I like to write, but nothing to date, that I have ever started out of my school work, has reached completion. I have numerous stories and ideas that over the years have come to be forgotten on the back waters of my hard drive. So I'm uncovering my work, from my most recent and well written, to the the earliest and most hazy pieces.
When the lifegiver takes back
Scrabtrapman
I
The month, I think, is October. The year, 1995, I think. It’s amazing I’ve survived this long. I’ve been battling the heat since the government admitted that the Sun was going red giant back in 1987, but probably, we’d all been feeling it since before then. Many other people have died since then, probably billions, the elderly went first, and the sick, both physically and mentally. If you couldn’t help yourself you were doomed. Then the children, they couldn’t look after themselves. In fairness they did well for the first two years, bands of roving urchins travelled through the streets overpowering passers by and stealing all that they could. But when their prey vanished, their only means of survival, they faded away. It is so rare to see the elderly and the young anymore. Anyone with a child stays well away from the roads and the cities. There are road gangs now, warbands vying for control of petty pocket empires. Any trader that travels along the motorways now has to be constantly on watch. I’ve seen them walk by the orbital with mercenaries flanking their pack horses.
It’s hard to tell who are the good guys now, everyone looks the same, everyone is the same shade of grey so no one talks to each other. I think we are entering a new dark age, which is weird because we
won’t ever come out of it. The news said we have a thousand years left before the Earth becomes completely uninhabitable and there isn’t anybody left. But this heat is already unbearable and we’re only eight years in, I think the scientists were just trying to keep civilisation together. They didn’t do a very good job. If I have the year right then I’m 39, and if I have the month correct, then it was my birthday last month, not that I celebrated. Back in the 60s when I was younger, it was cold on my birthday. Autumnal winds blew golden leaves from the stripping trees and the little shrivelled palletes coated the walk ways and crisped under foot on the drier days. We used to make little piles and crush them but when it rained they always went soggy and rotten and the piles became infested with big spiders with long legs. If there’s one good thing that has come from the impending apocalypse then it’s that no one sees spiders anymore, just dusty old cobwebs. In reality, there are probably still loads of spiders left. I just don’t see them. I haven’t been into a city for years and I haven’t gone into a town for months. The reason being that they have become the psychotic staging grounds of brutal battles between starving civilians, cannibals and tribes, they all fight for water but really they would have more luck digging a bore hole and bucketing it up.
I live in the husk of an aeroplane crashed into the side of a cliff. It is spacious and keeps me safe from the deadly solar rays. Also I have bottled some of the fuel from the engine and apparently, it is a type that works in cars, which means I have an export vital to any traders that pass by. Some of these guys have farms and trade their food in return for the petrol. I don’t think I can stay here much longer though, raiders are moving west and
I’m too close to the roads for comfort. We’ll have to see.
_____
This story was going to be about the demise of the sun and the eventual death of every person on Earth, with our technology not sufficient to colonise other planets, man can only sit about and wait to die as eventually, the Earth turns to desert.