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Mass Extinction: A Story from the Nightmare Series

               The year was 2012, I was 20, and we were at the beach: St. Augustine to be exact. From the time I was 7 to the time I was 20 or 22 years old, it was a tradition for us to go down to Florida on vacation, at least once a year, sometimes twice.

 We were taking a day just to sit on the beach; I elected to go in the water at one point; I wanted to go out until the water was up to my neck and I got out to where the surfers were and looked back to realize that I had gone too far.

 I turned back and tried my best to get back to shore, but couldn’t, so I remembered some advice that I had seen on a sign once, and I started to swim as hard and as fast as I could, in a diagonal pattern, back to shore.

    I made it back to shore a few minutes later and realized that I had been pulled a good bit away from where I had originally started. So, being extremely exhausted and beyond scared, I decided to go up to the room and I sat down to watch TV.

 I can remember sitting there for a while, watching sitcoms and cartoons before deciding that I wanted to walk back down onto the beach.

 So, I exited the room and walked back down to the beach, and being unable to find my parents (who I’d come with) I decided to just sit down on the sand and enjoy the weather. I was just watching ships sailing off in the distance when the sky started to become a hazy blazing fire color, and I can remember looking out and seeing the ocean water all being pulled back to the point that I could see things under the water that I hadn’t previously known was there. I knew what this was, or so I thought, so like many others, I turned and ran away from the beach as fast as I could.

 My assumption was correct, I could hear people screaming in terror as the tsunami rushed towards the beach, eventually sweeping them under. I ran along with a group of people, and we all found the tallest building that we could and darted inside, rushing to the steps and running to the roof as fast as we could. We all watched as the waves slammed into nearby buildings and halfway up the building we were in; I can remember the sound of beeping cars, busting windows and people begging for their lives as the water swept them away. In a few minutes, the waves had stopped and as we stared at the ground, we watched as the water receded back to where it originally came from, and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

 “That was close.” A middle-aged white man stated, looking to be in his mid-40s; we all laughed a little bit and then made our way down off of the roof and back to the ground. I can remember, on my way down, a woman asked me if I was worried about my parents.

 “No.” I said quickly. “My dad is smart, I’m sure they made it to safety before the waves hit.”

We had made it down to the lobby when suddenly, something large slammed into the floors above us, and the building started to collapse down on top of us.

 “We have to find high ground!” the middle-aged man from earlier shouted as he grabbed my arm and pointed away from the beach. “Now! We have to go now!”

 “What is it!?!” I asked as he tugged on my arm, and I started to run alongside him.

My question was answered before I knew it, as meteors crashed around us, and we ran for our lives.

 “Stay with me! We’ll get to safety!” the man assured. “We have to get to the mountains!”

“What mountains!?!” I shouted back over the loud whistling sounds of the meteors falling from the sky and crashing all around us.

 “Just follow me!” He shouted back. “I know where to go!”

 “I don’t know how long I can run for, but I’ll try.” I said before I stared up in the sky, stopping where I was as a meteor came crashing down ahead of us. I just stood there, watching it in the sky, following it to the ground, watching it slam into the earth, the impact so severe that it shook the very ground I stood on and sent me flying into the air, screaming in fear.

 I landed back in the same place I had been, and I looked around for the middle-aged man that I had been with, but he was nowhere to be found. So, I did the only thing that I could think of doing, and that was to run in the direction he had pointed when he had told me that he knew where to go.

 So, I did, I ran as fast and as hard as I could as the meteors crashed all around me, looking back for a moment to see the destruction behind me. But when I looked back in front of me, I was back on the beach. The water was ablaze and boiling, dead sea life floated all around, and I watched as meteors crashed all around me.

 There was no use in trying to run from this, I understood that now, there was no sense in fighting the inevitable, so I walked out into the shallow water; I thought about my life, how there was so much that I hadn’t done that I wanted to do. I never got the opportunity to really pursue a music career, I had missed the opportunity to have children or to even be married; I looked up into the sky, as a meteor literally landed several feet away from me, and I waited.

 I wondered about my parents, how I wasn’t there when they met their fate and they weren’t there to comfort me either, but none of that mattered now, I knew I’d see them both in a few seconds when I got to heaven. I watched as a giant meteor fell from the sky, directly towards me, so I put my arms out to my sides, and excepted my fate.

 I woke up, face down on the couch in the condo room and immediately walked to the glass door that led out to the balcony of the room: I hadn’t even realized that I had fallen asleep; apparently, fighting that rip current drained me more than I had originally thought and at some point when I had been watching TV, I had nodded off.

 The tsunami and the meteor part of this story was just a nightmare that I could wake up from, but that rip current was no joke: I could’ve been injured or worse out there, had I not known what to do. So, if you’re ever caught in one yourself, always remember: if caught in a rip current, the recommended action is to swim parallel to the shore until you are out of the current, then swim diagonally back towards the beach to escape its pull; essentially, swimming diagonally away from the current once you've moved sideways to exit it.   

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