There were many signposts of what was about to happen. Irreversible effects on plants, animals, farming and weather were already apparent. Most scientists agreed that carbon dioxide emissions were causing global warming. Not only would the earth's atmosphere warm up, but also it's interior. Yet no one could accurately predict the effects of global warming on our planet's porosity, because it was largely unknown. When the interior magma on which huge tectonic plates float heated only a few degrees, the plates forming the earth's surface began to expand and change positions with increased velocity. All at once, a great earthquake cut through Turkey and the Eastern Mediterranean, totally destroying the old town of Jerusalem. Regional conflicts to officiate it as a capital city became empty and meaningless. A decades-old Middle East war of attrition, the cost of which was born by taxpayers to the treasuries of questionable arms industries, suddenly grinded to a halt. There would be no war today. Instead, the world turned to the fruits of advanced space technology and to the scientific know-how gained from unlocking the secrets of atoms and galaxies. Millions of climate refugees had been forced to evacuate their weather-ravaged homelands and were desperately on the move. Descending from the sky, the New Jerusalem would come to certify the discovery of intelligent life in space...

A DAY TOO LATE
Apocalypse Aftermath

by BlackRaiser

Loud noises and intense convulsions brought him down. The old shopkeeper lifted himself from the floor. He grasped his spectacles and looked at the broken shelves of his food market, bent and wrenched out of shape. His trousers were torn. His sweater was caught in a snag tangled on a corner of his flattened cash register.

Outside, he could hear a soft, melancholic melody. A feverish chill accelerated in his ears, making the hairs on his shoulders move. Through a broken window of his destroyed food market he observed what he could not welcome. A glimpse of daybreak over the highway overwhelmed the old shopkeeper with a sense of impending danger. Some miles away, the tectonic plates of the San Andreas Fault had suddenly trembled as never before, causing an eerie mountain line to rise from the ground, like a black-gloved hand through a cloud of smoke.

The San Andreas Fault rift had abruptly worn together, fundamentally redrawing the Californian landscape. In about three minutes, the cities of Los Angeles and greater Hollywood completely vanished in heaps of plates and metals. A ghostly mountain terrain appeared in their place, shooting up from a mass of black dust.

The shopkeeper slowly staggered to the doorway and stopped for a moment. He viewed a peculiar young man standing calmly at peace, next to an old motorcycle while playing a harmonica. A soft, melancholic melody.

"What... What happened?" the elderly shopkeeper asked with a shaky voice and nervously rubbed his neck.

"Earthquake," replied the other. "Temblor. The Big One." He looked to the ground. The corners of his mouth turned. The young man observed what was left of the commercial center of Hollywood and glanced back sharply at the shopkeeper. "All gone. What a bitch. Friend of every king and ruler of the world." He looked to the ground again, playing his harmonica.

"Who are you?" the dazed shopkeeper asked in bewilderment.

"Why ask my name, seeing it's secret?" the young man said. He pointed to the incomprehensible ground elevation in the distance. The earth's crust projected upward through a dark suspended cloud of pulverized earth. Black Raiser. "See that? What do you think they'll name that new mountain?" he wondered aloud. A soft tune resonated from his harmonica, gloomy and strange.

The earth trembled again with rumbling thunders. An aftershock moved the ground once more. The shopkeeper fell to the asphalt and huddled a street curb. After a few vibrating seconds, the danger passed. He looked to the direction of the young man. But no one was there. No old motorcycle. As far as the shopkeeper could see, nothing but a devastated highway. The ruins of a broken valley. A day too late for the usual picturesque view of natural scenery. Above the distant horizon, a new mountain range was now visible in a violent atmospheric disturbance of dust, lightning, and charged particles.  Rock against rock, fiery rock.