Evolution Day: An American Apocalypse

I jolted awake at dawn, drenched in cold sweat.

This was the twenty-third parallel world I'd dreamed of where catastrophe struck Earth. This time, besides the asteroid impact, I saw a news headline—September 24, 2022, 1:30 AM: A mass shooting in Washington D.C. left over a hundred casualties.

I grabbed my phone from the nightstand, unlocked it, and checked the time. It was today. I opened Twitter and saw the trending hashtag climbing rapidly: #WashingtonShooting.

My face went pale.

My hands trembled with the surge of emotion. When I finally managed to click through, I read the news reports.

...Washington D.C.

...Over a hundred casualties.

I closed my eyes. My phone clattered to the floor.

But I was beyond caring about that now.

It's all real!

The thought filled me with dread.

All the dreams I've had this past month—they're all real!

A month ago, my family was on a road trip when we got into an accident. My parents died instantly. I survived, and I awakened an ability—I could glimpse the fate of human civilization in parallel worlds through my dreams.

The night after I buried my parents, grief-stricken and exhausted, I had a nightmare: October 1, 2022, Independence Day, zombies would suddenly outbreak globally, and humanity would suffer catastrophic losses.

I thought it was just a nightmare. But for the next month, every night I dreamed of different disasters befalling parallel versions of Earth.

Floods. Earthquakes. Volcanic eruptions. Global heatwaves. Ice ages. Magnetic storms...

I closed my eyes, my face ashen, remembering those horrifying scenes.

Human strength is nothing against nature.

My movements woke Cooper, my orange tabby, who stretched lazily, extending his limbs before hopping onto the bed. He padded over to me, his wet nose sniffing, his fluffy head nuzzling my arm affectionately, meowing softly.

Duke, my German Shepherd sleeping by the bed, shook his majestic head and whimpered. He picked up my fallen phone and gently placed his furry head in my hand, dropping the phone there.

The warm, fuzzy sensation snapped me back to reality.

I hugged Cooper close, petted Duke's head, and took the phone from his mouth. I tapped the darkened screen back to life.

The screen showed: September 24, 2022, 5:49 AM.

One week left.

I scrolled through the news. Everything seemed calm except for the Washington shooting still trending. The rest was celebrity gossip and COVID lockdown updates in various neighborhoods.

Nothing unusual.

Of course not. I'd observed the pattern: the disasters in my dreams varied, but the timing was always the same—October 1, 2022, 4:00 AM. Like nature's malevolent Independence Day gift.

I didn't know if my world would suffer like the parallel ones, but in all twenty-three dreams, every single Earth was devastated by catastrophe.

Better to prepare.