Two of All People: The Climate Change Endgame, #1

By Jeff Kelland

Two of All People is the prequel novella for the climate fiction novel, The Dying Party.

 

The Dying Party asks: What happens when they tell us it's too late, when we pass the tipping point of the climate change crisis and are forced to face a near future that will be increasingly hellish, and the end that will come within our lifetimes? The novel answers this with two two parallel story lines. On the one hand, we have six survivors in 2049, in a residential complex built into Newfoundland's only mountain, Gros Morne - the last six people alive in Eastern Canada. On the other hand, we have a group of humanity's richest and most powerful, the super-elite, trying to establish an off-Earth colony for themselves.

The novel shows in fascinating detail the complex brutality of what having to accept such a fate would mean for the social, political, and economic principles and structures that underpin human civilization; what it would look like on a global scale, in a local context, and from a variety of distinct personal perspectives.The Dying Party demonstrates that the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, the cause of so much injustice and suffering through history, will plague us on into the fateful future we now face. The thrust of the novel, however, is to illustrate the under-appreciated impact that passing the climate change tipping point will have on the human psyche – an impact as great as that of climate change on the planet, accelerating the deadly advance.

This is not fanciful speculation about the near and distant future, but rather the logical extension of the current course of humanity based on extensive research. The novel has the courage to depict the worse case scenario unflinchingly, that we may see the human consequences of unchecked climate change. It is, therefore, the cautionary tale to end all cautionary tales.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Kelland
• Release date: Dec 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215627228

Book preview

Two of All People

A Prequel Novella for the

Shocking New Climate Fiction Novel

The Dying Party

by

Jeff R. Kelland

Independent author/publisher’s website: www.jeffrkelland.com

Copyright © 2022 Jeff R. Kelland

All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Information

Chapter 1: Ends in Themselves

Chapter 2: Estranged Bedfellows

Chapter 3: To What End?

Chapter 4: Coming to a Head

Chapter 5: The Devil She Knows

Chapter 6: A Beginning

Epilogue

A Prelude to The Dying Party

Chapter 1: Ends in Themselves

Shirtless, glistening with sweat, Donnie Tobin struts into the tenth-floor community room. His surliness is apparent to all present as he trudges down to the front row, muttering obscenities. Hopped up on some wild concoction he cooked up in the lab the night before, he parks his frame in a chair almost directly in front of the chairperson, fidgeting, glowering at her. She is a bookish, overweight middle-aged woman, obviously intimidated by his aggressiveness as she fretfully prepares to call the meeting to order.

Everyone is sweating incessantly and most are chronically irritable, so Donnie’s irascibility is not a shock to anyone. Interpersonal tensions are running as high as the mercury, which has been steadily rising for years, and it has been impossibly hot and getting hotter for so long now that nobody looks at a thermometer anymore – it does not help.

The room can hold more than two hundred at full capacity, but there are only a few dozen residents in attendance today, a lot less than the last such gathering more than seven months ago. Back then even the ceiling was dripping wet. Now it is all bone dry and the only moisture in the room is oozing from their bodies.

It is late April 2044.

The poor attendance reflects the diminishing number of survivors left in this ten-storey residential complex built into the side of Gros Morne, Newfoundland’s only real mountain. The climate change warnings and dystopian forecasts that started late in the 20th century have long since proven true, only it has been accelerating, advancing at a much faster pace than even the direst predictions in the early 2020s.

It was completed in 2039, when it was no longer possible to deny that water levels were rising and would continue to do so, in anticipation of the worst-case scenario. With the rush to build and the unavailability of some building materials, amid the heat and unpredictable weather of advanced climate change, there were problems right from the start. It was never really new or fully operational, and towards the end they were tearing down abandoned buildings in the area to get enough materials. Now, only five years later, the complex is already looking bad and starting to fail in many ways.

Slipping quietly inside to take a seat in the back just inside the door is an attractive young widow. She squints at the brightness of the buzzing fluorescent lights above as she digs around in her backpack for a book, the reading glasses stuck in her hair, a pencil clenched in her teeth. Languid and apathetic, Lizzie Flint has no idea what is on the agenda for today’s meeting and she is not the slightest bit interested. There is only one reason she came out today: to somehow try to mitigate the loneliness and the tedium of their collective fate – day after day, just waiting and dreading the next stage in the awful decline.

She has been living alone since losing her husband, a young American navy pilot she met online who reminded her of her father. After flying in for a swift and entirely forgettable wedding in Corner Brook, he returned to his unit and soon thereafter went missing on a humanitarian mission somewhere in Southeast Asia, eventually presumed dead. Almost three years later, Lizzie has all but given up on looking for a partner, much less finding one.

The meeting starts without her realizing it, her mind lost in a dog-eared copy of one of her favorite mystery novels. After just a few minutes, a commotion down at the front of the room brings her back. A deep male voice is booming: What the hell are you talking about? Sure, that makes no sense at all!

The tremulous reply: Please… Please, sir…. We all need to just –

Fuck the decorum, missus, he interrupts rudely. You know as well as I do… Doing that would be a complete waste of time. That kinda shit doesn’t matter anymore!

Having missed his entrance, Lizzie cranes her neck to see who is causing the fuss. A heavy-set couple is sitting right behind Donnie, so she cannot tell who is doing all the shouting. She can see the chairperson, flushed and shaking, her eyes on the floor, her back to the large whiteboard, one hand picking obsessively at the side of her skirt. Lizzie is embarrassed for her.

The chairperson tries again: We all know… Donnie, is it? Look, Donnie. We all know you had a rough go of it since last week, and –

Oh, come on, he cuts in again, seething. Don’t be patronizing me.

Her chubby face is red and getting redder. Oh no… I’m not p-patron–

Suddenly standing, he knocks over the chair behind him with a bang, and now Lizzie can see the back of his head. For fuck’s sake, lady! Have you been outside lately? Huh? Do you really think all this administrative housekeeping bullshit matters anymore? The chairperson is paralysed with fear, speechless. Well… do you?!

A distinguished older gentleman at the far end of the row clears his throat. Excuse me, young man, but that’s no way to –

But Donnie