In a Blaze of Glory

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NEW PROMPT:
Write a story or poem with heat as a key factor. All the other details are up to you.
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"Can you give me a sip from your water bottle? Mine's dry. Please, Norm, please." This plea in a whispery voice was ignored by the woman's husband. His two children had given up begging for water hours before and now just lay in the dirt, staring blindly up at the burning sun.

* * *

Norman Jackson hadn't always been so heartless. Only a few weeks earlier, he had been working in an air-conditioned office crunching numbers for a nationwide insurance company. His second marriage was turning out to be much happier than that with his first wife. After a bitter divorce, he managed to gain full custody of his twin 10-year-old girls. He did this to spite his wife and proceeded to ignore his children as he had before the divorce. A month later, Norman married Gloria, a voluptuous blonde who was content simply to be a trophy wife. The world was finally treating Norman in the way he felt he deserved.

The world, though, must have had a different opinion of what Norman deserved. Between scientists testing weapons of mass destruction and politicians giving in to their blind ambition, the earth was bombarded with enough explosives to cause a minor tilt in the world's axis. Almost immediately, but slowly enough to not cause outright panic, the beautiful blue and green planet started moving closer to the sun.

"Norm," Gloria called out from where she was sitting under an umbrella beside the swimming pool, "come on out and join us." Her husband finished mixing his after-work drink and reluctantly left the coolness of their home. He stayed in the shade of the patio awning while watching his daughters swimming laps in the slightly scummy water. Although the pool man came to clean the water weekly, the unheated water attracted bugs at night. Even at midnight, the temperature surrounding the pool was in the high 90's and reached a scorching 110 or so during the day.

"Well," Gloria asked after letting her husband drink almost half of the cold drink, "what's the news from work?" She pulled her long legs back into the shade when she suddenly felt the sun's burning touch on her ankle.

Heaving a big sigh of relief, Norman sank down on the chaise lounge beside his wife before answering. "We lost our air conditioning this afternoon, so the executives on the third floor told us not to come back until they called us." He grimaced at the memory of the last hour in the large office where he worked. With hundreds of cubicles filled with heat-generating computers and humans, the work place quickly became a large, overcrowded sauna.

* * *

The call from work never came, and the heat increased day by day. First the air conditioning in businesses and homes around the world chugged to an overworked stop. This did alleviate the strain on the various nations' electricity grids, but only temporarily. With the sun growing ever closer, water in lakes and streams evaporated. Rationing of what water was still coming into cities was implemented with mandatory enforcement of the newly enacted water laws. Anyone caught using more than their allotted gallon a day was severely punished by fines and even imprisonment.

Food was the next to be rationed. Trains and trucks overheated after going only a few miles in 120 to 125 temperatures. Hungry hoards of desperate people raided storehouses of food as rapidly as swarms of locust went through a field of dry grass.

By the end of August, homes were becoming unlivable. Thousands of people left to roam through nearby fields in an attempt to find food, and it was common to see desiccated bodies lying ignored on the side of country roads.

On the fifth of September, Norman Jackson, his wife Gloria, and their two young daughters left to join the migration out into a more hospitable section of the state. Behind them was a magnificent and useless mansion, soon to become the home for scavenging wild animals. Ahead was the unknown. Like everyone else, the four of them carried what remained of their food and water in backpacks that became lighter each day.

After walking less than fifty miles, Norman finally called a halt and guided his exhausted family to the side of the road. There wasn't any shade, so the twins simply collapsed against each other and covered their eyes against the pitiless glare of the sun. The faces of all four were caked with a layer of hardened mud where the dust from the road had mingled with their sweat earlier in the day. With the afternoon sun beating down on them, their dehydrated and weakening bodies no longer had moisture to spare for sweat.

The two girls finished their water first, passing the last few ounces of water back and forth between them. When it was gone, they huddled together to wait for the end. First one and then the other took a last shuddering gasp of the scalding hot air. They died as they had lived, together and forgotten by their father. Within minutes, the remaining moisture in the youngsters' bodies leached out into the parched earth that was the only grave they would have.

Norman slowly lifted his tired body to kneel and looked over at his wife. Her once beautiful, blue eyes stared lifelessly back at him. Suddenly, a superheated breeze passed over him and the now deserted dirt road. Scalding hot dirt, whipped up like a miniature tornado by the wind, entered his screaming mouth and down into his lungs. This happened as the tattered clothing of the family started to smolder from the sun's unrelenting heat. By the time the clothing was completely engulfed in flames, Norman mercifully no longer existed.

Weeks later, in the midst of merging fire storms, no sign of humanity remained to witness the death throes of the final earth day. Long tendrils of flame reached out to pull the disintegrating planet into the sun to disappear instantaneously in a blaze of glory.

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Microsoft Word count = 1,000

"The Writer's Cramp"  daily contest winner for 04/22/08
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