The Dying Sun

By Lisa Elis

The sun is dying. The world is dying. But I am going to live.

I walk down Main Street one final time. The sky is orange, but the orange is not sky—thick smog clouds blocked it out long ago. Only a touch of color finds its way through.

I cannot remember a time when I was not cold or tired from the lack of sunlight, but we tried to make up for it—every street light gave off five thousand lumens, people hung electric lanterns in front of their houses, and indoors, hot lamps ran the length of the ceiling in every room.

But not anymore. Today, the city is dead. There’s no life in any window, no children or dogs on the sidewalk, not a single sound except for the gentle thumping of Jax’s and my footsteps on the cobbled street. Jax is my father’s apprentice, and he now walks ahead of me, carrying three bags—one for my father, one for me, one for himself.

“Come on, Marci. Your father won’t wait forever,” Jax calls, glancing back over his shoulder.

I catch up with his long strides in two quick bounds and take his free hand in mine—his cold, black, metal hand that feels like nothing to me, but through which he can feel as tangibly as with his human arm.

“Did you think you would live to see this day?” I ask in a hushed voice, looking around at the deadly stillness in wonder.

“No.” There’s a catch in his voice.

Of course not. I rub a thumb over his knuckles. It’s something I’ve been doing more and more in the year since Jax returned from his excavation journey, half his body crushed and maimed by the cave-in that trapped him screaming under rock and rubble for two days.

Much of his body couldn’t be saved, so they rebuilt him with wires and plastic and metal, and while he recovered, I sat by his bedside stroking his new hand, because I was too afraid to touch his real one.

Jax always said he had fully expected to draw his last breath away from light, under rock and rubble. Of course he hadn’t thought he’d live to see the day when the last remnants of humanity had to depart from the surface of the earth because the dying sun would leave it encased in ice. But here he is. The sun is dying. The world is dying. But Jax didn’t die, thank the fates that rule our lives.

I don’t let go of his hand until we reach the Base a mile from the city. It is a strange sight. An electric barbed wire fence hems this side of Mt. Blair. Security here used to be tighter than anywhere else in the city to stop a stampede of panicked citizens from trying to escape ahead of their time. Now they’re all gone. Safe. My father is the only one standing there, backpack on. Waiting in front of an enormous cave mouth, the entrance to one of the hundred and fifty tunnels that were dug into the ground.

He is an extraordinary sort of person. Hard, cold, unaffected by most human suffering. For the last forty years of his life, he has been engineering this escape with twenty-three other scientists, effectively ignoring monsters, diseases, earthquakes, wars, famines—all so the last remnant of humanity could survive.

This scheme of his… if I had a choice, I wouldn’t believe it. Take biotechnology and nanotechnology, move close to the center of the earth, and wait for evolution to turn us into some strange worm-like beings?

That’s the idea in a nutshell, stripped of all its science.

Of course, I have no choice but to believe it.

The other option is death.

“Thank you, Jax,” my father says, taking two of the bags. Those are rare words for him to utter. He turns and starts walking towards the dark mouth.

Jax offers me his last bag.

A wave of horror strikes me. “Wait. What’s going on? Jax?”

My father doesn’t even look back.

“Goodbye, Marci,” Jax says softly.

“What do you mean, goodbye?”

A strange sensation creeps up my bones and settles in my heart, where it feels like everything I ever lived for has been stripped away.

“Marci.” His voice is a croak. “I can’t. I tried going back once after the accident. But the walls closed in. The rock came crashing down. I couldn’t breathe. And it was all in my head. They had to carry me out, screaming.”

“But I’ll take care of you,” I whisper. A weak protest against fate.

Jax steps closer and touches my cold cheek. With his human hand. His warm, real human hand.

I want to scream against fate. I think for two fleeting seconds about not going, but the thought of staying in this dying world and slowly freezing to death in darkness leaves me numb. I’m not ready to stop living. My heart feels crushed. I realize then that everything people said about how brave it is to descend into the dark bowels of Earth, never to see the sun again, is a lie. It’s easy to choose life. To run. It’s braver to die.

And I am not brave.

I take his human hand in both of mine for the first time. For the last time. I pull it to my mouth and kiss his knuckles.

Then, I leave him standing there. I look back only once before entering the gaping black mouth of the tunnel. He is a lonely dark shadow against a barbed wire fence and an orange sky. The last man standing. Jax. My Jax. Well—he could have been my Jax.

My father’s light is a small moving dot in the darkness ahead.

A single tear runs down my cheek.

The sun is dying. The world is dying. And I just died with it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lisa Elis is a creative who lives in Canada and loves stories, art, and things that grow her wanderlust. Though often hermitting at home, you can also find her scrambling to post regularly on her blog.

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