1

The first one scared him so badly he had to change his pants before gathering up his family and making for his brother’s boat. If they could get deep into lake Michigan, was the thinking, they could perhaps survive the blast. Though even if they got that far, he assumed they would be watching Chicago, Milwaukee, Grand Rapids and Detroit all pop like sizzling matches on the horizon.

But when Wayne, his wife Sue, and their three children Isaiah, Malik, and Joanna arrived at his brother’s boat, his brother was already on it and pointing a handgun at crowds of people and screaming women and children desperate to board. Other boat owners were either doing the same or already thrown off the docks or dead. Wayne watched as the crowd overtook his brother, one or two dying in the process. The boat departed full to the brim and summarily capsized before making it out of Burnham Harbor.

Wayne took his family to Navy Pier and hunkered down with hundreds of souls who also realized the futility of taking reasonable shelter, and wanted instead to see the great lake one last time. He hugged and kissed his family and they cried together as the city of Chicago was vaporized in a wave of thermonuclear heat.

2

The second one was almost more terrifying than the first. Not because of the nature of the apocalypse, but because it was happening again. Wayne remembered every detail of the nuclear Armageddon in which he had failed to protect his family. He woke up that morning crying, in fact, like it was only a dream. But it was real, he knew.

The date (June 30th, 2026) was the same, his wife’s burnt (but sweet) pancakes were the same. Joanna’s tantrum about Malik stealing her toy: the same. So like a good, cultured citizen who had seen Groundhog Day and its many incarnations, Wayne Robbins assumed the apocalypse would also be the same.

Poor, poor Wayne.

He turned on the news but unlike his first apocalypse, the TV received no signal at all. Their internet was out as well. Cell towers? Also down. By 9:00am it was pandemonium in the streets as the power grid went entirely offline and millions of people made a run on the banks. By 11:00am Wayne decided he regretted moving to Chicago, and that living in a city was for people who wanted to die.

But this time was not as fast. They sheltered in place for days, following the advice of an automated warning across A.M. radio frequencies. Where would they have gone, anyway? They weren’t one of those families in the movies who had a relative with a house in the country. The best they had was a brother with a boat.

After two days, the water stopped coming from the tap. After a week, they were out of everything except condiments and the automated warning did not change. Wayne survived his first two trips to his local grocery store but on the third trip it had been taken over by a paramilitary group who summarily executed three other fathers like Wayne by shooting them in the head as they approached the cereal aisle.

Out of habit, he guessed, Wayne took his family to Burnham Harbor near Sledding Hill park. His brother’s boat was untouched. He decided to take the boat out to Four Mile Crib, the small water intake facility from the late-1800s. As its name suggested, it was four miles offshore.

As they sped away, two pops sounded from a distance. Wayne shouted for everyone to get down and two bullets pinged off the side of their boat as they escaped into lake Michigan. Three miles out, Wayne Robbins and his family saw their horizons burn. Chicago was not yet on fire, but it would be. As they approached Four Mile Crib Wayne felt he might have done things right this time. But then a voice rang out from a megaphone telling them to turn around. Sue yelled that they just wanted their children to be protected, that they had no food and the city was no longer safe. We know, the voice answered. An attenuated thunk sounded from the parapet of Four Mile Crib and the Robbinses huddled together and cried as the grenade blew their boat to smithereens.

3

He didn’t know it yet, but he would regret this one the most. Wayne woke up at 7:00am, weeping. Then he was pissed he had never been one of those guys who wakes up at 4:30. He wiped his tears and gathered his family by shouting at them until they listened. At 7:25 he withdrew $8,000 in cash. At 7:32 he filled up the Corolla and bought 10 jerrycans of gas, which added about 40 gallons of additional fuel. His wife threatened to call her sister out of fear and Wayne obliterated her phone by smashing it on the pavement, which he regretted, but what could he say to her?

They drove west. The thinking was to get out of the urban sprawl and shoot up to Canada, all the way to Hudson Bay if need be. Yes, this plan felt good. The open road felt good. No one was going to drop nukes on, hack, or invade rural Canada, he was sure.

And he was right!

At approximately 11:40am EDT, Yellowstone Caldera erupted in a magnificent VEI 8 mega-colossal explosion. Its plume reached 20 miles into the sky and would eject 88 trillion cubic feet of ash into the stratosphere before it was done. By 1:00pm, the same had happened for every super volcano across the globe.

By 9:00pm that evening, as the Robbins family crossed into Canada through Fort Frances, Ontario, tiny flakes of pumicite and ash were already floating into small piles. They sought to take a Trans Canada Highway east, as far away from Yellowstone as possible, but even through the night it was gridlocked. They made it up to Sioux Narrows and checked into the motel that would be their home for the next 18 months.

The sun was red and perpetually dim. Nationwide rationing had been implemented and Sioux Narrows was getting less by the week. At 18 months, it stopped getting shipments altogether. This was when the owner of the motel, Deke, left one evening and never came back. Eventually the Robbinses had the motel to themselves, and then the entire town. Sioux Narrows became a tenement darkly, its only movement ash and ghouls.

One night, a roving band of hunters came down from the north.

Wayne killed upwards of 15 of them with his collection of Canadian rifles. Throughout the massacre, he thought back to losing his family those two other times and wondered if they were merely premonitions. He had been in this apocalypse so long, you see, he couldn’t remember if the other two were real. As the scalp and cranium of another would-be attacker flew in the air and landed softly on the powdered asphalt, Wayne didn’t think so anymore. His family was right here. The others must have been nightmares. So he slaughtered the hunters like there was no tomorrow.

But they were still too many, and they overran him. The hunters said his wife was theirs now, and he could join his children in heaven. He pulled the knife from his ankle holster and slit a final hunter’s throat before they gunned him down.

4

The fourth apocalypse, while statistically more tragic, was also gentler. Wayne rolled over and made vigorous love to his wife in his own bed. She did not burn her pancakes when she made breakfast.

Wayne decided to stay put and wait for the news, whatever it was. At around noon, NASA confirmed sighting of the previously unseen comet they now called Gabriel. Gabriel had swung out of the Oort Cloud and approached us from behind the sun, hiding in its glare. It was the size of New Jersey, and would impact the Pacific ocean in about two months. The experts said we were lucky to even get that much time.

What the world learned then, was how awkward a time-frame two months really was. There was time for “Gargantuan Gabe” memes but also instant panic as every human on the planet hoarded food and water.

The Robbinses were marked and registered as part of the MWCS (Midwest Coalition for Survival), and were grouped into community 1013B, each community containing 100 individuals and given 25 hyper-insulated houses with wood stoves and enough canned food to last for 6 months. Chicago was abandoned in its entirety and each citizen was administered a suicide pill.

Two weeks before impact, the nations of the world symbolically joined hands and launched the entire global nuclear arsenal at Gabriel, which was akin to shooting at the Sun with a pistol. The scientists estimated it was deflected by approximately 4 meters.

One week before impact, the survival zones were overrun with refugees from the coasts, but there was a surprising lack of violence. Wayne’s allotted house now held 15 people. Others slept outside in tents or continued into the remains of Chicago.

The impact, for Illinoisans, was surreal in its lazy momentum. The comet struck almost dead-center between Chile and New Zealand, deep in the South Pacific. There was a slow rocking in the ground eight minutes later and existence itself felt alien. Seven hours after that, they heard the low boom that signaled the destruction of their planet.

The sky turned red over Illinois and by the next morning, the sun shone through a blanket of purple fog. On the third day, the acid rain fell. On the fourth day, the sun did not rise. In the week that followed, temperatures descended below freezing and new violence spread through the survival camps. Wayne and his family huddled together in their small bedroom and locked the door.

Wayne had been merely along for the ride with this one, but that was okay. At first he wondered why it hadn’t been the galactic vaporizing from the movies, an instant death upon impact. But the two months’ notice followed by the somehow anticlimactic ending was more human, he supposed. It wasn’t poetic, really, but the clumsy nature of it all was still beautiful. And this time, he was able to avoid the violence. He could focus on shepherding his family into death, rather than helplessly watch them succumb to it. He kissed his wife and children. Together, they took their pills and went to sleep.

5

June 30th, 2026. 7:00am. Wayne Robbins woke up peacefully and caressed his wife’s cheek. He played Godzilla with his kids to wake them up, causing all sorts of ruckus and roughhousing Sue outwardly disapproved of but inwardly adored. They ate breakfast together and laughed and made a big old mess that everyone had to help clean up, thank you very much. And then Wayne realized he was not scared to check the news. Not because he could handle whatever doomsday came next, but because he was pretty sure none was coming, at least not imminently. At 11:30, his office called to ask where he was. He said he was deathly ill and would try to be back tomorrow.

He had always appreciated his life, he never took it for granted. But Wayne still felt different now. He had suffered through four Armageddons, after all. But if the apocalypse is what happens before you die, he thought, then he had really suffered through five. The first one had simply been longer, starting the day he was born. No, Wayne never took his life for granted, but he was always afraid. He fought with death daily, seeing it in the eyes of his children and hearing it in the sound of his own voice when he put them to bed.

But he was done fighting now. Even if the world ended tomorrow, Wayne’s apocalypse was over.