Something was wrong. Not just with my yard but with everyone's. I had been dreading this day. I knew it would come, but never did I think that it would be so soon. I stared up into the sky. Not so bad. Not different at all, I told myself. But who was I kidding? Not very different but the dark haze was still there. No ,it wasn't a cloud. Couldn't have been a cloud. Clouds were a puffy white. This was different. This was an unhealthy grey black. No problem, I thought again. It wasn't serious yet. Then I looked to the ground. Another unhealthy colour. The grass was green. But it was a sickening colour. A brown green. The trees were wrong too. The leaves were that same green and the bark looked as if it had been through a fire. It had a charcoal colour to it.

     This was serious after all. It wasn't just the black sky, it was everything. The inevitable had finally happened. Mankind had diseased it's precious earth. OK. I can handle this, I told myself. I have been training my whole life for this moment. I could fix this.

     But there wasn't enough time. We didn't expect to see the signs for another twenty years, and by that time we would have had a way to predict it five years ahead of time. Now the earth would be extremely difficult to cure. Next to impossible. "Once the signs show up we can't do anything." That was a quote the professor had said one year ago. So we couldn't do anything now? It wasn't true. It couldn't be. I would do something. Sample the plants, oxygen and water.

    Well, there were plants all around me and I had the equipment in the lab, so I would be able to start right away. I took several leaves and pieces of grass in with me. When I got to my lab, I started to analyze them. This was very, very bad. There was a pollution level 13 times what it normally was. My heart sank. Was he right after all? Was there no hope after all?

     There was only one way to find out. I waled up to my room and called the professor. "Yes? You'll meet me tomorrow at 12:00 in the lab? And you'll get all the students? Great... goodbye."  I hung up the phone and made preparations for tomorrow.

     "Hello," I said once everybody was there. "I am sure that you have all seen the fog outside?"
     They nodded. "It appeared so fast. Just overnight."
     "As you probably know, those are the visual effects that we have all been dreading. I have done some samples on the greenery near my house and found them to be +897." There was a gasp.
     "But that's 13 times the normal amount." I nodded glumly.
     "There's nothing we can do." That was my professor.
     "But we have to try," I screamed at him. The others nodded in agreement.
     "Have it your way. But there's nothing you can do. You should just try to enjoy your last few weeks of life."

Weeks? I wondered. Had I just heard him say weeks? We had never talked about how long we would have if the visual did appear. I knew that it wouldn't be very long. But I expected at least a year or two. But it was true. Just weeks.  

     We didn't get our teacher to help. We worked hard the next three weeks. But nothing worked. Every day it got worse. And as it got worse, it got harder to work. Not just because we became agitated but because every day it became harder to breathe. By the end of the second week, the water was getting people sick. We couldn't eat or drink unless it was canned food. But I was surprised. Not once did I hear anything about it on the news. People didn't think that it was serious at all.

     On March twenty ninth we were finally close to a cure. But it was so hard to breathe. SO hard. I was gasping for breath. Each breath was agony. It wasn't that I didn't get enough air, it was that the air I was getting was poison. There was an intense pain in my chest. I gasped again and the pain worsened. I staggered onto my feet, trying to get out into the open. But I didn't get far. After a few painful steps, I crashed to the ground. "Help," I wheezed. But nobody heard me. I stared through the now almost pitch black haze and saw them struggling just as I was. My throat was parched and my lungs ached. If I didn't get some clean air soon I would die. And that's exactly what happened. After several minutes of agony, my body shut down. All at the same time, my breathing and heart stopped and I died.

     The whole world died. They polluted it so much that it just became extinct. Just like the dinosaurs but worse, because we could have prevented it from happening.

©1998 Alicia Peters


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