By: Devin Fussa

On September 9, the apocalypse began. We never imagined that it would happen this way; there were no earthquakes, no oversized meteors, no zombies. Fans of “The Walking Dead” spent six years watching a show, only to find that the real apocalypse would be… boring. All of this was rather unfortunate, really, because it seems the end of the world was overhyped. There wasn’t even a sharknado. But, alas, humanity had no choice in the matter. Instead, the apocalypse was brought on by a leaking oil pipe in Helena, Alabama.

With almost 300,000 gallons of gas spilled, our species can now see it’s inevitable doom. “You really couldn’t have planned it any better than this. There are no homes nearby, and it’s fully contained. It’s so fortunate,” said James Pinkney, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Sadly for James, the rest of us don’t feel fortunate. We don’t care about the environment. We just want gasoline.

Gone are the days during which we could roam the streets freely, as the cars of the future quickly become useless piles of metal. To account for this tragic dilapidation of vehicles, horse and buggy sales are at an all-time high. Scooters and bikes, as well, are sold out in Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas. But all of this is futile. The only survivors will be those lunatics at Tesla with Elon Musk set to take over as the emperor of the world. Oh, how he’ll cackle and grin; his weird, un-primitive, electric cars set to survive the trying days ahead. Maybe there will be other survivors, but they’ll be few in number.

In the meantime, citizens out the American Southeast will have to conserve their gasoline. Local gas stations are already packed with doomsday preppers, swarming fuel like buzzards to a carcass. Our gas prices are at a sudden high, and it seems Wall Street is on the brink of implosion. Global banks are soon to fail, whole economies will crumble, and we’ll have to pay $3 more every time we go to Sheetz. We must hold a special pity for those certain Southerners, however, whose pickup trucks burn through fuel at a rate of 30 gallons per mile. The leak is estimated to be fixed by the end of the week, but such a time span seems far too long for North Carolinians to survive. We’re now forced to use fuel sparingly, sometimes even resorting to those two bothersome appendages that help us walk–legs.

With the world soon to re-enter the stone age, the whole of humanity can see it’s inevitable collapse. The Mayans were fairly accurate after all; they were only off by four years. Did they really know? Or were they just really good at guessing? Whatever the answer, the apocalypse has begun and we didn’t even need to wait for the 2016 election. Maybe this is the world’s way of sparing us.