A/N: Here we are with the unplanned third 'not' volume of All Things End. If you're a new reader, do not start here. You will understand absolutely zero of what is going on. Go read Volume 1 and 2 and then come back or else you're going to be very lost. For returning readers, as is tradition, the song I am recommending for Finale as a whole is 'The Other Shore' by Aly & Fila.

All Things End: Finale

By: CourageFan09

Chapter 1: The Apocalypse Doesn't Pay The Bills

Caitlin Gibson was the one and only employee left in the entire gas station. A popular pit stop for travelers, it now sat empty with everything from its multiple fast food stations to its coffee shop and gift shop having been left entirely unmanned. Everyone else had fled, including her boss. It didn't matter much though. Nobody had stopped to fill up on gas in at least an hour. Oh, there had been a brief mad rush before, but then it had all...stopped.

They had all heard the rumblings that some sort of emergency was occurring in the city. There had been talk of an ongoing evacuation from the people who had come in during the unexpected rush. It had not surprised them at all after how long those government people had been scouring the city for a weapon or creature or something of the sort. Caitlin had not really paid much attention to any of that. She lived in a town a few miles from here and almost never went into the city unless it was to shop or go to a concert.

Well, with all of the bad news coming out of the city, her fellow employees had started to get nervous. It wasn't until they saw a bright light burst out of the city and all of the traffic came to a complete and total stop that they began to flee. Even now she could see the city on the horizon through the windows of the gas station and she was certain that she could see it shifting and moving about like some sort of living creature, but that just did not make any sort of sense.

A large crocodile of a woman, she had decided that she was going to keep her tail planted firmly where it was. If a nuclear bomb was about to go off in the city and start World War Three, it wasn't like she was going to be alive to care, and if it was just a false alarm, well, she was still getting paid right now, and the bills were due.

She pulled out one of the many cigarettes she kept hidden in the folds of her scales. She knew that she wasn't supposed to be smoking on the job, but who was going to bust her for it now? Besides, if this really was the end of the world, she was going to go out enjoying herself.

"Always thought these things were gonna kill me." She murmured to herself, smoke rising up through her sharp teeth. "Never thought I'd go out in a terrorist attack, or whatever."

The cigarette slipped out of her claws when she heard the glass doors slide open, accompanied by the annoyingly familiar jingle that she was sure would be her eternal punishment in hell. For a moment she was certain that one of the employees had come back to rescue her after she had made her casual announcement that she felt it was pointless to flee. Forgetting her cigarette, she rushed to the counter. Her hopes were immediately dashed.

Standing at the entrance was a disheveled, soggy dog with a missing ear and a downright radioactive looking blue glow. He was breathing heavily as he scanned the massive gas station. His eyes fell upon the abandoned coffee shop counter, and with a look that Caitlin could only describe as manic desperation, he turned to her and blurted out,

"Woman, I demand your finest Double Ristretto Venti, Half-Soy, Nonfat, Decaf, Organic, Chocolate Brownie, Iced Vanilla, Double-Shot, Gingerbread Frappuccino, Extra Hot with Foam, Whipped Cream, Upside Down, Double Blended, with One Sweet'N Low and One Nutrasweet, and Ice!"

Caitlin blinked, too bewildered to question anything that was going on at the moment. "Uh, sure." She said, reaching to pull out a notebook and pen from beneath the counter. "But...could you repeat some of that?"

Even though she was not trained to work the coffee counter, she did her best to fill the guy's order. She then proceeded to watch in amazement as the dog slammed the scalding hot coffee like a man who had just spent three days out in a desert without any water. If it had hurt him, he did not show it. He then had her make a far more simple pot of regular old black coffee as he half limped and half stumbled his way over to the nearest table.

It was around that point that she realized that the dog didn't seem to have any money on him, but he was such a mess that she decided she wouldn't make a problem out of it. Much like with her smoking, nobody was around to notice some coffee going unpaid for. If they were all on the verge of being blown up, it wasn't like it mattered.

She remained stationed by the table, repeatedly refilling the dog's cup as he downed the coffee at speeds she didn't think was possible. His eyes kept wander up toward the window to gaze out at the weirdly shifting city, only to seemingly have some unknown force jerk his eyesight back down onto the coffee cup. This repeated multiple times until the dog finally cried out in an entirely different voice from the one Caitlin had been hearing,

"Seriously, Compute! What the heck are we going to do about that?"

...The dog was talking to himself, and somehow switching between two voices that sounded nothing alike.

"I-I don't know!" The other voice exclaimed, throwing his paws up into the air. "When I signed up for this whole 'getting you to the mountain to save your life' thing, stopping the end of the world was not in the job description!"

His eyes suddenly snapped in Caitlin's direction, alarmed, as if he had forgotten that she was there. Her expression did all of the talking for her.

"It's...not as weird as it looks." He offered, but then reconsidered it. "Actually, it's every bit as weird as it looks, keep pouring."

Caitlin simply shrugged and did her job.

The other voice took over again. "But what are we gonna do? We can't just let them sacrifice people until there are so many Constructs melded into them that they can cover the entire world!"

"I told you, I don't know! I specialize in useless trivia about domestic supernatural threats, not world ending ones!"

"Well, we should focus on what we can do. I know that you're upset about your friends, and we can't do anything for them right now, but we can help those puppies who live outside of the city, right?"

The dog's single ear shot up in alarm, and that much more, er, fancy sounding voice exclaimed, "The puppies!"

He jumped down from the chair, not even sparing Caitlin a glance. He rushed for the door and was gone in an instant. She caught a glimpse of him running across the parking lot through the window, and that was it. She never saw that weird, glowing dog with the two different voices ever again.

Shrugging, she looked down at the nearly empty pot of coffee in her claws. "I don't get paid enough for this crazy blue dog shit." She complained, and went to clock out for the day.

End Of Chapter

A/N: This chapter is definitely a bit shorter than normal, but I wanted it to act as more of an intro anyway. I figured that a short, weird perspective switch would be interesting to write and read. We'll be back to regular sized chapters after this.