Death by Degrees...

Source

"Hello.. Hello.. Anyone listening.. Err.. Please we nee.. STATIC.. three kids and seven... STATIC... The heat is now with us, if anyone.. STATIC..."

There was a click, and the voice was gone. I put down the radio, and held my no longer recognizable hair in my hands. This was the fourth distress call my radio had intercepted in as many days, and the news was not getting any better. If anything, the number of casualties were only multiplying. I picked up my pen, and continued my journal which the call had interrupted...

I had warned them, they know I did. 15 long years ago I had called the world's attention to the impending catastrophe, and about 6 years ago I repeated the same call. Mine was the first distress call there ever was about the apocalypse, and just like the many others that followed, no one who mattered responded.

Who would have anyway? I was a woman playing a game that belonged in the men's world. Yes, as pitiful as it does sound, gender inequality still holds as strong as ever, even in 2378, and I was nothing but a pest to the big players and those in power.

So the pollution continued, and year after year after year the wastes of the robotic firms were sent into the atmosphere. No one bothered to think of the consequences and no one called anyone to order, no one in the appropriate places anyway. The status quo remained, and those who made the big bucks kept making bank...

Until the explosion...

We all knew the earth was dying; they knew it as much as I did, even if none of them would have cared enough to tell the world. Only the money and the bots mattered. But what we didn't know was the speed at which the earth was failing, and we were particularly blind to it because nature being nature, had disguised it well.

So when on June 17th, 2385 the sun exploded, the world panicked, because the world knew not what else to do. The best scientists had no answers, the religious leaders preached Armageddon to anyone who would listen, and the men who caused all these ran, but in truth they had no place to hide, for nowhere was safe; not an island, not a bunker in the world could keep them away from the impending death.

Meanwhile, the sky rained fireballs on the earth's surface, killing and destroying all that stood in its path. Whole cities were reduced, not to ruins, but more like melted mercury; forever boiling, forever dead. There was no escaping the disaster, because the fireballs, maybe sunballs would be a better word, they could not be quenched.

One respite remains however, one tiny little respite...

There seems to be a solution available, an information I happened to have overheard from one of my radio interceptions. Some ancient chemical plant from the early 2000s in Saudi Arabia has managed to withstand the heat, and the feeling is that the element used to construct its security system could help stop more deaths across the world, and prevent the seemingly inevitable extinction of the human race. I do not know if...

"Mummy...! mummy...! mummy...!"

I turned to find Luke, my fourteen year old boy running to me, his face a picture of pronounced fear. How did he get out of the hideout?

Suddenly right before my eyes he falls, and then I see it; the sunball clear and real, enveloping all as it slowly approached the shelter. A myriad thoughts rocked my mind at that moment - why now? had the earth spinned 360 already? where was Jake and Julia? why my son?

All those thoughts enveloped into nothingness the moment Luke was caught up in the heat, I died and woke and died again. Nothing mattered anymore, nothing. Humans be damned...

I only heard the faint shout of Angela, and the chopper starting up...

I remembered my unfinished journal...

Then I embraced the heat...

THE END

#SladenSpeaks

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Written for @calluna's Tell a Story to me Contest

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