Fiction

Hello, Apocalypse

That it was coming, few doubted. It was merely the logistics of it that were shrouded under a cloak of darkness.
At least, until today.
The when’s, the how’s, the why’s of the impending disaster were at long last revealing their true form. Like a monster that had been growling in a corner for years, finally bearing its teeth.
Climate scientists in the USA, Britain, Europe, China and Australia would have been able to indulge in a brief but potent burst of euphoria, with their pent up curiosity that had manifested itself in years and years of painstaking research about the environment finally being satisfied. Their celebrations would not last long: they would quickly have to digest the harsh reality of their world being swept away, quite literally.
By way of theories, a freeze over was not an uncommon one. A reenactment of the ice age that would leave before it nothing more than an abandoned, unmoving wasteland was a popular hypothesis. Non-believers conjured up an image of an inferno of sorts in their mind’s eyes. They would not have had to strain their imaginations too much, though. Forest fires all over the world had painted the perfect picture as to what would happen when the sun finally had its say, with the globe’s ozone shield peeling away layer by layer until only the bulb was left: the Earth, bare and vulnerable. Defenseless.
Even for the most hardened of souls, drowning is a chilling notion. It pins two of our most basal human instincts against one another, turning them into each other’s opponents: Breathing, and Survival. Underwater, you’re faced with an inescapable paradox. To inhale is the one action that tempts you the most, but it is also what will be the primary cause of your death, because water, not oxygen, will come flooding down your windpipe. Your body will do what it is hardwired to do, so much so the action may even take place independent of your permission. When you feel what may as well be poison rushing into your lungs, you’ll know that it is all over for you.
Rising sea levels and the universal state of emergency declared by governments around the world meant that many would likely suffer that fate. Countries had been planning for ways to manage the predicted 11C rise in Arctic temperatures over the next century. The melting of ice caps would not only cause sea levels to rise: since ice reflects sunlight back into space, the Earth’s natural insulation system would be disrupted as well. However, the tactics devised to deal with these scenarios lay in a mangled heap on the hypothetical floor, as the process of handling the rising sea levels had outstripped the ability to do so far earlier than anyone had predicted. Humanity was left without an alternative as Mother Nature finally pushed back.
Ralph knew he was being foolish. He knew it was ridiculous and he knew it was pointless. But on an uncharacteristically warm night in January, the twelve-year-old boy frenetically pulled on jersey after jersey, until he had at least five layers between his skin and his overcoat. Families had been given strict instructions that luggage of any kind would be confiscated; ships were going to be overcrowded as it were. Ralph placed his cool fingertips against his temples- his head was scalding, and began to count the number of times the wind outside caused the screen door to slam against its frame. He tried to think of nothing else.
The television would have been a welcome distraction. One would expect to have it on at full volume during a crisis, reporters squawking out emergency updates. Today though, the screen remained as black as the sky outside. The January 2024 floods were almost unimaginably under-reported towards their latter stages. Journalists have been known to put their lives at risk to obtain a story, an image, that one moment where you capture the essence of an event better than anyone else was able to. In this case, cameras had been abandoned, lives being put first, reporters armed with the knowledge that even if they were able to obtain that elusive image, few, if any, would live to see it.
Not that it would have mattered. As you would imagine, cable was out.
A natural disaster, an event far beyond political control, can come to be seen as the great leveler. From the moment we are born up to the moment that we perish, aspects of inequality -wealth, power, and prestige- shape our lives. A select group of people is put on a pedestal that few who have not been born onto are able to climb up upon. But that pedestal is metaphorical, not literal. It would not elevate anyone above the rising tide. Mother Nature cares not about your position in society. Squatters and CEOs alike made their way to the hastily constructed rocket launch sites and the overcrowded harbours, knowing full well that when the water finally arrived at their feet, it would matter little how much money you had.
Right from the outset, it was clear that the governments’ evacuation plans were unrealistic. No one had anticipated that the floods would reach the levels that they had. Nobody had prepared. Mars had always been touted as a potential settlement area for when the Earth’s population grew too large, but no one could have foreseen an evacuation plan of this scale: commercial rockets thrown together by unskilled workmen being used to shovel heap after heap of human life away from the place that they once called home. The alternative primitive-like strategy of packing as many people as possible onto ships was as porous as a sieve, given that there were evidently insufficient vessels to accommodate even a fraction of a fraction of the population. Selfish human nature was bound to result in vicious fighting to obtain one of the limited spaces aboard a ship. The method of rationing supplies also had yet to be determined, given that no one was entirely sure when these containers would eventually dock. Or if they ever would.
Ralph recognized the scratchy tone of voice that his mother used whenever her nerves were stretched thin, as she screeched something incomprehensible to his brother. He surveyed the wreck that was his room as the voices grew in volume, walking over to his bookcase while anticipating the inevitable flinging open of his bedroom door. A little red diary caught his eye, and he flipped it open. His entire class had been forced to maintain a journal, and Ralph smiled sadly as he understood how a return to normality was almost impossible now. He began to read to distract himself, while outside, the voices grew louder still.
“It has to be now!”
“You don’t have any sort of plan to contact him if we go!”
“So we wait here, until we all get swallowed up? Your father he’s, he’s probably already… we can’t wait any longer.”
It was after he had read the sentence ‘today we celebrated Miss Anna’s birthday in class’ for the fifth time that he realized that he wasn’t paying attention to what he was reading.
Ralph heard a hand on his doorknob and his already jittery hands fumbled, sending the book clattering onto the wooden floor.
His older brother, Anthony, burst into the room along with their mother, who simply raised her finger towards the door.
“Leaving. Come.”
The look on his mother’s face did nothing to quell Ralph’s already increasing distress. A sort of demented, dazed expression had taken up residence in her eyes. The appearance of someone who couldn’t quite believe what was happening, but knew that she had to take action anyway. He looked away as quickly as possible, wasting little time in scurrying past her towards the front door.
His brother walked on behind him, staying silent. As they were about to exit, Anthony reached for the umbrella leaning against the frame of the door. Ralph stared at him incredulously, a mix of wanting to laugh at the irony of the action, and cry at the futileness of it. His brother smirked at the young boy’s expression, “Old habit,” he shrugged.
It was a bizarre sight as they stepped out of the house. The roads resembled winding streams rather than neighbourhood streets, but above them the rain had slowed to an almost non-existent drizzle. It tended to do that, the rain. Stop. For tiny intervals, just long enough to allow a glimmer of hope for those who dared to dream that the environment would sort itself out, before it shook everyone out of their denial by drenching them in torrential rain once more.
“What are you waiting for?!” their mother screeched maniacally from inside the house, “Get in the car!”
The family had been ill prepared for the evacuation. Awaiting the return of their father from his parents’ home, they had wasted valuable time in departing for the harbour. A menacing threat hung in the air: what if the ships were already full? The elephant in the room meanwhile was breaking furniture and stomping holes in the floor: what had happened to their father?
Ralph watched unblinkingly as his mother rather pointlessly scrabbled with her keys in order to lock the front door of the house before sprinting over to join her sons in the four-wheel drive.
The silence pressed in on Ralph’s eardrums as they swerved through the waterlogged streets and onto the highway. It was the same route that he and his brother used to take when the latter would drive the both of them to school. How different everything seemed now. Ralph felt his stomach contort itself in ways he didn’t know it could as he wondered whether or not his classmates were going to make it in time to secure a spot on one of the evacuation vessels. What would happen if they didn’t?
A violent jerk brought Ralph right back to the present. Reaching over to try and prevent his younger brother from seeing the reason his mother had slammed so suddenly on the breaks, Anthony was too late. Ralph had already seen the corpse, floating sickeningly face down in the water; a knife plunged into its back. Fighting had been expected- after all, it was every man for himself, but seeing such a literal picture of what could potentially await them at the harbour, which was a mere 15 minutes away by that point, had left the entire family frozen with fear.
“We can’t,” Anthony finally managed to stammer, his outwardly calm persona clearly shaken, “We… no. We have to try something else.”
As Ralph watched his mother, who was no longer able to drive, trade seats with Anthony, he noticed that tears were rolling down her face. He hadn’t realised until then that his cheeks were wet as well.
In one swift motion, Anthony maneuvered the car so that it was facing the opposite direction from which they had originally come from, and started to drive away. The sun hung low in the sky, about to set, taking with it the last glimmer of hope that Ralph and his family had of survival.
Ralph didn’t recall falling asleep, but the sky was dark by the time he awoke. Drowsy and confused, it took the young boy a few seconds to remember the ordeal he was in, and he wished more than anything that he could slip back into dreamland. That was of course, until he saw the terrifying, magisterial creation that stood in the distance.
The gargantuan rocket, that only grew in stature as they drove closer, was constructed by underpaid, unskilled, labourers in miserable conditions under huge time pressure. And yet here it stood, protruding into the night sky like a metallic mountain.
Seeing that his mother was yet to be disturbed from her slumber, Ralph could bear it no longer. “Are we all going to die?” he asked his brother, surprised inwardly at the bluntness of his question, which he had intended to phrase less morbidly.
Anthony smiled a calm little smile, and shook his head.
“Why don’t you think so?” Ralph asked, quite confounded by his older brother’s quiet confidence that everything was going to work itself out, when he himself was struggling to push away the disturbing thoughts swimming around in every corner of his brain that threatened to overwhelm him.
“Look at the stars, Ralph. Look how many of them there are.”
Ralph peered out of the window at the momentarily clear sky and noted with astonishment that the darkness was indeed dotted, no, packed with glittery specks of lights. It was unlike anything he had ever seen before. He turned back to his brother wide-eyed.
“No one would have put that many stars up there if we were all going to die tonight.”

Sheena Kaur Sidhu