The sun beat down with a hateful passion on Omar's back. At forty-four, life in Khartoum hadn't granted him many kindnesses, but the vanishing was the cruelest twist yet.
It began like a thief in the night, slow and unnoticeable. First, the birds stopped singing.
The usual dawn chorus, a raucous serenade of sparrows and weavers, simply ceased. No flapping wings disturbed the dust-laden mornings. The sky, once dotted with their playful aerial dances, remained empty.
Then the cats were gone. Khartoum, like any bustling city, hosted a healthy stray population. Felines, once darting in the alleys, fighting, or demanding food, turned scarce. Bowls sat untouched, filled with food the cats had never had the opportunity to try.
People whispered. Some spoke of angry djinn, others of a plague, but Omar thought that they did not speak facts. He felt something bad had already started and was going to get a lot worse.
"They're just gone?" his neighbor Fatima said, clutching her shawl tighter. "Like they never were."
Omar nodded, unable to put his own disquiet into simple statements. Fatima didn't even finish her food, a sad frown adorning her features.
The disappearance spread. Dogs, loyal even in their scavenging, vanished. Goats from the outskirts that farmers used for milk. Cows for sale became missing before anyone could purchase them, an unbelievable ordeal.
The desert, typically alive with lizards and insects, fell into a still death. A chilling stillness filled with dry heat.
"This isn't right, Omar," said his uncle, Idris. "It feels like something is watching us."
Omar agreed. The absence pressed down. The sky became darker. A weird dark blue color started making the landscape less like Sudan and more like another planet. A death planet where nothing exists.
He had stopped going to the souk as frequently. Fewer people walked the streets; storefronts closed down, and the whole place had turned into a dead zone where no one lingered long.
Fear was a thing on the tongue, sour and metallic. Children did not go out to play; their mothers made sure they were home to shelter them.
The mosques rang with intensified calls to prayer, seeking some type of intervention, seeking release, seeking someone to deliver them from this weird horror. Nothing came of this as no one responded or helped the residents out of their crisis.
Then the Nile receded.
The great river, the lifeblood of Sudan, started shrinking, the banks turning to mud then dust. The fish were next; floating bellies up as buzzards feasted on corpses. And vultures started to disappear as well. What would they feed on now? This made a horrible feeling inside Omar start to stew in his own fear as anxiety sunk its teeth into him.
"The river is dying," a frantic voice declared in the marketplace one day. People had abandoned it a long time ago. The words carried over the eerie stillness.
People fought for water as supplies diminished. Riots seemed inevitable and started happening quickly as time turned on its ear, so they were commonplace for survival now. No water and very few scraps to feed off from animals becoming slim was no good combination.
Omar's anxiety heightened as his water and food were going quicker than usual because his family was going through things faster than Omar was capable of replacing them. His uncle was getting skinnier; Fatima, her eyes hollowed out from lack of nutrients.
He rationed what was left, sharing equally between them all. It seemed there was no option, only death awaiting them. He did not let that thought simmer long. No, not while he lived and breathed.
One night, the sky exploded into color. Not a gentle sunrise, but garish and strange hues; colors that shouldn't exist together smeared across the black canvas.
The air smelled of ozone and something else, something indefinable and ancient. This was it.
"Stay inside," Omar told Fatima and Idris, but even as he said it, he knew it was a pointless reassurance. Nowhere was safe.
He stepped out into the open street. People stood on their doorsteps looking upward, their faces a collection of fear and something like wonder.
Then came the screaming.
It started softly and built with horrifying crescendo. High-pitched screeches like tortured metal. There was the earth tearing itself open, ripping, cracking with violence. What kind of nightmare was Omar subjected to?
He didn't have the luxury of answering as he quickly darted to see if Fatima and Idris were alright; nothing would stop him from checking on his neighbors, who had been his confidantes.
The ground shifted under Omar's feet. A wave of heat scorched him and made him nearly throw up as the smell overwhelmed his nostrils, his very senses. He tried to cover his mouth but it made his skin burn even hotter; everything hurt him so bad.
Buildings crumbled, turning into sand; the sky twisted, and reality unraveled around him. And they did not know when and where help will be on their way. Was this the beginning of an end, or just their personal story of survival from an inescapable end?
He saw a neighbor consumed by purple light, their body stretched into an inhuman form before they vanished. A child turned to dust. Everyone disappeared around him.
"God, save us," cried out from every doorstep. A collective wail into the chaotic winds. People ran inside screaming in terror but everyone vanished slowly and their screams quieted.
He could feel the power rip the town open in front of him. This was when the true disaster actually began. His body started feeling strange and hot, boiling underneath as the sweat came down cold with fear and anxiousness. This was worse than before.
"Omar!"
Fatima's scream sliced through the growing bedlam. He could hear a child whimpering. The kids did not go out anymore. He wanted them to stay indoors at all costs, so why were they now?
Omar, driven by sheer will, stumbled toward her.
He had to protect them; it was his job as a man, as a human, as one being on this planet. If anything happened to him or them it did not matter because he wasn't a being who would be surviving, he needed them just like they needed him.
He found her and Idris trying to drag a small boy toward their doorway. The boy was half covered in sand as a blue light radiated from his eyes. It was now happening; no amount of shielding would help as he looked into the radiating face that glowed.
This was something even God couldn't stop as hell seemed to have engulfed this desert they lived in, a hell made from some higher being not from their planet but from some other that chose the world that they loved, destroying its wildlife for its satisfaction and sick delight.
The air crackled. The sound sent goosebumps to Omar as what looked like pure power expanded more around them all.
"Hold on!" Omar shouted, but his words were lost in the cataclysm. What an ordeal, one like no other. His strength must endure now!
He reached them. Fatima shoved the boy into his arms.
"Save him, Omar," she said.
He did not hear her.
The boy disappeared from his hands as the tears fell from Fatima's face, sadness that she felt he let them go. She would join their ranks of vanishing; it would happen in just mere moments. Why could this day not wait?
Then she looked toward Omar. "This will be your future!"
Her face and body shifted. It contorted. They elongated, became impossibly thin and as light came down the desert began again. But only with him this time. Everyone vanished and so there was silence again.
The silence filled with only Omar again and then he knew it; he heard what Fatima said. He finally had some perspective now but now the reality sat; it's something that only Omar felt that made this existence his to roam as that feeling took over more.
She spoke like it had always been destined for him and that it was his end that everyone else simply escaped from. She had spoken the truth as that all there ever really was from him on; just truth, no falsehood.
Now what he could do about it became clear but all seemed impossible, only more struggle lied in place; would this make him better or cause his end?
He stood alone. Silence, complete and absolute, rang in his ears.
The garish colors dimmed, and the sky normalized to a deep blue that never existed before. His mind reeled as he reeled at a world without people, what to make with this? Was it his own new version of heaven that has shown himself in Sudan for so long and the many others across the lands?
Did every single place from all over disappear alongside his neighbors and the desert here he loved so much and fought to be raised within? There must be some people around to check from other communities outside of just the city here but as time ran by.
Weeks turned into Months;
He sought out if there are communities to build together again. Was he not destined to only live by himself, a cruel ending to a horror story no one would have liked to have endured from but what could he say; here was at the epicenter where the world decided it would stop right here.
His soul was meant to bear such a challenge where all vanished at such a scale leaving him alone by every metric measure available and accessible in his psyche but as time rolled he figured, or knew in this soul now, the very world that has allowed a test for only one has now decided an alternate reality to which no human could possibly dream was at a higher state.
His new perspective would now show it; everything was coming again. From new beginnings for something more grand. He began to get the old animal sounds that the horror from his people created to live in silence from. Then people walked.
It came and then this world knew itself what his end would do with it all so no longer could it make. Now from a desert horror from an ending to something new and beautiful. Omar may get a chance once in his entire life for his entire dream world now here alive that there ever should be.