I'm pretty sure it was a Sunday... or maybe a Saturday.

Whatever, what did in matter in the scheme of things?

A couple days after New Year's Eve it was, anyway.

I was only sixteen when it happened... my parents woke me up. That is, my dad barged into my room, nearly breaking the door down with his entrance, alarms blaring in the distance. It was a night after all so I was sleeping, well, I wasn't sleeping anymore after that. The outside didn't seem out of the ordinary with the capital's light pollution so high that the sky was not a bit different than any other night's sky. Light-grey, not even a star on it, because it was yet before the blackout. Our neighbourhood, as always, was pretty silent and calm by itself, at that moment that is, before all hell broke loose...

I barely remember rushing by the TV, still in pyjamas, because there was no time to even change. On the TV, three people stood at attention, their fists on their chests in a salute, singing the Union's anthem and tears welling in their eyes. A moment later the signal cut off to static before a warning by the Union itself was displayed with a loud ping. I asked my parents over and over what was happening, but they said that everything would be fine and that it's nothing serious. Suffice it to say, I didn't believe them, but when I tried to see what was happening on my holopad which I snatched on our way out, my mum ripped it straight from my hands.

In horrified silence, my parents pushed me into our car, which we had, even though it didn't get much use with how hard it was to traverse the city in a car. Because of the rain outside my clothes were all wet, but with how terrified I was, it didn't matter. I again asked my parents repeatedly what was happening, but they just said that everything was fine, which made me feel even worse. My dad tried to turn the radio on, but there was just static, he checked his holopad, but there was no signal. He drove out of the drive way and onto the road which slowly filled up with cars, heading out of the city and south.

My parents handed me my holopad back, seeing that there was no internet. We drove for a minute or two as the gridlock slowly accumulated itself before all lights in the city gave out, and didn't come back on, that is for the time that we were in the city, but the capital was lost not a long time later either way. We drove for hours, the chargers in the highway barely holding up under the massive load with everyone escaping. Because it had power from multiple places along the whole continent it was mostly untouched by the blackout.

We stopped two times, at the end, because at the start, there was too many people to stop for more than a bathroom break, so we didn't eat for hours and hours at a time. The first stop felt like it was the best thing that happened ever. I wolfed down a stale bread sandwich, the employees of the highway-side shop left long before we got there. After five days of constant travel, the power grid throughout the continent gave out at last, we only had another day or so of charge.

Fortunately, with the power grid going down, an emergency radio station came on, phasing from static, middle of a sentence, and we finally got any kind of actual information on what was happening. My heart stopped as information about evacuation routes, destroyed roads, lost cities were broadcast. A good part of the northern hemisphere was lost, with only half of the massive capital surviving just long enough for people to evacuate and even that information was iffy, as we had no satellite service of any kind. Then the broadcast repeat and I actually got to know what happened.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

The Tyraxi, a race essentially governed by a warlord empress, we've been at war with them for as long as I could remember. Pure evil, that race was. When you stood before one, you couldn't be sure if it wouldn't bite your head off, I would know, when we still lived on Proxima, one bit me- no he didn't...

Anyways... they launched Earth, the last oasis of human life, our last planet, into a black hole seemingly over night, almost twenty million Tyraxi died only to condemn us, that's how evil they were.

In a last ditch effort, the Union found some way to get us out, but only way to do even that was to escape from the other side, the far south, Antarctica. The barren continent, made of glacier, the coldest ever, but soon everywhere would be like that, apparently. We couldn't use planes, because of the effects of a being shoved into a black hole, we needed to use boats, we just needed to get to the evacuation point and then everything would be fine.

After our car's battery run out, not only ours, because many cars were stopping along the highway until it was empty. We left our car, and into the whirling winds which were picking up by the hour. I ate a couple snacks that we managed to snatch from various stores, I was hungry, very much so. For a moment I thought that this was the end, that there was nothing else we could do, if only we had taken a spare battery or two... maybe we could've gotten to the evacuation point in time, or at least closed the last kilometres on foot.

I looked at the sky, it was the first time in my entire life I actually saw stars... not in a ship that is. I would've never thought that the sky should've been dark. But those stars weren't ours, they were foreign, unfamiliar, alien and a whole half of the sky was eaten up by darkness chilling to the bone. Around the dark half, a glowing ring floated, the remains, ruins of the Earth-Ring, burning, the only real source of light. Around in the centre between the two, Luna, the moon floated, but not how I remembered it... It was cracked in many many pieces, slowly heading in the direction of the black hole. For a moment I thought that there was a shadow between it and the black hole, but something else had taken my attention.

As the thought of damnation finally started to set in, on the horizon, far far far away from us, from the direction we drove in, from the direction of salvation, dozens of little lights tracked in our direction. Flickering, getting bigger and bigger, closer and closer. I stopped crying, then started again, but they weren't tears of sadness, but of joy.

They were buses! A whole lot of them! Powered by good old gasoline, because we didn't have power after all. They powered through the length of the highway, breaking the speed limit two times over before parking in place before us. With a screech of the tires and a swoosh of the brakes, a bus stopped nearly right in front of the right side of our car, the suspension jumped a bit with the force of the stop. The doors opened swiftly and deep voices shouting out orders broke the silence. Union soldiers helped us into the old buses.

With how quick the whole thing went, everyone wanting get out of there as soon as possible our bus started on its way after only minutes. Even if there were some altercations with the soldiers. Some people were so stupid to want to take their luggage in an end-of-the-world scenario, it was nuts. But our bus, along with many other started on its way and relief washed over anyone as hope resurfaced that maybe we will get through this and everything would be fine. It certainly wouldn't be normal, hell, we weren't even sure what we will do with ourselves after we leave Earth, every colony was gone, Proxima maybe survived, but they already have been dead-silent for days when we left.

I decided against thinking about it then, I took my holopad and turned one of the shows I downloaded on and got my headphones on. I was just trying to get my mind off of this, we were safe after all, we were with the Union military, nothing could harm us with them, right?

Thankfully my holopad still had a lot of charge, it had a couple more days worth of charge, and at some point it should be possible for me to charge it so I didn't think about it. Especially as I slowly faded into sleep in that bus, it was the first time in a lot of time that I actually had a good night's sleep.