Lucid Waking

we had ten years left on earth

    “It seems as though I’m glimpsing things through a bubble of time and no one can stop the ride to let me off. Life is passing me by, but I can’t seem to stop long enough to notice that we’re in a bubble in space and the only things we had left, we took for granted. ‘We have ten years left on this earth. Are you ready to face the consequences?’”
    He glanced at her in the fading light. Her blond hair was reflecting back the orange light in a copper glow and her skin shimmered in an otherworldly way. She was standing in the sand looking out at the ocean, now filled with mountains of garbage islands. A dark cloud of pollution reflected the color of the sunset as a ceiling above the earth.
    “Eventually we’ll have to evacuate. We can’t possibly stay here.”
    She wrapped her thin arms around her body and took a deep breath, immediately hacking up the particles in her lungs. The breath of his oxygen mask hummed as he rhythmically breathed in and out. The machine buzzed and he turned to empty out the carbon that accumulated in the tank. She fell over in the sand and gasped for air, pulling up handfuls of sand in her fight for oxygen. He bent down beside her and in one fluid motion pulled the mask over her mouth and nose. She screwed up her face in sorrow, but he could hear her gasp for air as the oxygen quickly whooshed into her mouth.
     “We have to get out of here,” he echoed, his voice far away, yet resonant. He waved his arm over the landscape to present his point. “We’ll stowaway.”
    Earth was left to the people too poor to pay for a ticket to the space colony on Mars, the closest colony to Earth. Most of the people left had managed to swipe gas converters and now lived in anarchy under all of the trash, burrowing away from humanity and accepting this hell.
   “Thank goodness there are still flights left.”
    “Only to take species that have still survived up with them. I hear there’s a zoo on Alpha-Apollo.”
    She nodded and pulled at the straps of her mask. “I can’t live like this. We tried, but no one would listen and now all they do is run away from the problem instead of fixing it. Damn it!”
    She coughed again, but pushed him away when he tried to replace her mask. “I don’t care if I die.”
    All he was left to do was watch as she hacked up blood doubled over on the sand, her gas mask around her neck and still pumping out oxygen.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Apocalypse, Science Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.