Warning: some non-graphic descriptions of violence and gore.

The apocalypse came quietly, when it dawned. There were no trumpets. There were no avenging angels. There was no blood, no fire, no sign of struggle. That would come later. It started, simply, as a scribbled note on a gas station bathroom wall.

Dab Solomon had been driving for days from a past still too fresh to really be a past, her foot leaden on the gas pedal, her phone notifications on silent and instead playing a podcast during the silent hours. Her bags were packed, her bank account was nearly empty, and her will to keep her car from simply swerving off the road was crumbling as she took a brief break to pee and to get herself some more caffeine pills. There, written on the wall of the stall she’d chosen, was a simple phrase in purple ink: THE END.

“The End,” Dab read aloud. Nothing happened. She finished her business and rolled her eyes as she buttoned her pants back up, despairing about the teenage spirit of frivolous cryptic vandalism. But when she went to wash her hands, there was the note, printed on the back of her hand as if she’d written it herself: THE END. Dab stared at it as the water ran, then looked up into the mirror. Nothing had changed about her appearance since the last time she’d checked, nothing but this new bit of graffiti. She pumped soap into her palm, then slapped all of it onto the inscription and began scrubbing. When that did nothing, she scraped her nails across the words, leaving her skin red and irritated, scraped until she began bleeding, but even with her skin torn to shreds, THE END was still visible. With hot water and soap stinging in her scratches, Dab calmly turned off the water, dried her hands, and left the bathroom.

In the gas station, there were two attendants and four customers other than herself. All six of them were scratching at places on their skin, places where, in various colors and fonts, THE END was prominently placed. One man had it on the side of his neck, rubbing hard and with a panicked expression as he looked at his reflection in a pair of polarized sunglasses. The woman at the register was ignoring her customer in favor of dragging her forearm against the surface of the counter, and the customer in turn was spitting on their palm, scrubbing the skin with their fingertips. Dab quietly took a Coke and a bag of chips from the aisles, put some change in the empty spot on the shelf, and left.

Outside was more chaos, more people screaming about THE END, and Dab opened the cap of her soda with her teeth as she jimmied her rusty driver’s side door open. It made a pleasant fizzing sound, and the sweet hint of Coca-Cola taste that sprayed against her tongue promised a delightful experience to come. Dab put her soda in the cup holder, put the chips in the passenger seat, and opened up her phone to check the news and the social media.

THE END was everywhere now, it seemed, splashed across people’s increasingly irritated skin, tattooed across various landmarks, screamed through microphones and typed into Twitter with desperation. The pope apparently had THE END transcribed across his eyeballs, before he’d gouged them out with a letter opener. Dab took a swig of her soda and turned on her car.

The roads had been empty while Dab was driving, for the most part. Now they were littered with people who had crashed, people who were either unconscious in smoking wrecks or screaming next to broken axles. Dab glanced at her own reddened hand, then back at the road. Had to be careful, there was no telling what people would do on the road even on a good day.

The sky was a cloudless blue, the temperature was exquisite, and overall Dab was feeling good about her choice in direction, idly watching a plane crash in the horizon, the resulting explosion rattling her dashboard. Terrible, obviously, but maybe they’d all died. THE END was scribed across the side of the plane, in bold script she’d been able to read from miles away. She passed a field of cows, all of which had colorful THE END phrases on their hides like they’d been painted, and they were placid. Animals couldn’t read. Animals didn’t have to.

Dab checked her GPS, ignoring the flashing warnings from various government agencies warning against THE END or advising people to be calm, ignoring text messages and dozens of calls from people she knew. Forty miles before she would encounter the next town, but her chips and soda would sustain her for at least another hundred. Hopefully the roads would be this clear all the way through.

 The podcast episode ended and transitioned to the next. Dab watched as another plane crashed, then blinked and saw THE END against the sky, written in clouds. Her car sputtered some when she navigated around a head-on collision in the middle of the interstate, one driver limp in their seat and the other splashed across the hood of their totaled vehicle, but overall had no other issue. Dab saw that even through her scabs THE END was visible and shrugged.

As she approached the next town, she saw it was on fire, THE END written across the tallest buildings and still hanging in the sky overhead. Navigating that was a bit trickier, but if she drove on the median and swerved around people trying to throw themselves under the wheels of her car, it was fine. There was a man who had cut his skin completely away to reveal THE END as bright as ever on the exposed muscle beneath, but she passed him before he got to the bone. Soon enough she passed the town completely, and was left with just THE END in the sky and THE END on her hand and THE END printed inside the bottom of her chip bag.

When she stopped for gas, she didn’t hear any screaming or pleas for mercy; there was no one else around. She pumped gas into her car, glanced at something large swinging from the ceiling behind the gas station window, and thought better about going inside for another snack. THE END was on the hanging man’s bloated tongue.

As the day wore on into evening, Dab pulled into a rest stop and, using a trick her brother had taught her, pried open one of the vending machines to stock up on the snacks within, some of the labels obscured by thick black THE END signs. She didn’t think the woman with the wide-open skull would mind if she borrowed her rifle, either. Just in case. Sleeping in the parking lots of rest stops had served her well in the days previous, but she could never be too careful. She fell asleep soon after dark with the rifle tucked against her side, the safety undone, but the gun wasn’t loaded anymore, anyway. She’d have to see about finding some ammo in the morning.

In the morning, her phone was nearly dead from all the notifications, but she’d charge it while she drove. She skimmed through them, enough to see that apparently the president was dead, her father had barricaded the rest of her family into their basement to wait it all out, and the world economy had collapsed. Which was just as well, she didn’t have any money, anyway. She checked the GPS and saw THE END had replaced all of the street and location names. Google really had a funny sense of humor sometimes.

A thorough check of the rest stop turned up some bullets she hoped were for the rifle, and while she was there she cracked open a few dispensers and stole some of those massive toilet paper rolls. Had to keep the essentials on-hand, when the world was ending. Dab loaded it all back into her car, then got back on the road, filling her belly with a Little Debbie cake of some kind.

The next four small towns she passed were ash. A few people seemed to still be milling about, their eyes wide and ghostly and mouths stretched wide as they pointed at her vehicle, but she just sped up and outran them. If they’d all burned their gas to set THE END ablaze, that was going to be problematic in the future; THE END still shone through the smoke and rubble, and her car wasn’t exactly fuel-efficient. But soon enough she found a city that seemed to be standing, though there appeared to be a police blockade across every exit into the place. Dab wove around wrecked and stopped cars and nodded at half-mad people scrounging through the wreckage, and kept driving.

According to her last check of the GPS, she was still half a day from her destination; maybe the beach would be deserted now, with everything that was happening. Planes weren’t dropping out of the sky now, but Dab still saw THE END written in clouds and across fence posts and on the case of her phone. Her podcast fizzled for a moment, then stopped playing, and Dab turned on the radio. It was silent static, but when she flipped through the channels, she heard a few distress signals and some mindless screaming. Silence was fine, she decided as she turned the radio off. Just a few more hours until the beach.

When she started to see the sand dunes and palm trees in force, she also saw smoke smeared across the sky and active fires still burning; Dab weighed her options and decided it couldn’t be that hard to find the ocean if she drove across the dunes. So she pulled her groaning car up the first hill of the dune and started driving vaguely seaward, hoping the gravel wasn’t cutting up her tires. They’d been replaced recently, but a well-placed sharp object could be dangerous. The sun seemed to beat down on her, reflected back by the white sands, and her mouth itself felt like it was coated in grit even when she was chugging water bottles to get rid of the texture. THE END was spelled in dune grass and scrubby bushes everywhere she looked.

At long last, Dab heard the ocean before her car finally heaved over the last dune and she saw it, glittering blue water and white sand beaches. It wasn’t empty, she was surprised to find as she drove down, there was one more car down there. A green Jeep. Its driver seemed to be sitting on the tideline, and they didn’t react when Dab drove up. Her car sighed as she turned it off, sinking into the sand it definitely wasn’t meant to drive in, and Dab kicked off her shoes before she exited her car. Sitting in the sand was a boy, younger than she was, with his feet buried in the sand and eyes on the horizon. She said nothing as she approached and sat down next to him, but a cursory glance showed her THE END displayed on his collarbones. She made sure her own THE END was visible as she wrapped her arms around her knees, and they sat together in silence for what felt like hours, listening to the ocean, ignoring THE END in unfazed letters washing up on the sandbar a few yards out.

“So,” the boy said at last, “this is the end, huh?”

“I guess,” Dab said. The waves crashed. In the distance she thought she heard a scream, but it could have been a gull.

“There are worse places to be,” the boy said, and lifted his feet from the sand to wash them clean in the sea before setting them down in the tideline and starting the process over. “What are you going to do now, now that we’re here?”

Dab mulled it over. Honestly, she’d been wanting it all to end for so long, she didn’t know what to do now that she was getting her wish. Admittedly, it wasn’t what she meant, but best not to look a gift horse in the mouth. She straightened out her legs, let the ocean scrub at her toes and heels, and at THE END when she reached for a shell that washed up with one of the waves.

“I’m gonna watch the sunset,” she said, and the boy nodded. Together they sat there, letting the waves carry away all sound and watching THE END as it set with the sun, burning like a brand against the dying sky.