A boy on the rooftop

One

The rain poured down, and it poured down hard.

The floods were finally over and the water was returning back to the gutters, but the worst was yet to come. 

All the once green lands of the earth were no more than ash and chaos. The air was heavy with the smell of rotting dead bodies of humans, fishes and plants and hung in a haze that partially obscured the blood-red sun. 

The cities stood like broken skeletons, Even the oceans stood still like semi-stagnant pools of death and decay, there were no waves as even the wind had left the earth. The skies were barren, no birds flew or sang.

A girl in black walked barefoot in the middle of a deserted roads, full of sand. Printing her footsteps on the wet sand, swollen with water and blood. 

There lies a dead great white shark with a human leg trapped within its sabre sharp teeth and dead bodies of drowned humans swollen up like balloons, with their mouths covered with sand and gravels. Some of them were missing the body parts, eaten up brutally by the fishes. 

The real terror began five weeks later, the floods arrived in Paris again.

From every corner of the earth came the signs that the apocalypse was upon them.

There was no electricity as the workers for the plants had died and soon luxuries like running clean water and flushing toilets had ended.

The entire country was thrown back into the stone age.

There were no more burials, the living would no longer approach a corpse, so they rotted right out in their watery graves with their unseeing eyes staring at the survivors. 

Eiffel tower was broken into thousand pieces, flood lasted for six weeks and it killed half of the population of France and the other half was living in Misery.

Some people lost their homes, and all the flora and fauna drowned in the salty water. Except few birds which later died due to starvation and hunting. 

Scientists reported that the land was sinking under the deep oceans and humans are responsible for this. 

Nuclear factories in the countryside exploded and country's economic conditions worsened. 

Kash and Mille looked into the water for some time, looked at each other, and then looked back in. A boy and his mother were floating on the surface, they were both dead. Their necks had swelled up like inner tubes and on the flesh, there was a purple-black color, like a bruise.

They backed away together and looked blankly at each other. Then

they turned to their mother. They could see her, jawing frantically into the phone. There was a pair of baby shoes dangling on the side of their rooftop.

Two

Annie woke up at quarter past ten in the morning to the sound of kids fighting outside the bedroom window and rock music from the radio in the kitchen. 

She went to the window in her saggy shorts and a night gown, threw it 

open, and yelled: “You kids shutcha heads! Stay away from water you may fall down." 

A moment’s pause. Kash and Mille looked around from the old and 

rusty duck toy, they had been arguing over. As always when she saw her 

kids, Annie felt dragged two ways at once. Her heart ached to see them suffering because of the flood. 

“Yes, Mommy,” Kash said in a subdued way. He was eleven. 

“Yes, Mommy,” Mille echoed. She was six going on seven next week. 

Annie stood for a moment, staring at them like a tiger in the forest and slammed the window shut.

"Throw away that fishing honey, you might catch a shark or a whale", she shouted at Mille who was standing at the edge of the roof, holding a so-called fishing rod made up of a rotting stick with a string tied around it and a hook attached to the other end. 

She stood for a moment, looking indecisively at her daughter.

“Stephen!” she bawled. 

There was no answer. 

She considered ripping the window open again and asking Kash where the hell he had gone. 

Stephen was Annie's husband, he was an alcoholic writer with a fat belly and funny hairstyle similar to a circus clown.

Mille felt a jerk on the string of the fishing rod and tried her best to pull the hook out of water. 

The string was weak and it was a miracle that she caught something without a bait on the hook.

She sighed and widened her shoulders to pull the rod out of the dirty water. 

She screamed again, and finally the rod came out of water, with a baby striped bass at the end of the string. 

Her face glowed with happiness. 

She felt some strange movements under the water, while she was holding that fish in her hand. 

She saw a fin, rising from the water. 

A large hideous figure jumped at her with full force with its jaws wide open revealing thousands of sharp teeth inside his mouth. 

Mille got almost no time to react, the beast appeared from the dirty water, it was a goblin shark. 

It jumped at her, opened its mouth wider, with his jaw touching it's large nose and ripped open her body into half and went back inside the darkness. 

Kash was there at the time of the attack, he screamed loudest breaking his vocal chords while their mom was looking for her husband in the attic room. 

She heard the screams of her son coming from the roof. 

Her heart was broken to see her daughter's legs lying on the roof under the sun. Her upper body was missing.

Blood was all over the roof and her intestines were visible from her splitted body.

Goblin sharks, according to researchers live in the deepest point in the ocean, but due to the disturbance in the climate. They were forced to come on the surface. 

The shark was 20 feet long. 

Three

Everyone knew the fact that Paris may never recover from this flood. This was not the case of Paris, but of the whole world. 

There was a continent named Antarctica. In August 2021, Antarctic ice melted away because of global warming and climate change. The temperature scale reached 50 degrees.

There was a sudden rise in water levels. Australia and New Zealand completely drowned in the salty water within a week 

This terror also swallowed Malaysia, Japan, Brazil and India.

And wiped entire Europe into a never ending nightmare. 

Some people living at the mountains were still alive and some of them were alive in the rescue camps.

Kash woke up from a night of broken rest at dawn and lay shivering, even 

with Buster curled up next to him. The morning sky was coldly blue, but in spite of the shivers he was hot. He was running a fever. 

“Sick,” he muttered, and Buster looked up at him. He wagged his tail and then trotted into the house. He brought back a piece of the fishing rod, which Mille used to catch fishes and laid it at Kash's feet. 

“I said sick, not stick, but I guess it’ll do,” Kash told him. 

Buster was Kash's pet dog, he was a German shepherd and weight about a hundred pounds. Kash found Buster floating in the water with the help of a broken log. 

He sent Buster out for a dozen more sticks. Soon he had a fire blazing. Even sitting close would not drive the shivers away, although sweat was rolling down his face. 

He had the flu, or something very like it. He had come down with it two days after Annie and Stephen left him alone to die from starvation. Little by little he was getting worse. And this 

morning he felt very bad indeed. 

Among the odds and ends in his pockets, Kash found a stub of pencil, his notebook, on which he wrote about his experience on the roof. He survived on the rooftop by catching fishes with the same fishing rod used by Mille before she was eaten. He used Mille's soft hind bone as a bait to attract tiny fishes. While Buster brings him corpse of birds. 

Some people said Annie and Stephen escaped the water and are now safe in the camp but some of them said they were killed by Manta rays when their rescue boat turned over inside the water.

Kash watched his progress with a mixture of bitterness and amusement, then picked up the Pepsi can Buster had brought him when he saw it floating on the surface. He 

drank slowly, slaking his thirst bit by bit. It hurt to swallow. 

“Life sure is a bitch,” he muttered, and then had to laugh at himself. For a moment or two he let his fingers fret at the swellings high on his neck, just 

under his jaw. Then he lay back, splinted leg in front of him, and dozed. 

He awoke after six. The mushroom cloud above his head before he took a nap was gone, but the western sky 

was an angry pinkish-red, like a bright weal of burnflesh. He could see the water is rising, and knew the fact that the water will soon cover the entire house.

Kash hauled himself over into his room and lay down, exhausted all over again. The shakes were back. And the fever. He touched his forehead with his wrist and tried to gauge the temperature there. He guessed it was well over a hundred degrees. 

Buster came out of the early evening with a rabbit in his jaws. He laid it 

at Kash's feet and wagged his tail, waiting to be complimented. 

“Good dog,” Kash said tiredly. “That’s a good dog.” 

Buster’s tail wagged faster. Yes, I’m a pretty good dog, he seemed to 

agree. But he remained looking at Kash seeming to wait for something. His brain was moving very slowly; while he was sleeping, someone seemed to have poured molasses all over his interior gears. 

“Good dog,” he repeated, and looked at the dead rabbit. Then he 

remembered, although he wasn’t even sure he had his matches anymore. 

“Fetch, Busty,” he said, mostly to please the dog. Buster bounced away and soon returned with a good chunk of dry wood.

"Dry woods in this wet atmosphere, good job", He had his matches, but a good breeze had sprung up and his hands were shaking badly. It took a long time to get a fire going. He got the kindling he had stripped lighted on the tenth match, and then the breeze gusted roguishly, puffing out the flames. Kash rebuilt it carefully, shielding it with his body and his hands. He had eight remaining matches in his school folder. He cooked the rabbit, gave Buster his half, and could eat only a little of his share as he found it difficult to swallow it's flesh. He tossed Buster what was left. Buster didn’t pick it up. He looked at it, then whined uneasily at Kash.

“Go on, boy. I can’t, it's all yours” 

Buster ate up. Kash looked at him and shivered. His two blankets were, of 

course, wet. 

The sun went down, and the western sky was grotesque with color. It was 

the most spectacular sunset Kash had ever seen in his life .… and it was feeling like hell. He could remember the thing written in his science book that there were beautiful sunsets for weeks after a nuclear test. And, of course, after earthquakes. 

But there was no earthquake or nuclear blast, it was water everywhere he could see. 

Buster came up from the washout with something in his mouth—one of 

Kash's wet blankets. He dropped it in his lap. “Hey,” Kash said, hugging him unsteadily. “You’re some kind of dog, you know it? But unfortunately I cannot use it Busty.” 

Buster wagged his tail to show that he knew it. 

Kash placed the blanket around the fire to dry it. Buster lay next to him, and soon they both slept. 

But Kash's sleep was light and 

uneasy, skimming in and out of delirium. Sometime after midnight he roused Buster, yelling in his sleep. 

“Hey!” Kash cried. “You better turn off y’pumps!"

Buster whined uneasily. The boy was sick. He could smell the sickness 

and mingling with that smell was a new one. A black one. It was the smell of the rabbits had on them when he pounced. The smell had been on the wolf. 

The smell had been on the towns he had passed through before coming to Paris. It was the smell of death. 

Buster whined again, low, and then slept. 

Four

Kash woke up the next morning more feverish than ever. The glands under 

his jaw had swollen to the size of golfballs. His eyes were hot marbles. 

He lay back down and slept. And then, somehow, it was early dark again. Another spectacular, horrible sunset burned and jittered in the West. And Buster had brought another bird for dinner. It was a pigeon this time. 

“This the best y’could do?” 

Buster wagged his tail and grinned shamefacedly. 

Kash cooked it, divided it, and managed to eat his entire half. It was tough, and it had a horrible wild taste of plastic and when he was done he had a nasty bout of stomach aches. 

“When I die, I want you to go back to Rescue camps a helicopter will arrive soon,” he told the dog. “You go back and find mom and dad. Okay, big old dumb dog?” 

Buster again wagged his tail doubtfully. 

An hour later, Kash’s stomach rumbled once in warning. He had just time enough to roll over on one elbow to avoid fouling himself before his share of the gopher came up in a rush. 

“Shit,” he muttered miserably, and dozed off. 

He awoke in the small hours and got up on his elbows, his head buzzing 

with fever. The fire had gone out, he saw. It didn’t matter. He was pretty 

well done up. Some sound in the darkness had awakened him. Pebbles and stones. 

Buster coming up the embankment from the cut, that’s all it was … 

Except that Buster was beside him, sleeping. 

Even as Buster glanced at him, the dog woke up. His head came off his paws 

and a moment later he was on his feet, facing the cut, growling deep in his throat. 

Rattling pebbles and stones. Someone—something—coming up. 

Kash struggled into a sitting position. It’s him, he thought. He was there, 

but somehow he got away. Now he’s here, and he means to do me before the flu can. 

Buster's growl became stronger. His hackles stood, his head was down. 

The rattling sound was closer now. Kash could hear a low panting sound. There was a pause then, long enough for Kash to arm sweat off his forehead. 

A moment later a dark shape humped against the edge of the cut, head and 

shoulders blotting out the stars. He thought it was one more Shark which arrived there after following the trail of fresh meat. 

Buster advanced, stiff-legged, still growling. 

“Hey!” a bewildered but familiar voice said. “Hey, is that Buster? Is it?” 

The growling stopped immediately. Buster bounded forward joyfully, tail 

wagging. He heard that voice before. 

"Kash, come here", the voice said again. He thought he heard that voice before but he thought he was hallucinating and it might be another big predator. 

He pulled the collar of growling Buster but he was too weak to handle that excited dog.

Kash fainted. 

Five

When Kash slipped back into reality again, it was twilight. It was 

Ela his childhood friend who was shaking him. “Kash! Wake up! Wake up, Kash” 

He was frightened by the way time seemed to be slipping by in sudden 

lurches—as if the teeth on the cog of his personal reality were wearing 

down. Ela had to help him sit up, and when he was sitting, he had to lean 

his head between his legs and cough. He coughed so long and hard that he 

almost passed out again. Ela watched him with alarm. Little by little, Kash 

got control of himself. He pulled the blankets closer around him. He was 

shivering again.

"How did you find me, Ela?” 

Ela held out a first-aid kit. Inside were Band-Aids, Mercurochrome, and 

a big bottle of Anacin. 

"Where you've been all the time?" Kash asked still shivering in his blanket, his cheeks were red.

"A rescue helicopter brought me here, brought most of us here", she said,"and surprise, we found you and your dog too."

“I almost died, you know,” Kash said. He and Ela were walking outside the 

empty tent together. His legs were still shaking and was coughing a little. 

"

Where are your parents?", He was stuttering with fever and his lymph nodes were swollen like balloons.

"Dead, all dead", she said in a serious tone with tears in her eyes. Her body was skinny and tired, she had a large ugly scar on her leg, half hidden under her skirt. 

"Oh, I am sorry", he continued,"do you know anything about my parents, the rescue team arrived at my home but they left me behind because of lack of space."

"Nobody knows, but I am sure they will be safe for the time being", Ela said touching his shoulder.

But he was happy with the fact that he was rescued from the hell. And can live a normal life.