reason. Outside the motel, just feet from her car, her dying body lay almost still, twitching slightly in a seizure as her oxygen- deprived brain shut down. I had never seen a corpse until three days previously: thinking of them as ‘corpses’ was easier to stomach than ‘dead bodies’. Since then I had seen hundreds - many of them strewn, discarded like she was, their brief pause from the wheel the greatest mistake of their lives. The hardest sights were the children, their young faces contorted with pain and confusion as their lungs failed. No one had believed the headlines at first. It seemed utterly ridiculous - the work of an adventurous Hollywood director trying to get his movie noticed. It took five days for the initial reports to become widely accepted, and that was long enough to leave more than half the world’s population too far from help.The news stories had charted our demise with unerring efficiency: first to be affected were the airplanes and long distance ships, the shifting magnetic field created by the slowing of the Earth’s rotation causing GPS navigation systems to fail. The world’s normal rotational speed is one thousand one hundred miles per hour, but since the news companies had picked up on the story it had been decreasing by twenty miles per hour every day. That meant that in just over forty-five days the world would stop turning completely; as a result, the shift of the magnetic field was causing the atmosphere to swing away from the Earth’s poles as they orientated towards its centre. Simply put, in around ten days only the areas near the equator would be left with enough oxygen to sustain human life. My eyes were becoming more and more clouded; the lids were starting to feel weighted. I hoped that this was because it had been three days since I had last slept, rather than the result of a sudden drop in oxygen levels. The first week of my journey was easy; I had been able to stop and sleep after the long days of
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