A dazzling flash of light swept over the entirety of the island, grazing the tops of the trees with its soft touch and racing ahead of itself to collapse gloriously in the dark blue waters of the ocean. The seas were illuminated momentarily with the light of the heavens, it seemed, and the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 glanced up from their deaths and their exhaustion, awed. And with the last traces of this brilliance began the first tremors, increasing in magnitude and violence as the seconds ticked down.
"Holy--" James Sawyer managed to spit out as the ground gave way beneath him, and he and everything, everyone, around him were consumed into the very earth itself. He would have enthusiastically finished the last word of his statement, but his voice was lost in the sudden absence of everything.
They were spinning madly and plunging to their deaths. Eyes shut, eyes open, it made no difference in this non-linear, non-existent space. All that one could noticeably mark was the abrupt crescendo of white noise and the onset of a bright something. They were falling into it. To their deaths.
The survivors extended their hands into the open regions to their sides and before their faces, groping around for some hard surface to cling to. Instead, their fingers wound their way around the hands of those beside them.
Their time had come. Judgment Day was finally here.
Bracing themselves, the survivors released their scattered thoughts into the warm breeze that whipped against their forms. There was nothing else. Nothing to restrain them, nothing to correct them. But they were absolutely still, prisoners of their own liberation.
The increasingly deafening noise was all that filled the survivors' ears. The illumination engulfed them until they were no more than a part of the light themselves, plunging into a garish nothing. The sudden gravity of the floor below came upon them, and they could feel themselves being pulled at all directions.
They would see each other on the other side.