Scourge of the Sun

Sweat Streamed down his face in narrow rivulets as he stood out on the balustrade, looking outward over the remains of what had once been Manhattan Island.

Dust blew in great clouds across the hollowed out shells of downtown New York. Nowhere did life seem to exist, choked off by the dust, and the sweltering heat.

There was movement to his left. He shifted his gaze towards Central Park.

A Crawler was crawling towards the balustrade where he remained in the shadows, its solar panels reflecting the harsh sunlight into his eyes.

The Crawler stopped, lifted up an arm. It began to turn slightly back and forth, reflecting the sun's rays in a repeated pattern.

"Help, S.O.S. Need Help!" It said.

He drew a mirror from an inside pocket of his tunic and held it upward into the sunlight.

"Stay inside, get in shade, we will come for you by nightfall." He sent to them, using the same rudimentary form of morse code.

Even though his hand was protected from the sunlight by a thick leather glove. The sun's heat still permeated through its porous surface, blistering his hand.

He quickly drew the mirror back into the shade, letting it cool before he dropped it back into his breast pocket.

He turned and entered a stairwell, descending into darkness...

* * *

Karyn stared upward at the domed ceiling of her domicile, cursing the cool concrete that protected her from the lethal rays of the sun above ground.

Tears streamed down her face as she stared at the paintings adorning the wall. Seascapes, Arizona sunsets, Deciduous forests in Autumn, all things that Earth had once known, but would never know again.

She envied those few people who had escaped the planet before the United Federation of the Northern Hemisphere closed the Interplanetary Skyway, barring the remaining humanity from leaving the planet.

Many years ago, a group of scientists managed to grow a weak ozone layer on Jupiter's moon, Titan. The moon was now a temperate paradise. Of course, only the really rich and wealthy could afford an immigration charter to move to Titan.

She'd even brave the acid rain of Venus, or the freezing temperatures of Mars. Anything but this blasted desert planet, and its scourge, the sun. This planet was a hovel, a ghetto where all forms of life were becoming extinct.

She got up off her chair, and opened her door, leaving her domicile and out into darkness...

* * *

Matthew sat at the controls of his Crawler, sweat pouring off his face as he navigated the behemoth spider around the buildings of former New York City, and down the streets, looking for a source of shade.

Soon, he came upon the remains of the Empire State Building, and he moved to the lee of the skeletal structure, basking in the meager amount of shade that the ancient building provided.

He glanced at the temperature gauge on his control panel, which read "158 degrees Fahrenheit." It was just too hot! It was no wonder why the planet was swiftly becoming uninhabitable after the sudden collapse of the Ozone Layer.

The only fertile remnants of former Earth were the Poles, and a small ring of ocean surrounding the Equator, stretching to the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.

The Arctic Circle, now the United Federation of the Northern Hemisphere, became a fertile savannah, which was ideal for farming. Its one cash crop, tobacco, was plentiful and abundant. Until the rivers and lakes began to dry up.

That was Matthew's mission. He was an Emissary to the Federation, sent to the peoples of the deep desert to bring their water preservation methods northward, to save the cash-crop and bring better life back to the northern hemisphere.

He looked out the visor of the crawler and watched the sunset, the sun dipped below the western horizon, and the world was shrouded in darkness...

* * *

Grover ran his blistered hand under the tap, allowing the tepid water to run over the first degree burns he had received giving his message to the Federation Crawler. It would be nighttime soon, and then it would be time to go above ground, in the hopes of saving the Crawler and its crew before they were attacked by the Night Raiders.

The sirens above ground went off, signaling the beginning of night. Grover layered back into his desert clothing, and went above ground, into the darkness...

* * *

His mouth broke out in a malicious snarl as he watched the Crawler.

"Let him power down!" He thought

With the oppression of night, the temperature began to drop drastically, soon it would be freezing, and then the Federation Crawler would have to drop its shields to preserve energy to keep it warm.

The blue surface of the shield began to fade and finally, it was gone.

"Night Raiders, Attack!" He yelled to his companions.

The night soon exploded into a flurry of bullets and sunbeams.

There were two types of weapons that these peoples used. Guns from the twentieth century, which were salvaged from the looting of museums and historical buildings, and Sunbeams and Sunswords, two weapons charged during the day by sunlight, harvesting the solar energy into powerful blasts of heat, or a single bar of light, which seared and went into flesh instantaneously.

Grover stood up from his vantage point, holding his Sunsword in his hand, its yellow beam of light aimed at the chest of a Night Raider.

He parried a beam from a Sunbeam, and sent his Sunsword spiraling downward into the chest of another Night Raider.

"Retreat!" The call reverberated down the side of the ravine. "The Guardians of Dawn and Dusk are here!"

As abruptly as it had begun, the battle ended.

Grover went to the front of the Federation Crawler.

"Powerdown, compact the Crawler, and come with us!"

The lights inside the crawler went out, bathing the night in darkness...

* * *

There was a momentary lapse in the mustard-colored clouds, and Tesla glanced down at Earth.

No longer was the planet a blue star in the distance, but rather, a yellow star.

More mustard-colored clouds formed, blocking out the sky, and the constant acid-rain of the planet Venus began again.

"Curse the day I bought this fucking charter!" Tesla screamed at the clouds and the acid-rain falling outside her window.

"Wump-wump-wump-wump!" The A.R.T.S. or Acid Rain Transistor System began harvesting the acidic rain from outside, fragmenting it into useable water, and burning the sulfur that kept her air conditioning running.

How she hated the oppressive rain of Venus, the marshy climate, and the foreboding, mustard-colored clouds that continuously blotted out the sun. She'd take the hot sun and harsh climate of Earth anyday.

The oxygen shutters above her home cut off, and Tesla collapsed into darkness.

* * *

"Run damn you, Run!" Grover yelled as the grey light of dawn began to peer over the horizon, bringing a moderate rush of heat that raised the outside temperature above 70 degrees.

They were still a great distance from the rendez-vous point, a ramshackle skeleton of a building that was the former Plaza Hotel.

They managed to run into dead Central Park as the first rays of dawn began to peer over the horizon.

Everything was agony...

Grover looked down at his hands, which began to burn and blister as the sunlight bagan to touch them. A first degree burn became a second, which then amplified into third degree.

His eyes, unprotected by sunwear, burst into flame, melting out of their sockets, cascading down his face.

All he remembered before he died was the sudden oppression of darkness...

* * *

Karyn travelled by night across the Marianna Trench, which, no longer filled with water, became an ideal highway for travellers to cross great distances both above and below ground.

She had passed the Federation Checkpoint at L'Ocean D'Equator, the small ring of water that surrounded the Equator. She was heading south, and had been for a month, towards the People's Communist Republic of Antarctica, and its capitol, the city Antarctingrad, in hopes of buying a charter off this god-forsaken planet.

Three weeks later, exhausted, she entered the ocean zone of Antarctica, and the soothing milder temperatures, which she basked in for what seemed an age.

She got her charter...

As she entered the gates of Antarctingrad, a notorious rape-murderer had his way with her, killing her, and leaving her body deep in the Antarctic Ocean.

He drove his car down into the Mariana trench, and darkness consumed him...

* * *

Up north, in the remains of the city Ice Cove, the last river of the north dried up, and the United Federation of the Northern Hemisphere erupted into a massive civil war with one objective...water. The atomic bomb was used, and the entire population of the north was wiped out in the ensuing nuclear winter.

In Antarctica, the ozone layer slowly began to rebuild, causing the planet to enter a second Ice Age. As the Polar Ice caps refroze, and water was again plentiful, the entire population of the southern hemisphere died of exposure.

On the planet Venus, the massive supercomputer that operated the planet's oxygen system crashed, and the populace suffocated in their homes.

On Mars, a great cataclysm eruted as Phobos and Deimos, propelled by a shift in Mars' gravity, hurtled towards the planet, crashing into the polar caps. Billions died of the ensuing carnage and nuclear wind.

On Titan, humanity's last stronghold, the citizens slept restlessy, their dreams haunted by dying phantoms. Hearing the screams of their dying brethren all over the galaxy.

In the remains of Central Park, a sign remains unscathed by heat or ice. It reads: "Armageddon is upon us, this is truly the end of life on Planet Earth. The remnants of humanity survive elsewhere, but we have killed the mother of all mankind. It is our fault the world became our scourge, our punishment. I depart now for Titan, and I hope humanity learns a lesson this day, so that we don't kill our next planet as well."