Conclusion
The opposite lane is empty. Sirens in the distance grow louder as two police SUVs speed back to the station,
their tires covered in mud.

Cross over Route One. Major highway, goes from Florida to Maine. The scene was chaotic, mostly everyone

had abandoned their cars, like I had. Traffic in both directions was motionless. How could it be this bad? Was

it the lack of traffic lights? I press on. Fewer cars on the street, in fact I don’t see anyone. Then I find them,

standing in a small crowd where the road ends. When I say “where the road ends”, what do you imagine? A

dead end? A cul-de-sac? This was none of those. The road, buildings, trees, after a certain point all of it was

just gone. The asphalt ended in a clean and perfect cut. No crater, no ash and debris, no bomb had gone off.

Instead it’s as if the entire thing, as far as I could see, had been replaced by flat, well groomed soil, as if some

mad farmer had killed everyone, destroyed everything, and just left an empty, tilled field. I don’t know how long

I’d stood there, shocked, as others came and went, experiencing the same mind numbing confusion, the

same horror.

We’ve accepted it now, it’s been a few months. Police departments got in touch with each other through their

CB radios, sent out scouting parties. Across the country, across the world, the same thing, cities, military

bases, anything big and concrete, was gone. I heard a rumor that when some cops made it through the miles

of nothing that used to Elizabeth, Jersey City, all the docks and industry that Jersey’s known for, they found

Central Park intact. A tiny island of green sitting in the heart of the now leveled Manhattan. There were a few

survivors there, hobos, late night joggers, all raving and insane. It’s funny how you can get used to not having

TV, the internet, all that. Growing a garden and tending animals keeps you busy most of the day. We’re trying to

be self reliant, it’s tough. I never heard from the family, I guess they couldn’t find a way to get back. Gas is

hoarded, now that we know the refineries, probably the whole infrastructure, is gone. The Cops use it for

electricity, keep the radios going. Plenty of the country has already gone dark, no more electricity, no more

radio. Now that life is returning to them, we call the blank spots “The Gardens” now. Some people tried to grow
crops there, it didn’t work too well, new things grew there instead. Same thing’s happening everywhere. Weird,
 fleshy, fast growing plants. There’s a rumor they might be alien. I thought that was crazy. But then the masters

showed themselves. We didn’t know what to call them at first, but we’ve accepted our place. One went through

the New Brunswick Garden, once. A massive collection of eyes, mucus, organs, polyps, at least as best as I

can describe it. From what I’m saying, you probably can’t imagine something like that being a cohesive thing. A

living, intelligent, awful thing. It slid through the garden, indifferent towards our stares, then vanished, like it

entered a blind spot in my vision, disorienting me. Every night I see them, horrible dreams that everyone’s had

since day one, we see the universe die, matter itself being ripped apart, every particle accelerating away from

itself, we see them escape this, see the universe recondense, they find a world and sleep. We feel smothered,

no ones sleeps well anymore. Some think they’re trying to talk to us, at least a little, possible just as a joke.

One person put it to me this way. You sleep all fall and winter, then wake up, your yard is full of leaves. You’re

going to clean them up, bag them, recycle them. They’re ugly. Do you care if thousands of insects live in those

piles, thriving in the moist darkness? Are you removing the leaves out of maliciousness towards them?

The fleshy plants are colonial; they’re beginning to leave the gardens, sometimes choking out the local plants.

Some people are very worried. There’s a rumor that deep in the biggest gardens, where New York and Philly

were, strange cities are rising. Buildings going up overnight. Strange fortresses of ivory, curved,

nonsymmetrical, disturbing. Cold and monolithic. No one’s going near them. There was a glimmer of hope

once. A military radio in New Zealand. Somehow the whole island was untouched. A police department in

California found a big boat intact, sent it out. We waited for weeks with our fingers crossed. Maybe we could

escape, survive, and go back to the old life. Then the news came in, the boat had turned back in the mid

ocean, and had come home. Half the crew had committed suicide. You know how you recycle those leaves?

How would you recycle cement and steel? Melt it down, put it in the mother of all smelters, say the Earth’s

mantle. What about organic matter? Compost it. Let it rot, out of sight, out of mind, let little animals eat it and

crap it out so plants can be fertilized to feed more animals, the circle of life. In the middle of the pacific, for

hundreds of miles, float millions of bloated, blue bodies. Rotting away as millions of fish chow down. They

float there, slowly becoming waterlogged, wearing the same clothes they wore at the moment in question, the

split second that all the cities vanished, unimaginable technology separating organic from inorganic, dropping

millions in the middle of the sea to drown, die, and rot. While their buildings, cars, and machines melted away

almost instantly in the inferno of inner Earth, returning to the ground from which they were mined, the people

rot slowly, indifferent nature taking her course. The bodies sink to the sea bottom, nibbled at, becoming the

nutrient rich sludge that fuels bacteria and simple plants, added to the base of the food chain. Recycled in the

most efficient way possible.