The Last Holiday
I walk through the trees, feeling the bone chilling breeze through my sweater. Walking always helped clear my head. Hearing leaves crunch under my boots as I waded through the skeleton trees helped me to imagine this was just another winter.
As of now, it was late September. The leaves had fallen, the temperature was steadily dropping every day, and Christmas lights flooded the city streets. Cheery Christmas songs were on repeat on every radio station and everyone’s brains as well. I knew every single popular Christmas song like the back of my hand. I could probably out do Mariah Carey on her own song at this point. Even though it most certainly wasn’t, all the financially inclined people pretended like this was a normal winter, like Santa was going to show up at their doorstep or come barreling down their chimneys any minute. All of the poorer people, like my family and I, didn’t even come close to being as blessed.
As I get deeper into the forest, I see ice forming on the trees near a frozen stream. I kick the ice with my heel, but all I get back is a muffled thud. The grass surrounding the stream had turned into an icy, brown, and dead mess. Where there had once been a muddy bank, there was now just sheets of ice. There were no sounds of animals to be heard, and none of them were preparing to hibernate or fly south. There was nowhere for them to go that wasn’t already frozen, anyway.
I feel my phone buzz in my pocket, so I pull it out and glare at the Official Alert that had popped up. The Officials had changed the curfew, once again, and they also stated the temperature was increasingly dropping, once again, like we didn’t already know. It had been months since they promised to find a resolution, but all the research they had supposedly done came up with jack shit. The sun was still moving farther away, our planet was still dying, and, soon, we would all be dead, too. Which is exactly why all the rich people decided to hole up in their homes, to live out the rest of their lives as if it’s just all some kind of extended holiday and not the end of humanity. They might have left us in the cold to die, but no matter how much hope or money they have, they will face the same fate, as well. The fact that they really thought they could change the course of the sun was shocking to begin with.
I placed my phone back into my pocket and turned around to begin the trek back home. My flashlight was beginning to die, and I knew I wouldn’t make it back without it. Letting myself die out in the freezing woods is the last thing my family needs. I walked until I felt like my feet were going to freeze off and my flashlight was just barely showing a small beam, but my mind felt a little clearer from my walk. Entering the field, I looked all around at the place my family and friends had called home for so long now. After our homes had been ransacked, we had to find a place to stay, and this field seemed better than nothing. My family’s tent was made of sticks and whatever cloths my mom could find and sew together, but there was little to no things inside. The most “valuable” possession we still owned was my phone, which I would rather just ditch, but my mom said we needed to keep it in order to keep getting the official alerts. She made my dad find a car battery with some charge still left in it to make sure I had a way to keep my phone charged, but if we don’t end up dying before the battery dies, I have no idea what we will do once it dies out.
Someone had lit a small fire in the middle of our ring of tents and everyone was prompted to sit down around it. I sat down as close as I could without actually sitting in the fire, but I felt like even doing that would be a relief from this cold. I absentmindly picked at the dead grass in front of me, trying and failing to tune into the conversations around me. A woman sat down beside me and started a conversation with a woman across the fire about the updates they had heard on the radio. The usual bullshit about the Officials telling us to stay “indoors and warm,” even though they knew most of us didn’t have homes anymore. They were too caught up in decorating their plastic trees and baking cookies for Santa to give a shit.
Scientists said it was a huge asteroid that caused all this. When I say huge, I mean one that like no other that humans have ever seen. If it had hit Earth, it would have completely destroyed and bulldozed our planet, and it still would have kept going on its path of destruction, barely even slowed down. It had just barely missed us. It was the type of thing you only see in movies, but it insanely was happening to us. It wasn’t as big as the sun, but it was still large enough and powerful enough to knock it off course. One of the satellites we have rotating Earth got it all on camera: the asteroid slamming into the sun and breaking into fiery pieces, one that headed straight towards Earth and devastated a large part of Europe, and then the sun being pushed away from the Earth. Since that day, the sun has continued to move away, and the Earth has gradually been dying. This had all happened in late July, and the temperature had dropped to below freezing by the middle of August, which was drastically different from the heat of June and early July.
As complete chaos ensued, with people dying in violent attacks in places like grocery stories, gas stations, and even their own homes, our family knew it was only a matter of time before we would be forced out of ours. The Officials began to lose control, and, even though they tried, the curfews were never truly enforced. We hadn’t seen an officer in ages, whether they were holed up in their homes as well or all dead, we didn’t know. But a lot put their lives at risk during those violent outbreaks, so I can see why they weren’t out and about now. Just because the chaos had calmed down doesn’t mean people didn’t still have it in them to create it. There just weren’t enough supplies worth putting up a fight anymore, and many people, like out little tent village, who just plain avoided the conflict were able to survive longer than others who placed themselves in the middle of it.
Many people have also already perished from either the cold or starvation. The ground is too frozen to bury people anymore, so lots of bodies are littered all about the place, especially in the city streets. I’ve seen a few that were wrapped up in Christmas lights by whatever sick and twisted fuck had decided to do that, but most people just try to pretend like they aren’t there. The cold has slowed their decay down, so it makes it easier to pretend, I guess. Since we can’t dig graves for the people our little village loses, we carry them deep into the woods. My mother found a bunch of cloth that had this pretty little purple, white, and yellow flowers on it, and every time someone dies, she cuts off a piece of it and places it over them like a blanket, as if they are sleeping.
As the conversation slowly died out, we all stared into the flames of the fire. A cold breeze blew through and made the flames flicker, and I’m sure that just as the flames of the fire flickered, so did a thought flicker into our heads. The thought that soon, we won’t be able to get warm, no matter how hard we try. Soon, nowhere will be safe, chaos or no chaos. Every day, the adults sang along to the carols on the radio, trying to make it seem like they weren’t scared, like they weren’t worried about the possibility of death. Myself and the other teens and children all saw through it. We knew exactly what was coming. Even the children knew that something bad was coming, even if they didn’t exactly understand what it was. Death hung in the air like flies, and it was waiting for the cold to hang us.
Eventually, the adults around the fire decided who would stay up to keep watch of the fire and our village. Since everything was so dead and dry, one powerful gust of wind was all it would take to set everything ablaze, but when you were already so close to death, a different way of dying didn’t scare you as much anymore. So, we all grabbed our sleeping bags and picked out a spot to lay down, each trying to get as close to the fire as we could without starting a full-blown fight. I laid there, staring at the moon and the stars, wondering if the cold didn’t end up killing us, would it be the fire lighting us all ablaze or a chaos filled person looking for the possessions we no longer had? Did the Officials care that as they were sitting around their fire places, drinking hot chocolate and telling Christmas stories, did they think about us? Did they care about the country they had left to dwindle to nothing around them?
These thoughts made me angry, but some resolution came upon the realization that death would be the same for them as it was for all of us. It was a sad thought, but it made me feel better knowing they would get what they deserved for betraying us. No matter the amount of money, they couldn’t buy life. Their supplies would eventually run out, the cold would become to unbearable even indoors, or the chaos would take over again and people would come after them. How they have avoided been taken out this far is beyond me, but I guess being higher up gives you great protection. Not for long, I imagine, though.
I could hear “Santa Clause is Coming to Town” playing on the radio, and I chuckled at how ironic it was before drifting off to sleep.
