.”

The phrase heard again and again since the first reports from the scientists who clearly had no idea what was happening; the term whispered, sprayed on walls, turned into a catch-all explanation even if almost nobody truly understood what it meant or could envisage the endless miles of space falling silent.

The chasms of seeming nothingness between planets, the midnight void of the universe, the interstellar gases on their never-ending journey through the galaxy, their passage creating ripples and waves in that void to be picked up by satellites and listening intelligences becoming nothing.

Solar winds easing down to silence.

Cosmic background radiation, existing for billions of years, soundless now.

Total environmental collapse on the solar system’s planets, most lost to NASA because of distance but the effects recorded weeks and months later.

The rotation of the gas giants somehow, impossibly, slowing to a final stop.

Venus’s mass shrinking, its light in the evening sky fading to a dot as the planet turned in on itself, and the scientists shrieked that it was impossible while it continued.

The red of Mars blackening as it ruptured from the inside out.

The Sun still burning; the Sun beginning to expand billions of years ahead of the forecasts.

The stars stopped singing and the universe now dying.

He knew it all even if he made no attempt to understand it. Having any idea what the faces meant hadn’t seemed important when NASA and professors and physicists filled the web and the news to report what even they didn’t understand.

The stars had stopped singing.

“Please.” He wept beside the girl and told himself when he refocused on her, she would be Sarah, again, and Gus and Fran would be nearby; his family whole and unbloodied. The world whole, again.

The tall windows at the front of the building caved in; the high-pitched jangle of the snapping glass stabbed his ears and he cried out. It made no sense for the shadows to break in when they could easily follow through the same doors he’d used, but what did things like that care about sense? They cared about his terror, hot and sour on his dry tongue; they cared about their last moments being as much of a ruin as the rest of the world.

“Come on. Come with me.” He managed to slide his arms below her narrow back; heat pulsed from her, and he was horribly aware of her exposed skin through her torn clothing. There was no sign of men in the library. They’d done when they’d done and left her here to bleed and die.

Ankle soaked, muscles straining, he pulled. The girl remained on the sofa as if she was part of it. Outside the ground floor, chittering and noise that perhaps wanted to be giggling skidded across the floors and over the mess. They were closer.

“Come on. Please.”

Her open eye rolled and she spoke inside his head.

Stay with me. I don’t want to die alone.

And here it was. Sarah, again. Crushed and bleeding under the rubble of the upper floor and the ceiling.

I don’t want to die alone.

But she had. Everyone did. Here, again. Here with his dying wife, not a child he didn’t know. Not. Not. Fucking not.

You know me.

No. He knew nothing.

You know me.

He choked on tears and dragged his voice out of his gut. “Shut up. Just shut up and come with me. We can go together, okay? But you have to try to get up.”

The shadows were in the library, creeping over the destroyed shelves and furniture, picking their way through the ashes and the glass. Taking their sweet time because they could. Claws and teeth ready. The crunch of shattered glass somehow as loud as the dull thud of the road right outside bulking, breaking open, then a crunch he felt in his chest as one more building caved in on itself.

I am so hot. I am burning.

Not yet, but he would.

Hold my hand.

He found her fingers. The vistas of the planet were open for him, again: deserts and mountains; snow and tundra; oceans and cities. All here for him because she was Earth and she was here: Earth open to him and all he had to do was hold her hand as she went out into the dark.

“What was the point? Why call for me?” he whispered.

“I didn’t want to die alone.”

And there it was. A simple wish as the stars stopped singing. She didn’t want to go into that black alone.

But it wasn’t enough. It could not be enough.

The shadows were right at his back, their claws as cold as the girl’s fingers, the tips on his skin while their laughter was frozen in time. He tried to speak and couldn’t move his tongue. Didn’t have enough spit or strength.

As he hadn’t possessed the strength to shift the tons of rubble pinning his wife into her grave.

NO.

He pulled away from her, gagging, barely able to breathe. Pushing against the shadows with their claws was like pushing against smoke. Dirty air flooded his nose and his eyes but didn’t obscure her face as she turned his way and reached for him.

In place of the dying child or his wife, she was a rotting lump of muck and broken bone, smeared with red and brown. Her mouth hung open much too wide, revealing stumps for teeth and her tongue. Insects squirmed down there in the dark; she choked on them while the streets and the cities choked on smoke. Red broke through the muck in his vision; the red of spreading flames, and he realised the shadows had brought the fires with them, ushering in the heat through the wrecked windows. The shadows with their claws at his throat, ready to open him to the world so they could go into the dark together but always apart.

Her single open eye was a white whole in the filth and the decay, beseeching him to take her hand.

As the pain began and the heat from his open throat merged with the fires to turn the library into the sun, as the shadows chittered and laughed, as the girl continued to try to reach for him, he wished the stars were still singing.