The Encroaching Dark (be warned: this is pretty bleak)

It’s perfectly natural – it’s built into our genes – to act to protect, as best we can, our progeny.

But all creatures are related, interdependent; and cousins should be more kind to each other.

The super-rich were the first to see what was coming. Even those who weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed were freed of the need to struggle from day to day, and had the freedom, the leisure time, to reflect.

Some saw the inevitability of the storm on the horizon years in advance. Some recognised it decades earlier. All knew that control was crucial; and so, they used their wealth to leverage their power. They gamed the system to funnel ever more into their own coffers, while at the same time acting to misinform the masses – perhaps, in their own own minds, they justified this to ‘prevent panic’.

As the global crisis deepened, crops failed on a massive scale. Even those in the ‘Civilized West’ found their supermarket shelves bare, and began to starve. Governments acted, imposing severe rationing. But that did not suffice. The people were offered the choice of avoiding death by starvation by opting for euthanasia, and were rewarded for their sacrifice with increased rations for their nearest and dearest.

Temporarily.

The Resource Wars were brutal. Billions died in agony.

All the while, temperatures mounted, inexorably.

Overfished and polluted, the oceans’ incipient dead zones spread. Algae bloomed, sucking life-giving oxygen from the atmosphere. The dying seas, no longer a source, became instead a stagnating, stinking sink.

The world’s forests and jungles burned to ashes, and the glaciers and ice caps melted.

Secure in their faith, the religious continued to maintain that God had promised never again to flood the land. Yet still the waters rose.

When life outside became utterly unbearable, the elite abandoned their personal jets and helicopters, their expensive yachts and their expansive mansions, and fled to their hermetically sealed bunkers. As civilization fell, they survived… for a time.

Oxygen generators and water recyclers were repaired continuously – and spare parts stocks dwindled.

Then, blight afflicted their hydroponic crops.

When the lights finally went out, they waited in the dark for the end.

Word count: 360