The face on the screen flickered, distorted by waves of statics. It was his mother's face, she looked brave, but that facade of motherly smile, hiding the pain for her son, was slowly crumbling.
"Sorry, baby," she whispered, her voice cracking, the transmission struggling against the storm of dying signals.
"We couldn't make it out in time." The lie was a kindness, a final, gentle fiction.
Tears traced clean paths through the grime on her cheeks. The truth was there had been nowhere left to run.
Don't smile, Mom, the boy thought, his own face remained expressionless, he could no longer feel his face. Please, don't smile. It hurts more than the screaming.
Beside her, a man's arm around her shoulders, offering a comfort he no longer possessed. He pulled her closer as she clutched his hand, her knuckles white.
He looked at the screen, at his son, and a grieving smile twisted his lips.
"Son, it looks like this is it." His voice was heavy, thick with the dust of a collapsing world and the weight of broken promises.
"We told you so many stories about the future. I'm sorry we only gave you this."
He looked at his little boy, who looked like a living ghost. His hands, pale and fragile. His hair, his eyes, every essence of him was the color of snow, Hair like spun snow, eyes the color of a frozen sky, a body so fragile it seemed a harsh word could break.
He was a miracle.
A survivor of radiation and a Nuclear blast.
A boy who could walk through fallout and not fall, the only human known to have endured the initial waves of hard radiation without his cells collapsing into cancerous growth.
But survival had come at a cost, he was a living vessel of the poison that had been killing the world around him, his very presence a lethal poison full of radioactive decay.
"We can't fulfill the promise," His father said in a reminiscing tone.
A promise. The word echoed in the silent chamber of his mind. You promised we'd see the ocean. You promised I would grow old.
The thoughts were like a broken record, kept repeating, a part of him that was already gone when the initial nuclear bomb fell near him.
"I'm sorry," his father continued, "I promised you a long life… It seems none of us will even see our hair turn grey."
His wife buried her face in his shoulder, her body shaking with sobs that the microphone mercifully distorted into static.
The boy didn't move. He couldn't conjure an expression, couldn't force his numb lips to form the words clawing their way up his throat.
The only proof of the storm inside him was the silent stream of tears that poured from his snow-white eyes, tracing hot paths down his cold skin.
His heart, a leaden weight in his chest, ached with intense emotion that threatened to crush him. He hugged the two stuffed toys tighter—a worn bear from his mother, a patched-up rabbit from his father. Their last gifts. His only anchors in the storm.
"Baby," his mother's voice returned, suddenly clear and bright, a final burst of signal before the end.
"We love you. Never forget that." She looked right at him, her eyes finding him across the screen, apart from the distance between them.
"Being your parents… it was the only thing that ever made sense. Thank you for everything you endured for us… for everyone."
"Mommy… Daddy, I—" His own small, pale hand reached out, his fingers brushing against the cold, unfeeling glass of the screen.
He never finished.
The world behind his parents vanished in a silent, blinding flash of white.
The image pixelated, tore, and then dissolved. For a single, horrifying frame, he saw their bodies not as people, but as silhouettes against a sun being born on Earth.
Then, they were gone. Pulverized into atoms.
Behind where they stood, a monstrous mushroom cloud, a tombstone for a city, clawed its way into the sky.
The connection was cut. The screen went black. The hiss of static was the only reply.
"Ahhhhhhh…" A scream, raw and animalistic, tore from the boy's throat, echoing in the sterile observation room. It was the sound of a soul being ripped in two.
This was the end. Humanity had lost.
And he was not alone in his vigil.
Fifty other screens flickered around him, a mosaic of global annihilation.
He watched Paris's iconic tower melt like a candle.
He saw the waves of fire wash over the coast of Japan, swallowing cities whole. He saw screens go black, one by one, each a silent testament to millions of lives each seconds turning to bloody mush and superheated ash.
World War III. It had no winner, only a final, spiteful act of mutual annihilation. The fire had begun with a forgotten spark—a border dispute, a political insult, a lie that was easier to believe than the truth.
Fuel was added, drop by petty drop, until the world's leaders, blinded by pride and fear, found themselves standing in an inferno of their own making.
By the time anyone realized the true cost, the blaze was unstoppable.
They had turned their advanced science not toward the stars, but inward, perfecting the art of their own extinction.
As he watches the screens. He thought, They did it. The Avengers... they kept their promise.
These so-called Avengers, they were not the heroes from the comic books he'd read as a child.
These were not saviors.
They were the bereaved. The husbands, wives, parents, and children who had lost everything in the early days of the war.
They were the ghosts at the feast of destruction.
They gathered in the shadows, united by a singular purpose of Destruction. If they had to suffer, then the world would share their pain.
They weren't terrorists seeking a political goal.
They were judges, juries, and executioners delivering a final, absolute sentence.
They had found the launch codes, the keys to the world's basement arsenals, and they had turned them all.
They would ensure there were no victors, no one left to write the history of this meaningless war.
Only silence.
The screens confirmed their success.
Thousands of nuclear warheads streaked across the sky, a final, deadly meteor shower.
[ERROR]
[DANGER]
[DANGER]
[TERMINAL EVENT IMMINENT]
The red alerts flashed in unison, bathing the room in a bloody light.
A new screen activated, showing a view from a sky-facing camera.
The dark clouds were pierced by descending lights, hundreds of them, all converging on this last, isolated sanctuary.
His eyes drifted to the window on his right. Through the reinforced glass, he saw the ruins of the facility around him, a testament to earlier, less successful attacks.
And beyond, he saw the streaks of judgment heading for him.
One of them, brighter than the rest, was falling directly toward his window.
So, this is it. The thought was surprisingly calm. I get to see you soon.
BOOOOOOOOM.
The sound was a physical blow.
A crack, like a bolt of lightning, shot across the glass wall in front of him.
The world outside was a maelstrom of fire and pressure. More missiles were impacting, some intercepted by the failing defense grid, but their blast radiuses overlapped, a Venn diagram of obliteration.
These were the planet's best weapons, each one designed to end a nation, and they had all been sent here, to erase the boy who was humanity's last, strange miracle.
He closed his eyes, clutching the stuffed animals to his chest. He could feel the heat seeping through the walls, the very air vibrating with imminent death.
"Farewell, Mommy and Daddy," he muttered, his voice a faint whisper in the roaring chaos. "Thank you for the stories. I love you both."
As the final warhead struck, a wave of incandescent heat slammed into the tower. The boy, the room, and all the broken promises within it were not burned, but simply erased, turned instantly to ash in a silent, all-consuming light.
×××××
Author note: I don't want to go into full details of his past life or the world. I just wanted to start something with a blast, and got the idea of the end of the world.
Please don't mind too much the details.