GUEST STORY: The Sky of Fire

I'm going to be honest. I think this is the best story Jason has written to date.


They lit the sky on fire. The planet was dying. They released chemicals into the atmosphere that were supposed to turn the pollution into clean air. It didn’t work. The sky is made of lead. It rains bullets. You would’ve thought we’d have learned our lesson, but we are worse now then ever.

I am certainly the last man alive. I am the lucky one, or the unlucky one depending on your point of view. I was testing a space suit beneath the manmade ocean when they ran their experiment. I lost all communications, and when I emerged from the bowels of the rapidly evaporating Cerulean Ocean, I was crushed with twice the amount of pressure than from the bottom of the sea, the planets new atmosphere. The space suit works like we hoped it would.

I immediately take shelter from the metallic storm, in the space test center where this suit was designed. No one else is alive. Dead bodies fill the rooms like Armageddon. They don’t even look like human beings anymore. An epiphany strikes me, and I sink to the bottom of my suit. Every living thing on the planet just died at the same moment less then an hour ago. Every bird plucked out of the sky in mid flight, every forest and every creature living inside every tree, every person I have ever known or ever loved. Dead. Although odors can’t pass through the vacuum that is my suit, I can still smell the death, and it makes me vomit.

Their brains weigh a thousand pounds. I’m only capable of walking because of the suits boisterous hydraulics. It sustains my life in almost every conceivable way. It absorbs molecules and turns them into oxygen, it extrapolates the hydrogen from the atmosphere and hydrates me, it takes the dim sunlight and converts it into energy, and it dissects my waste and recycles the nutrition back into my body, but it can only keep it up for so long. If I take the suit off, I die. My body will implode like all these other suckers. The atmosphere is so harsh I wouldn’t even last a fraction of a second. I’m forced to slowly starve to death. The thermometer in my suit reads 600 degrees and rising on the outside. The inside maintains a tepid 80 degrees. I’m issued a life sentence to my body armor.

I make my way through the facility in hopes that they were running some other strange experiments preserving the life of any other human being. I know the outcome of the search before I make it. I go anyway, out of vanity and boredom. Waiting for my body to run out of nutrition.

I remain in the facility for a week, staying in my old office most of the time. Not even a picture of my family survives the planets new climate. My depression is complete when I picture what their dead bodies must look like now. I fight the urge a hundred times to make the dangerous trek home to see if there’s still some way I can save them. Warm tears run down my cheek, and I pray for my destruction to come.

I look for someone to blame for this whole mess, and I realize that this all came about because of the planets fleeting condition. It wasn’t nature that did this, we did. The extinction of the human race was methodical. The pollution we created over the last half-century should have been stopped a long time ago. I didn’t stop even after the imminence was so obvious. Thirty percent of all human babies were being born with cancer. Those that lived faced terrible odds that they would be born mutants. My wife had six miscarriages before we had one healthy child, and I couldn’t think of a better way to get to work. We sacrificed our green energy sources when they devised a quicker cheaper fuel. Of course it pushed pollution into he air, but a full tank of gas was cheaper than a glass of water. We moved our whole civilization on to the hybrid grids. Radicals filled the streets with picket signs, and made sure we kept “clean” alternatives that no one would be caught dead using.

Thinking about the grandkids I’ll never have, I cry. The planet will be a better place after I’m gone, but I don’t want to leave it like this. I’m embarrassed to leave it like this. I imagine aliens coming from beyond the solar system, noting the disgrace of the human beings and moving on. We treated the planet like such shit that we can’t even invite guests over. How did it get this bad?

My son always use to remind me to recycle, he would change the knob on the washing machine to the cold setting, he wanted me to buy a stupid looking solar car. I always thought it was so funny that he would worry about the little things, that he still had hope for the future. He’s dead now, roasting on the living room floor with his limbs scattered. At my lowest I decide to brave the violent cataclysm outside.

The horizon is red and pink, and the mountains reach into the sky higher than my eye can see. The miasma is translucent, but physical. I take note of the fact that the outside temperature has peaked at just over 700 degrees Fahrenheit. The ground quakes truculently as I walk away from the facility and the roof finally falters under the pressure of the dense atmosphere. My life is spared once again. The Impervious suit shudders with every step I take.

My body is weak from sleep deprivation, and malnutrition, but the suit is doing most the work walking through the necropolis. My heart is ripped in two every time I see a fallen monument. I am the final spectator, witnessing the extinction of the human race, and there isn’t a fucking thing I can do about it. I drive the suit through the city faster than before, as fast as it can go, and I don’t look back.

My home is past the endless desert where the first colony was set-up. My wife didn’t want to raise kids in the big city, even though that’s where my job was, Olympus City, the city of the future. Now it’s just a massive graveyard, the city of the dead.

It’s a mere 500 degrees outside the metal metropolis. I look past the wasteland towards my old home. Boiling lava spits from the surface, turning craters into a plethora of fiery puddles. I walk right through them as if they weren’t there. The suit was designed to withstand temperatures far hotter than lava. They have been developing heat shields that could resist the temperatures on the surface of the sun. I keep moving through the venomous environment. The gloom in the sky consumes the whole planet. The shadow of death looms directly over my head. I ward it off for only one reason, to make my final resting place as close to my family as possible. Every step I take across the chaos is one step closer to eternal sleep. The flesh on my blistered feet peels from the muscle. The pain forces my chest to convulse. My legs give way, but I persevere, my own annihilation fuels me, a man driven by death.

My toils bring me past the N.O.V.A. hybrid nuclear power plant. I used to pass it everyday on the drive to work. The once massive pillars have been cut down to ash, the uranium core has fallen to the ground, and radioactive wastes gush from the rubble. This place was supposed to be safe. It was suppose to be indestructible. It use to be a symbol of our advancement, created with the same technology that propels our space ships a million miles an hour. The power it generated powered the whole continent. The guise of its purity has been torn, it was so beautiful, but now it’s regressed to a holocaust. The temperature in its vicinity is off the charts, had I not been wearing this suit, it would quickly melt my bones to cinder. A dense haze emanates from the plant forming a torrent of dark clouds with the prominence of the planets core. It radiates dark light over the desert, and I can see my reflection in my visor. My own dread image wrenches my stomach a full rotation and makes me nauseous.

I can hear the planet turning, it sounds like a pyre. If I listen closely I can hear the euphoric voices of my family calling out to me. The screams come from the ghost town in front of me. There isn’t a building left standing. Metal skeletons poke out of the ground marking the territory where people use to spend their cursed lives. A sandstorm blows over the town, and runs right through me. It cuts into the suit as if it were made of knifes. The force of the dauntless gale lifts me up and hurls me back. I loose a kilometer. Blood sifts through my broken skin, but I’m still alive. This smoldering dead planet is trying to get rid of me, but I won’t let it. I get up and try again.

Fragmented carcasses line the streets. The walls are painted with blood. I find solace in the fact that they all died instantly. I reach my home barely alive, and find the liquid remains of my dog spattered across the front yard. The easiest part of the journey is behind me. Frozen in place, unable to move into the remains of my old home. I turn away. Hours pass before I muster the courage to look back again. The temperature has dropped drastically, below freezing. The inside of the suit remains a stoic 80 degrees.

My family calls out to me again, and I call back to them. Mustering the last of my courage, I breach the threshold that was once my front door, and go into my old living room. I find their crushed rib cages twisted together. At least they had each other. I fall to my knees crying. I laugh through tears, and release the pressure lock on my helmet, taking a deep breath from the bottom of my lungs, I lift the fish bowl from my head.

I fall over expecting my body to implode. Wanting it to. It doesn’t happen. I look straight up through the fallen roof into the pink sky. The temperature is 80 degrees. The purging is complete. The atmosphere is as clear as the day we first made it.

The fix brought on the apocalypse, it reminds me of a famous story my great grandfather use to tell about the marsh of Camarina, People were dying from a strange epidemic, they believed the disease was coming from the marsh. Despite the warnings from their oracles they drained it anyway. Once they drained it, there was nothing to stop the hostiles on the other side, and the whole village was slaughtered down to the last infant. I memorized the story, but never learned the value. My great grandfather was a member of the last generation of Earthlings. He came to Mars on one of the last ships before Earth crumbled. This is the second planet human beings have destroyed.

I remove the armor from my tattered body, and I walk on the cold red ground. Gazing into the sky I notice that Phobos is missing. The heavy atmosphere must have pulled the moon out of orbit crashing it into the surface of Olympus Mons. Fore the mighty mountain is now a shadow of itself. The devastation brought on by our own decadence is inconceivable. The murderous atmosphere killed all life on the planet, and anything that would sustain life along with it. I am the last exception, but I won’t be for long. It’ll take millions of years for this newly thriving planet to sustain life as complex as a human being again. All of this happened because our technology slowly siphoned the life from us, we were always looking for the quick way to advance, but the more advancement we made the faster we were killing ourselves. It took thousands of years for us to destroy the Earth, but less then a century to compromise Mars. We figured out a miracle cure at the end, but at the cost of all life itself, a reset button.

I assemble the bones of my dead family, and bury them together. I keep pieces of their picked bones to hold against my chest. My work here is done now, and I feel my life flying away from me. I lie face up on the mutual grave of my wife and son, and close my eyes. The sky sheds heavy tears of pure water onto my face and the dry Martian surface, liberating us both. My arms and chest shake in my last moments of consciousness. The sun sets forever on all mankind. I go to sleep with my family and dream.