"It Ends With a Whimper"

Good story title, right? Today's reading comes from Dark Sky magazine, an online pub that features literature and art.

An excerpt from Patrick Parr's story, "It Ends With a Whimper," below:

You are on your fifty-first can of beans as the sky continues to crack and groan. You’re in your basement, or the basement below the basement. It’s a bunker you built nine years ago, right before the turn of the century. Though difficult to later admit, you were one of the dozens who took Y2K seriously. You dug an eight by twelve hole, reinforced the edges and slapped a thick metal door on top of it. The engineers who helped you said you could live inside it for seventy days. After that you’d run out of air. At the moment, you have no choice. It’s been forty-three days since you first (and last) heard the report of worldwide annihilation. Since that day you’ve remained in your bunker, listening to the sky sound like mountains breaking.

Makes you wonder, right from the start, fifty-first can of beans??