The Refreshing, Post 6...

6.

I never made it for my walk, but I did manage to clear my head, and I never once needed cigarettes. I never even made it out of the building. I only made it down the stairs from my floor to the floor below, where I found my hot downstairs neighbour Kimberly pacing the corridor. She was wittering away, something about the end coming, our world being done for and needing to feel like a woman once more before it was all over. Still dazed from the news report, I didn’t quite catch on at first, until she made it clear by pressing me up against the wall and saying that mankind was screwed and she wanted to be one last time.
I knew the hysteria was going to catch on.
I wasn’t complaining.
By the time I got back to my apartment, a lot had changed. the hysterical reporter had been replaced by one far more composed, but still coming across as trying to suppress his own solemn mood in order to present himself as jolly as necessary to reassure the people watching. The odd quiet next door had been replaced by the regular level of noise, my neighbor sharing his newly formed opinion that it was all a big con, thought up by a Steven Spielberg or George Lucas type to promote some new multi million dollar blockbuster about the end of the world, like when Jerry Bruckheimer, Michael Bay and I think Touchstone put a huge fake asteroid hole in the side of some building in LA to promote Armageddon in 1998 (until they had to take it down for affecting traffic). “They can do anything with special effects these days” was his argument. Fool.
The biggest change had come in the form of squirrels. Dozens of squirrels flocking out of the British Telecom Tower in London, England, the Blackpool Tower in Blackpool, England, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France and the Space Needle in Seattle.
They had shown the footage from above the cloud over and over again, even slowed it down and shown it frame by frame, but were no closer to knowing what it meant. Even the “Professors” they had wheeled out over the last couple of days were still stammering, stuttering and getting very flustered when trying to explain. After much lobbying from viewers, the networks had also brought in some religious types to see if there might be any biblical theories to help explain alongside the scientific ones, but all that resulted in was a massive science versus religion debate. No matter how different the views of all the experts (and the handful of random ordinary members of the public) may have been, one thing remained constant; the note of panic in each one of their voices.