The following morning, the steel factory explodes. Apparently, the scorching weather had built up so much pressure in the engines that it all finally combusted.

  I see it from my window; a giant fireball erupting from the facility, as if a nuclear bomb has been dropped. The ground shakes, and all my windows shatter. The houses closer to the explosion disintegrate immediately. Those further away, like my house, just burst into flames.

  The fire quickly spreads. By the end of the day, it has engulfed ten square miles of neighborhoods and woodlands. The smoke blocks out the sun. It can be seen from space.

  I watch from my window. All of the neighbors’ houses collapse from the fire. I can hear flames crackling, wood splitting, glass breaking.

  And screaming. So much screaming. From kids, mostly.

  A little girl, consumed by flames, sprints down the street while flailing her arms and shrieking like an animal. A man— her dad, maybe— stumbles after her. He looks really dazed.

  A hoard of refugees soon stampede in the same direction. There are dozens of them. Maybe even a hundred. Some of them are on fire, like the girl. By running, maybe they can escape this Hell on Earth. But it has become all-encompassing, all consuming. That’s why I don’t bother leaving the house.

  Most of them collapse mid-flight, either from the heat, or the smoke. A trail of bodies lay in the middle of the street, fodder for the inferno.

  The disaster dominates the news. Estimated death tolls are announced daily.

  Thirty.

  Two-hundred and twenty.

  Three-hundred and fifty.

  Five-hundred.

  Nine hundred and seventy-five.

  Firefighters scramble to fight back. I watch the planes dunk river-water over the flames. But the record drought has barely given them anything to work with.

  Eventually, the planes stop coming.

  It's been almost a month. My house has been on fire the entire time. I don't want to leave, but mom's corpse has begun to make me nauseous.

  As I walk, I make sure not to touch the colossal walls of fire that surround me. Though I'm covered in sweat, I manage not to burn myself.

  I keep trying to search the horizon, but it's nothing but fire and smoke and charred buildings and mountains of blackened corpses. I start to wonder if nothing of the world is left.

  But that's not true. After several months, I manage to outwalk the fires. I stumble upon a refugee camp a couple miles from the beach. It's in the parking lot of a Walmart. There are hundreds of blue tents, each harboring a different family of refugees. I sit down beside one of them, and see a baby lying on the ground, crying. Where are its parents?

  Soldiers carrying assault rifles are handing out water bottles and Pringle cans to the refugees. I wonder where they could have possibly secured those resources, and then I remember the Walmart.

  A soldier blows a whistle and commands everyone's attention. Someone steps in front of the Walmart to make a speech.

  It's the President.

  "How are y'all doing today?" he asks. A few people clap. "That's good to hear. So here's the situation. Every square mile of this great country has been consumed by the inferno.  What's worse, it's gotten so hot that the whole ocean has dried up. Not a drop is left. It seems hopeless, but I have a plan."

  "What's the plan, sir?" a guy at the front shouts.

  "I'll tell ya the plan!" The President winks at him. "We're all gonna go to the shore, and descend the pit that was once the ocean. Not only can we escape the fire, but there's gonna be ample resources for all of us down there. We're gonna be safe, we're gonna be happy, and we're gonna be cool. How's that sound to y'all?"

  "That sounds good, !" says the guy in the audience.

  The baby next to me has just died.

  After a few hours, the soldiers start to lead everyone towards the shore. When we get there, we find a desert. The sand stretches on ahead of us for a couple miles, gradually angling down as it goes. But soon after that, the ground suddenly drops deep, deep, deep down, where the light cannot break. This abyss stretches all the way beyond the horizon. A silent despair weighs heavy on us. This is where the ocean once was.

  "Y'all ready!" the President says. A few more claps.

  We begin our trek, the thousand or so of us.

  We've been going for about ten minutes. The further we travel, the deeper we descend, and the darker it gets. I turn around and catch a final glimpse of the upper world we're leaving behind. I spot smoke rising into the sky.

  Finally, we get to the spot where it suddenly drops down at a sharp angle.

  “Alright folks,” says the President. “This here is the continental slope. Climbing down this thing is gonna be worse than climbing down Mount Everest. But we’re Americans, goddammit. We’ve been through tough times before. This ain’t nothin’.”

  He takes one step forward, trips, and now he’s tumbling down the fathomless abyss. We hear him scream for the next five minutes, his voice growing quieter and more echoey the further he rolls down. Finally, his screams vanish into the darkness.

  “The President is dead,” the guy from the audience says.

“Indeed he is,” says the General. He’s a bald, mustached man smoking a cigar. “Guess that means we’ve got ourselves a military government. Right men?”

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The other soldiers shout victoriously. “YEAAAAAAH!!!”

A few refugees clap.

  We start to climb down. The soldiers are the last to go.

  My heart is pounding in my chest. The cliffside is at a near ninety-degree angle, and there are barely any protruding rocks to step on or grab onto. Half the time, my foot is searching for a platform to support my body; most of them are so small, they feel like they would break under my weight. But I’ve been lucky so far. Other people haven’t. It often happens faster than I can process; the snap of a breaking rock, followed by screaming that is quickly consumed by the deep void. Just like the President’s.

  I hear yet another snap. A little boy is screaming now. This time, I happen to look down and see him falling to his death. He looks so small against that yawning abyss. Microscopic even.

  He’s been falling for a long time. I catch one more glimpse of him; he’s a dot, as tiny as a grain of sand.

  And now he’s gone.

  “I can’t do this anymore!” a young woman next to me shrieks. I know what she means; my fingers have gotten too sweaty to support my body. I want to say something to comfort her, but no words come out.

  She gives me a desperate look. “Please, I need you to tell my parents that I couldn’t keep going. They’re names are—” Crack. She screams and plummets.

  My hands have gotten even sweatier.

  We climb down for hours and hours. The screams of hundreds of people accompany me during the descent.

  Every step down could very well be my last. My limbs are trembling. My muscles are throbbing in pain. And it’s getting darker. Soon, I can’t even see my own body, so searching for rocks to hang onto has grown even more dire.

  I shriek when it happens; my heel has touched solid ground. Putting my entire weight on the smooth surface, my legs give out and collapse onto the floor of the abyssal plain. I’m crying and moaning and hyperventilating. My long suppressed panic attack has finally arrived.

  More people follow. I can hear their own shrieks as they’re released from the relentless abuse of gravity. For a long time, we sit in pitch blackness, crying.

  “Alright men,” the General says to his soldiers when they finally arrive. He seems unfazed by the expedition. “We’ve reached the abyssal plain. Flashlights on.” Dozens of blinding lights illuminate the darkness. My eyes are burning from the sudden glares. Everyone is wailing in pain. At this moment, I notice that, of the thousand or so of us who started this journey, less than a hundred are present here.

  I try not to think about the splattered corpses just beyond the light’s reach.

  “Onward!” the General says.

  We’re trudging along at a slow pace. The few surviving children cry every so often. Their parents are probably dead.

Although the soldiers are holding the flashlights, they’re yards behind us. We can barely see what’s ahead. The same questions linger in my mind.

  Where are we going?

  Where’s the food?

  How are we going to survive down here?

  “Alright, let’s take a break,” the General says. We all sit, the soldiers in one circle, the rest of us in another. The General paces around both.

  “Well, it seems the time has come.” He takes a puff from his cigar, and sighs. “We have to eat the children.”

  “What!” I bolt up and glare at him dead in the eyes. He doesn’t look back at me. The soldiers and even a few refugees nod at his suggestion.

  “Didn't we pack at least some Pringles?” I say.

  The General shakes his head. “Nah, they would have weighed us down.”

  “The fucking Pringles?”

  “Yup.” He approaches the children, whose shoulders tense. “Children are basically Pringles, but with legs. They can climb down all by themselves, without anyone having to carry them.”

  More and more people start to nod. The idea is catching on.

  “This is insane!” I’m screaming now. I can’t believe this is fucking happening. “We should at least try to find something to eat! There could be dead fish all around us! We just need to look!”

  I’m surrounded by glaring eyes. The General pouts at me. “This is about more than just food, Aubree. Eating the children is important. It’ll provide us with the structure we need to not only survive, but flourish.”

  Structure? Structure? “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Everyone turns away from me; clearly they’ve had enough of my insubordination. “Of course you wouldn’t understand,” says the General.

  The adults start to gang up on the children. Their eyes are wide with a manic bloodlust. The children back away, whimpering.

  “Stop it!” I scream. “Stop it, stop it! You’re insane! You’re all…!”

…

  I’m sitting far away from them. I want to cry, but can’t. My body and mind have numbed. The General approaches me.

  “Hey,” he says, taking a bite out of a leg. “You okay?”

  I don’t answer for a long time. He’s giving me sad eyes, as if he’s genuinely concerned for my well-being.

  “I think I’m depressed,” I finally say.

  “Me too,” he says. “This world is fucked up. I wish it could be better, but—” He takes another bite. His lips are splattered with blood. “Yo, I have a question for you.”

  A question? What question could he possibly ask me?

  “Do you know about the Ape?” he says. I raise an eyebrow, but say nothing. “The Ape with Eight Billion Eyes,” says the General. “It’s an immortal being that’s dwelled on the ocean floor for thousands of years. They say it’s taller than the Empire State Building. That’s a hell of a monkey, right?” He nudges me and laughs.

  “What are you talking about?” I say. I ask not because I’m curious, but because his answer might be an insight to the current mental state of the group. Know thy enemy.

  “The Ape is the real reason why we’re down here,” he says. “We’re gonna look for it. If you ask anyone else here about it, they’ll tell you that they don’t know what you’re talking about. But they do know. And they’re all eager to see it. And here’s the real kicker...” He grins, exposing his blood-stained teeth. “We all yearn to be devoured by it.”

  The General stands up and walks back to the crowd. Eventually, they turn the flashlights off. Bed time.

  Even though it’s pitch black, I can’t sleep. Probably because of everything that’s happened today; the inferno, the descent into the abyss, the cannibalizing of the children. It’s too much for my brain to process.

  But I also can’t shake the feeling that something is watching me.