A walk with Tom Hays.

Today is April 31st. It has been the 31st of April for a few days now… well, at least as far as I’m concerned, and I doubt there is anyone left who would care enough to argue. I’m calling it perpetual April Fool’s, because the joke’s on me and no one is left to laugh.

We had all joked about it. Everyone! Even the world leaders who led us headfirst to this grand finale. The whole world had become a virtual carnival, but hey: at least we were all thoroughly entertained when the show was over.

I don’t think anyone believed it was all about to end. Sure, we all knew the world was going to hell in a handbasket, but to actually see it happen? Hot damn. What a time to be alive.

I always thought closure mattered. Really mattered. I would obsess when a TV show was canceled without resolving the main storyline: Where would the story have ended if they had continued? Why would they start something they didn’t intend to finish? Soon enough, I’d get all mucked up and depressed, thinking that one day I would die without knowing what became of humanity.

Would we ever put aside our differences?

Would we make it off this rock?

What would that even look like?

I wanted to know, because even though I was just as shallow and shitty as the person standing next to me, I still believed. I was a closet idealist and thought something was going to change.

Maybe we’d all set down our phones and start talking to the person next to us, realize that we’re all in this together, and put some people in charge who could make some long-term decisions for a better future.

Or maybe aliens would just show up with the answers to all our problems. I didn’t have the answer, but I believed the answer was out there.

Then BAM and here we are. Or here I am, anyway.

It’s been three days since I saw someone else, and at least a week since I heard another person speak. I never thought I’d miss the sound of another human voice… I used to sit on my couch watching a movie where the main character got sent to solitary confinement and think: “I could totally do that. Hell, I’d enjoy the quiet, sign me up”.

Turns out, I was wrong.

I started walking down this road with my neighbor, Tom Hays. Our houses sat parallel to each other in a shallow valley, surrounded by hills. I think that’s the only reason we didn’t immediately dissolve like everyone else.

We certainly weren’t unscathed.

My right arm is just dangling next to me like a dead branch, and Tom looked like a zombie from one of those over-the-top, low-budget films. He got it worse, though. He had been out in his garage, I was inside sitting on the couch with a remote in hand.

I never liked Tom much. Not for any real reason. He wasn’t a bad guy—just lonely. The kind of loneliness that builds up over decades. A lifetime of memories with nowhere to go.

He spent most of his time sitting on an old lawn chair in his garage, keeping an eye on our street. I think he sat there hoping someone would show up and talk to him.

Usually that someone was me.

He’d tell me his story any time he caught me in the driveway coming home from work:

College football. Military service. Degrees…doctorate?, PhD, who knows what else. Thirty years at some lab in the city, testing rocket fuel and designing propulsion systems.

Then he retired. Bought the house next to mine, and that was it. Nothing left but stories.

He might have been at the end of his life, but I was still living mine. I didn’t have time to talk to him… I had to hurry into my house to… what?

Sit on the couch scrolling through my phone while the TV streamed some show I wasn’t really watching, but absolutely needed to see through to its conclusion?

Fuck!

Tom’s dead now. When we started walking, he wasn’t talking anymore. I don’t know if it was the gash in his head or if he was simply too shocked to speak, but we walked together in silence until he stopped walking.

I learned more about myself walking in silence next to Tom than I had growing up in the so-called age of information. All the things I thought were so important—my mortgage, my bank account, my fucking social media profiles blinked out.

Gone.

No matter how many times I indulge the habit of reaching into my pocket and pulling out my phone, it’s still just a dead, blank screen. But beside me, limping next to me, was an actual human being melting like an ice cube sliding down a hot pavement.

He was dying with each step, and I couldn’t do a damned thing. Not for him, not for anyone.

I couldn’t have saved the world, but I could have been better. Could’ve paid attention, looked up, talked to people. If we had all done that…? It doesn't matter now.

It was weird leaving him there. His eyes were still open, staring up at a blackened sky, and all I could think was: “I wonder if his research contributed to our undoing?”

I didn’t even say anything, not a “goodbye,” or “rest well,” or “be at peace.” I just stared at him for a minute, then walked away.

Left him like litter on the side of the road.

And somehow, I found myself blaming God.

Funny, right? I never believed. I only went to church because my parents made me. But I remembered what they taught us; how God made the world in seven days.

Well… we beat that record.

Destroyed it in less than an hour.

How’s that for progress?

Fuck! … it hurts to fucking walk.

The world ended on April 30th, 2026. Sure, we’d been working on it for a while poisoning water, killing ecosystems, burning the sky, killing each other. In the end, none of that mattered, all of that’s gone too.

I’m sure there are a few bunkers full of spooks out there… I wonder if they’re counting their stockpiles and measuring the atmosphere… it won’t matter, there’s no coming back from this.

I don’t have much longer. I don’t need to be a doctor or a scientist to know that my hair falling out isn’t a good sign. The last person I saw had blisters the size of jawbreakers on his face, and he was one of the better-looking ones.

I don’t even know why I’m still walking down this road.

I was following Tom. I thought maybe the old soldier knew something I didn’t. Some survival trick, some plan.

Now I think he was just looking for a better place to die.

You know, I don’t think I ever drove down this road. I have no idea where it leads.

But I know how it ends