Panic. It was a cold, sharp needle piercing through the numbing blanket of his shock. The vast, silent emptiness before him was not just a visual trick, it was a physical, suffocating reality. His mind, scrambling for a foothold, seized on a desperate, wild hope.
"That means... the humanity is ba- back, but the atmosphere still make feel the loneliness," he stammered to the empty air, the words tasting like ash. It was a nonsensical thought, born of terror. If everything was pushed away, perhaps the space in between was now filled with people, with life. But the air itself belied the idea. The profound, crushing silence, the sheer scale of the loneliness pressing in on him, told the true story. There was no one. Nothing.
This realization broke his paralysis. He spun on his heel, his heart hammering a frantic, painful rhythm against his ribs. He rushed back through the mini-mart's entrance, not bothering to re-seal the door. The world outside was no longer a threat to be kept out; it was a void to be escaped.
He stumbled into the small, windowless surveillance room, the glow of the monitor screens casting a sickly blue pallor on his face. His hands trembled as he grabbed the mouse.
Click. Click.
He cycled through the camera feeds with frantic urgency. The front lot camera showed the same impossible vista. The side alley view was a tunnel of stretched buildings receding into infinity. The rear camera, once pointing at a concrete wall and dumpsters, now showed a sprawling, unrecognizable landscape of distorted rooftops and distant, miniature hills that had not been there yesterday.
His breath hitched. The evidence was irrefutable, painted across every single screen. A strangled, disbelieving whisper escaped his lips.
"Earth got expanded in overnight?"
The sheer, impossible scale of it made his head spin. It wasn't that things had moved. The very fabric of the planet, the ground itself, had been stretched on a cosmic loom, pushing all of creation away from this single, cursed point. He noticed the system log on one of the monitors. A red alert icon blinked insistently. He clicked on it. The log showed a series of seismic alarms, triggered by violent, sustained tremors starting at 03:47 AM. The exact time he had been lost in the depths of his deep, nightmare-plagued sleep. The tremors had been strong enough to shake the foundations of the building, to trigger every alarm the system had.
And he had slept through it all. While the world was fundamentally, physically torn apart outside, he had been trapped in the intimate horror of a bloody hand and a whispering voice, oblivious to the cataclysm. The two horrors, one internal and one external, had occurred in the same cursed night, leaving him utterly and completely alone.
A new, more insidious fear began to wrap around his initial panic. His eyes darted from the impossible images on the screens to the ordinary shelves of the mini-mart around him.
"Why didn't I feel anything?" The question was a whisper, clawing its way out. "And if the Earth expanded, why is this mini-mart the only thing that remains unaffected?"
The logic of it was maddening. It was as if this one building had been anchored in its own pocket of reality, a single, untouched stone in a river that had catastrophically widened its banks. This was not like the color rays, a visible, sweeping phenomenon. This was a silent, fundamental rewriting of the physical world, and he was trapped at its undisturbed center. The intensity of the situation was no longer just outside. It was inside his mind, threatening to fracture his understanding of everything.
Strangely, a hollow laugh escaped him. He was not surprised. Not truly. After the unexplained color rays that had erased all lifes except plants, his capacity for shock had been deeply scarred. His thoughts spiraled backward, trying to calculate the time since the collapse began. How long had humanity been absent? The world had been falling apart in a slower, more predictable way for what felt like an eternity.
He was sure of it. Fires would have begun to break out across the globe from unattended appliances, rampant short circuits, and unstable chemical spills. With no fire departments to answer the call, those flames would rage unchecked, consuming entire city blocks until they simply ran out of fuel. Elsewhere, sump pumps in submerged underground systems like subways and mines would have failed. Those dark tunnels would now be rapidly filling with water, creating hidden, flooded tombs.
A grim, cold comfort touched him. "Uffuh." The sigh was heavy with a weary acceptance. At least the animals and pets were gone, taken swiftly by each color of ray from above. The alternative, their slow starvation and confusion, was a horror he was spared from witnessing.
He was fortunate, he supposed, to have been outside the city when it all began. Even the vast cornfield he had left behind was likely burned to ashes by now. He could only imagine the scale of the chaos that had unfolded in the densely packed urban centers. It had been one day and ten hours since the first event. Those initial disasters, the fires and the floods, now seemed like simple, predictable tragedies. They were normal, almost mundane, compared to the planet itself stretching into an unrecognizable void outside his door.
The reality of his new world was a physical weight on his shoulders. Noren stepped outside once more, his eyes scanning the impossibly distant horizon with a grim, practical focus. The initial shock had hardened into a cold knot of acceptance in his stomach. He remembered the red Jeep he had seen parked near the mini-mart's entrance days ago. It was gone now, not stolen, but presumably stranded an unimaginable number of miles away, lost in the vast expansion. Any hope of using a vehicle was futile.
His sanctuary was no longer safe. It was a target, an isolated point in a wasteland that would not take long to be scoured by the coming disasters he knew were inevitable. He had to move.
"I should find a safe place," he muttered to the silent, stretching emptiness. "Uhm. Not the city, nor the villages with farming fields." Cities would be concrete tombs, raging with unchecked fires and structural collapse. The open farmlands offered no shelter, no resources beyond what was likely already ash. His destination was a mystery, but staying was a death sentence.
With a resolve born of pure necessity, he packed his bag with a careful selection of canned goods and bottled drinks, each one a heavy, precious weight. He then set his steps forward, leaving the mini-mart behind. The act of walking felt both insignificant and monumental against the sheer scale of the distorted landscape.
He had walked for what felt like an hour, the mini-mart a shrinking block behind him, when a cold dread seeped into his veins. He stopped, his hand instinctively patting his pockets. Nothing. A curse, low and guttural, escaped his lips. He had forgotten the phone and the power bank. They were still in the mini mart, his only conceivable link to a world that might, somehow, still exist.
The thought of returning was a physical pain, but the thought of continuing without that slim chance of contact was worse. He turned around, the journey back feeling infinitely longer than the journey out. By the time the mini-mart's familiar shape loomed large again, he estimated he had wasted the energy and time it took to walk nearly four kilometers.
Retrieving the devices, he stood once more in the doorway, the utter silence pressing in on him. A deep, weary sigh escaped his lungs, carrying the weight of his absolute solitude.
"Everyone should die alone at their end," he said, his voice flat and hollow. "But I am really going to die alone." His eyes swept across the barren, silent expanse. There was not even the promise of a natural end. "No birds here to eat the corpses," he finished, the statement hanging in the dead air. There would be no cleanup, no return to the cycle of life. Only stillness, and decay, and an endless, expanding silence.