EXCERPT

When “The Announcement” came, it had screamed from every radio, every TV, every newspaper and social media feed. It was the official notice from those men in high towers running things that they had finally thrown in the proverbial towel into the ring. The Announcement had a name, a long name, and it was a report signed by all the scientists in the whole damn world, but the humans just called it, “The Announcement”. Something to do with the faster-than-anticipated destruction of ecosystems. Something to do with tipping points. Something like the 6th (or is it 7th ?) mass extinction. And honestly, most of the islands in the Pacific were already buried and long gone. Mass evacuations had begun years ago. Some parts of the globe had already been razed by fires, devastated, obliterated, experienced it like the canary in the mine that never made it out. But of course, those with the means in the North (or was it West?) kept up their cars, their central heating in the winter, the central air in the summer and pushed it deep down into the small recesses of their brain where all the unspeakable dread dwelled. That is, until it caught up with them too.

In the broadcast, the men in black suits backed by the men in white lab coats said they didn’t know when the end of the human species would come when pressed by the journalists. It will be gradual, they said. It may take decades. There were things they could not account for, things that they could not measure with their billion-dollar tools and technologies. They only knew that the atmosphere, the weather systems, the sea…all were changing more rapidly than they could know. In other words, it wouldn’t be like a meteor falling and obliterating the dinosaurs all at once. One of the men in black, wearing mirrored sunglasses tried to wax poetic by referencing T.S. Eliot. He whispered hoarsely into the microphone, “It won’t be a bang, it will be a whimper.”

The announcement, the things that preceded it, the things that followed was a herky-jerky mess. A couple of decades of reality TV never prepared people to face who they would become in a time of scarcity, of survival, of who gets and who doesn’t get any. But let’s be real. Those who had never gotten before knew the deal long before it began to happen. “No shit”, the poor, the ever-struggling, the always one-toe-over-the-edge people thought, as they listened to the broadcast. By then, they had already been living the long whimper.

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Before the Announcement, there had been food riots. Then fires, the police, the new military zones, the fortifying of the neighbourhoods of the rich and then those who had the money fled to walled communities called the Domes. The leftover people knew because jobs at the Dome were the only things on offer anymore, but it meant leaving the city and their families behind. Word on the street was that the Domes were fortresses, except the Domes was under glass with their own weather system and instead of a moat full of crocodiles, the communities were secured with land mines and invisible laser fences that would fry you like a moth too close to flame. Also, once in, you could never leave. That’s the rumor anyway. The military were assigned to patrol their perimeters, think of armoured trucks delivering cucumbers from the greenhouses to the Domes, winding through streets while the police held the masses back, guns always on holsters. For cucumbers. You couldn’t eat gold bars or dollar bills after all, and even if you had them, there was nothing left to buy. And this was the time that preceded, so The Announcement only made things official.

In the east-end of a city on the morning of The Announcement, Pauline lifted her head from her pillow and listened to the blaring TV that she kept on 24 hours a day and thought, “Whatever. I ‘m half dead anyway.”, slamming her greasy head back into bed as if the world had finally caught up and tipped with her towards death. When the teenage Julian heard, his only thought was one word, “LEN! ”. He held onto it like a stone in his fist, unwilling to let go. When Jing at seven-years old, heard her mother cry and panic-scream at her father, she only heard, “EEK EEK EEK WAH” and continued drawing birds in her sketchbook.