Dystopian Diaries, Nicole, Entry 24

It’s been 298 days, give or take ten or so. I’m doing the best I can.

The hard part lies in the days in the beginning, or maybe I should call it the end? It was the end of everything I’d ever known in my 54 years of life. 

The first wave of bombs came just as the oppressive summer heat broke. It seemed like there were two full days of brisk mornings, the kind that makes you pause when you step outside and wrap your arms around yourself just to pretend to shiver because you don’t feel like you’ve stepped into an oven. But then all hell broke loose and I lost track of time until a few weeks later when I realized how important it would be to keep track of time.

Fortunately, winter wasn’t too bad. In the 13 years I lived here in what used to be Scottsdale, Arizona, I can only remember two or three really cold winters, one in which we had 7 inches of snowfall and it took a week to melt. Normally if any snow made it to the ground it would be gone before you could pull your phone from your pocket and take a picture.

But that was last year. This is a new summer, the first one in this new normal, and I don’t think it is ever going to end.

I wish I could pull my phone from my pocket and check the weather. How friggin hot is it? It’s been at least 42 days now. Not ‘at least,’ for sure. For forty-two days the weather has been too hot to stand in the sun for more than five seconds without sweat starting to form. But the phones have been no good once the electrical grid went down so I can’t check the weather. That was 202 days ago. I think.

If there was electricity at least we’d have air conditioning. And refrigeration. What I wouldn’t give for a popsicle right now. Or a piece of ice. Or a cold glass of water. When it’s this hot for 42 days in a row, nothing is cold, or cool, without electricity.

The monsoon season might have brought a little rain if things had been normal. If the bombs hadn’t taken away the Four Peaks and all of California. At least I’ve heard all of California is gone. Most of the upper east coast too. I don’t know about the other continents, the only news we get now is from the travelers who are trying to get from one place to another and for some reason pass through here. God only knows what all this did to the atmosphere. I wonder how long we’ll live to find out.

Last year we had a wet monsoon season, which broke the monotony of the heat but fed the desert flora and fauna like I had never seen before. The beautiful wild chamomile became the tinder that lit everything around us up and burned it to the nothings. I can’t remember if it’s rained since the bombs and the fires, and I can’t find any reference to it in my notes, so I’m guessing it hasn’t rained since last summer.

The bucket of water I pumped from the well this morning is almost gone. If I’m going to sleep at all tonight I’ll have to go out to the well and pump it some more so I have something to soak my clothes in while I pray for a breeze. I should send a signal to my neighbors and see if they want to come join me and fill their buckets before nightfall. It will take us a while to coordinate so I better get started now or I’ll be out there by myself, which is getting riskier. I heard the mountain lions last week. The neighbors think they were fighting over a horse. We haven’t heard anything else about it and no one has gone to check. It’s just too damn hot.

The last of my batteries died two days ago, which means I won’t be getting any news or even the music from the old transistor radio with the one station that was still somehow, and for some crazy reason, on the air. I thought I was nuts keeping that little radio for so long. I was surprised and relieved when it worked.

The rest of the planet had just as much damage. New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii, and any other island in between mainland China and North America are gone. As well as most of the west coast from Alaska all the way down into Baja California. I saw that footage on my phone on Twitter. California finally fell into the ocean and took half the world with it. I can see the ocean now from the top of the hill. But it didn’t bring the cool climate I remembered from the beaches. Now it just feels sticky. Like a tropical jungle where it never rains.

It’s hard to get my mind around it. I know the heat has something to do with the mental fog I find myself in more and more. But I still don’t understand why the buttons were pushed and pushed and pushed. I’ll never get those sounds out of my ears, or the memory of the way the earth shakes when bombs sink deep into its flesh, and explode, taking millions of tons of soil, plants, animals, and humans away in a matter of seconds, leaving nothing but a giant hole.

I don’t like looking over there, where the Four Peaks used to be. And I know I shouldn’t be wasting the ink and paper to write about something I’ve written about before. But I don’t know how much of what I write will survive whatever is coming next, if anything at all. But I miss those mountains. It’s why I bought this house with the big picture window. So I could sit right here and look out there and see something beautiful. Majestic. I still get sick to my stomach when I look that way, so I try not to.

I miss the way the black monsoon clouds would charge their way up from the southeast, billowing up as they pushed past those peaks, carrying rain they would soon dump onto the earth where it would be gratefully soaked in. Now, even if the rains did come, the only thing it would find is scorched earth and then everything would be mud.

A little wind would be nice. Anything to break the monotony of the heat. When we first moved here it was for the heat. But that was when we had electricity and air-conditioning and ice. And rain. And the Four Peaks. 

If it’s been 298 days, then we should be close to the end of the monsoon season. And then maybe fall will be different. 

Anything but this damn heat.