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GUEST STORY: The Sky of Fire

I'm going to be honest. I think this is the best story Jason has written to date.


They lit the sky on fire. The planet was dying. They released chemicals into the atmosphere that were supposed to turn the pollution into clean air. It didn’t work. The sky is made of lead. It rains bullets. You would’ve thought we’d have learned our lesson, but we are worse now then ever.

I am certainly the last man alive. I am the lucky one, or the unlucky one depending on your point of view. I was testing a space suit beneath the manmade ocean when they ran their experiment. I lost all communications, and when I emerged from the bowels of the rapidly evaporating Cerulean Ocean, I was crushed with twice the amount of pressure than from the bottom of the sea, the planets new atmosphere. The space suit works like we hoped it would.

I immediately take shelter from the metallic storm, in the space test center where this suit was designed. No one else is alive. Dead bodies fill the rooms like Armageddon. They don’t even look like human beings anymore. An epiphany strikes me, and I sink to the bottom of my suit. Every living thing on the planet just died at the same moment less then an hour ago. Every bird plucked out of the sky in mid flight, every forest and every creature living inside every tree, every person I have ever known or ever loved. Dead. Although odors can’t pass through the vacuum that is my suit, I can still smell the death, and it makes me vomit.

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