The Dying Party: The Climate Change Endgame, #1

By Jeff Kelland

"The Dying Party", along with its prequel novella "Two of All People" (free and available everywhere), asks the question: 'What happens when they tell us it's too late to stop climate change; when we are forced to face a future that will be increasingly hellish, and an horrific end that will come within our lifetimes?' The novel answers this question with two parallel story lines that alternate from chapter to chapter and eventually merge – one about how the poor will deal with the advancing crisis, and one about how the rich and powerful will fare.

 

The former story line, starting a few years earlier in the prequel, focuses on two main characters. It is late in the 2040s, and Lizzie and Donnie are two of only six people left alive in a residential complex that had been built into the side of Newfoundland's Gros Morne mountain in the 2030s, now the only piece of habitable land left above water in all of what was once eastern Canada. In the second story line we follow a group of humanity's richest and most powerful, the super-elite, as they try to establish an off-Earth colony for themselves.

 

 "The Dying Party" explores in fascinating detail the complex brutality of what having to accept such a fate would mean for human civilization; what it would look like on a global scale, a local context, and from a variety of personal perspectives. The author's extensive research shows that if we stay on our present course of inaction, confusion, and complacency, such a declaration will come sooner than we think. 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 that will further complicate and accelerate what is happening on a number of levels.

 

This is not fanciful speculation about the near and distant future, but rather the logical extension of the current course of humanity if we fail to up our game. The novel is a courageous, unflinchingly depiction of the worst-case scenario, with a measure of redemption, and is therefore a cautionary tale to end all cautionary tales.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Kelland
• Release date: Feb 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215202296

Book preview

The Dying Party

by

Jeff Kelland

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

Copyright © 2023 Jeff R. Kelland

All rights reserved.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my dear grandchildren. For it is with the fullness of their lives in mind, and taken to my heart, that this book was conceived, written, and published; and in hope...

Reader Advisory: Please note that the subject matter of this novel and the thrust of its narrative are, of necessity, profoundly disturbing, so the telling of the story is forthright, unflinching, and sometimes quite graphic. Though written with positive intent, to raise awareness and promote dialogue and action on the climate crisis, readers may want to consider their personal thoughts and feelings on the impact of extreme climate change on humanity in the not-too-distant future and whether it is a scenario they are prepared to entertain/engage at this time.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Reader Advisory

Part One: The Spiral Down

Chapter 1: RSVP

Chapter 2: Arrivals and Departures

Chapter 3: Breakdowns

Chapter 4: The Burden of Guilt

Chapter 5: Misery Needs Company

Chapter 6: Alternatives

Chapter 7: Starting an Ending

Chapter 8: Days of Reckoning

Chapter 9: Coming to Grips

Chapter 10: Lunacy

Chapter 11: Nigh on Nevermore

Part Two: Regret and Resignation

Chapter 12: Against All Odds

Chapter 13: Killing Time

Chapter 14: Asking for the Moon

Chapter 15: Like a Thief in the Night

Chapter 16: No Plan ‘C’

Chapter 17: Coming to a Head

Chapter 18: Game, Set, and Match

Chapter 19: Facing the Music

Chapter 20: Denouement

Chapter 21: Salvaging Redemption

Chapter 22: With a Whimper

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Links

Part One: The Spiral Down

And you tell me over and over and over again, my friend,

Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.

Barry McGuire

Eve of Destruction

Chapter 1: RSVP

Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop… Chop.Chop… Chop.Chop.Chop… Chop.Chop…

Without looking up, as sweet as he can: Doin’ a couple of lines with me or what, babe?

Chop.Chop.Chop… Chop.Chop… that plastic card… Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop…

Standing at the window with her back to him, bloodshot eyes fixed, she gazes through filthy layers of thick glass without seeing and whispers: No.

Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop… the metal table… Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop…

His tone now mocking: Aw, come on now… I think it’ll help ya.

Chop.Chop.Chop… incessant!… Chop.Chop… Chop.Chop…

Suddenly turning around, glaring, she shouts: No!

Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop… Chop… Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop…

His wheedling continues as though she had said nothing at all: It’s good stuff, ya know...

She throws up her hands with her eyes. God damn!

Do you know what I had to go through to get all this together?

Chop.Chop… Chop.Chop… Chop.Chop… Chop.Chop.Chop.

Jesus, Donnie!

He looks up, a veneer of optimism: Well, how about a shot, then, hey? C’mon now.

She falls back on the ratty sofa chair, throwing her head back with a barely audible: No.

With an exaggerated shrug and twisted mouth, he looks back down at his table, eyes widening. "So much for the party part," he says to himself aloud.

Chop.Chop… Chop.Chop.Chop… Chop.Chop... Chop.Chop… Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop…

Lizzie is stewing in a stupor of fear and sadness, picking at a scab on her arm, staring into space. Well, you won’t have to bother with any of this shit after tonight, will you? Or with me...

Chop.Chop.Chop!... His eyes close, defeated. Fuck, Lizzie.

What? she responds and immediately regrets perpetuating the conversation.

You know very well what. You’d think all this was only happening to you personally. Look around, Lizzie. Haven’t you heard? There’s no such thing as a private hell anymore!

Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop…

For fuck’s sake! She droops forward dejected, eyelids sagging, hands piled on top of her head: "Anyway… It’s not your dying party, is it? It’s mine."

Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop.CHOP! Still looking down, his mocking tone returns: And you’re gonna cry if you want to, hey Liz? The card starts to gather, lining it up.

You can be a real prick sometimes, ya know that?

Yeah, I know.

Stone-faced, eyes dead. Yeah, you know. Shit.

Two feet of yellow rubber tubing hovers in one hand, the other held out in half-hearted appeal. Sorry, babe. He inserts it expertly. "You’ll feel better when they get here." I know I will.

Quick exhale–long sniff…quick exhale–long sniff…exhale…and that last finishing drag she has come to dread: the coarse shudder of pulverized material engaging a badly eroded septum. It fills the room and shakes her to the core, triggering a sudden wave of nausea as it always has. These days he is crushing and snorting anything he can reduce to powder. She hates it, and she hates the sound of his worsening nasal passages. But that doesn’t mean she cares much about what it’s doing to him. She doesn’t. Not anymore.

It is early 2049.

* * *

Elizabeth Antoinette Flint was born the only child of two stereotypical hippie-types from Washington State. Among thousands of people on the flights forced to land in Gander, Newfoundland on 9/11, bright-eyed newlyweds Chet and Amelia Flint were heading to Europe for their honeymoon. Instead, they ended up making the best of it where fate had put them – on a rugged pristine island in the North Atlantic they affectionately call The Rock.

As the world was dealing with the aftermath of the terrorist attack in New York City, Chet and Millie were catching the spirit of the famously friendly island and soon set aside their disappointment about the European trip. Heartily cheered on by the boisterous, backslapping natives, prodigious drinkers all, they made matrimonial merriment with the locals for ten days and nights. When it was time to depart, their bittersweet sadness surprised them both – a special seed had been planted in their bohemian hearts.

Back on the Pacific coast, they tried unsuccessfully for eighteen years to have a child. Then, inspired by a popular Broadway musical about the homespun brand of hospitality Gander residents showed the stranded travellers that day in 2001, Chet and Millie returned to Newfoundland for a holiday in the summer of 2019 and never went back. Their search for a place where they could live off the grid turned up many nice spots around the province, and they finally settled on a cozy saltbox-style house in the little seaside village of Daniel’s Harbour on the island’s west coast.

A few months later, just as the Covid-19 pandemic was taking hold around the globe, came an unexpected bonus. The change of scenery had done the trick and Millie was pregnant. As middle-aged flowerchildren who had all but given up on having kids of their own, they were elated. They insisted on an all-natural home birth with a local midwife, a harpsichord, two doves, and plenty of granola. And late in 2020, with the pandemic in full swing, little Lizzie came to be. With the blessed arrival of their long-awaited baby daughter in an idyllic pastoral setting they had both been dreaming about since the sixties, they were all set to start living happily ever after.

That was almost seven years before The Announcement.

* * *

Lizzie shifts around in her chair, belaboring yet another sigh, desultorily laying aside the novel she had been trying to read. Even as reading books gradually fell out of favour with most people in the 2020s, like so many other activities that bowed out in the face of humanity’s ever-shortening attention span, Lizzie’s love affair with stories and the written word since childhood continued. Just a year or so ago she was still collecting books wherever she could find them. But these days even her precious books are failing her.

Donnie sniffs and snarks his way across a room littered with shadows and random pieces of trash, sidestepping books and stacks of books that Lizzie has scattered throughout the compartment. Barefoot, scratching his ass through grimy gray sweatpants, shuffling through a dank stench that no longer registers, he kicks an oil-stained cardboard box aside and stands before the window. Raising both arms, he slaps his palms flat on the glass and allows himself to look out at it again. Fuck.

Over just a few days, less than a month ago, the day sky went from bright candy apple red to a dull flat crimson, progressively more blood-like in color and texture. All that week it had been streaked with black clouds, scattered, stretching across the sanguine stratosphere like random lines scrawled on a bloody page. He realizes that over the last three days it has been changing even more rapidly, and this evening it has taken on an ominous shade of reddish purple that seems to be deepening before his eyes.

The horizon has been virtually imperceptible for weeks, ever since the last torrid wave came through, smelting another ungodly layer of death upon death. Now it is just a fuzzy white band of sickening haze that is becoming hazier with each passing day. He can see it through the rippling sheets of heat rising from the toxic soup that surrounds what is left of their shrinking, otherworldly piece of wasteland. There is still some difference between night and day, but not enough to matter much to anyone, and it has been a long time since anybody could go outside and expect to come back. Daytime is dark, the night slightly darker, both somehow strangely backlit. They sleep during the day, leaving the challenge of conscious awareness for the night when it is harder to see what’s happening outside.

Across the globe the atmosphere is steadily breaking down, increasingly irradiated, no longer a sufficient UV filter for earthly life. With no real polar ice caps left to deflect the sun’s lethal rays, the Earth is superheating, and it is so hot now that its axis poles are just beginning to shift, with widespread seismic consequences. Volcanic activity has been rising sharply, and even long-dormant volcanos are becoming reactivated. Earthquakes flourish everywhere, triggering each other, setting off unprecedented chain reactions in the equatorial regions, the so-called Ring of Fire around the Pacific now literally so and visible from space. Thick, merciless waves of impossible heat are sweeping indiscriminately across the world, and dense clouds of radiation have started to form and maraud around the planet, riding the wind-driven air masses, poisoning what little there is left to poison.

Looking out on the relative calm of what was once the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Donnie is starting to worry about the changes in the horizon and sky of late. He thinks about the sickening walls of ever more toxic heat that have been passing over them in recent weeks, six now by his count. The first five were so slow they didn’t see them approach, instead gradually feeling them by the noticeable rise in the units’ temperature. But he remembers that the last one was moving much faster than the others; this time they could see it coming, and it was thicker, almost opaque. He knows it is only a matter of weeks, maybe days, before the worst of it finally gets around to the North Atlantic and finishes them too, taking all they’ve ever known and all they’ve ever been...

No! His eyes close tightly. He spins around and they open wide with a vigorous shake of his mop, and he returns to treasured escape.

Almost ten minutes pass without a word between them. Lizzie sinks into the couch in despair, just trying to get through the next minute of what she has already decided will be the last night of her life. Donnie is slumped over his table, as usual trying to get even higher. The party’s two other guests of honor, another young woman and a middle-aged man, are on their way up with one guest each along for moral support. They will arrive any time now.

Sniff. Sniff. Hey! You should put on some tunes, now, babe.

Chop.Chop.Chop.Chop…Chop.Chop…Chop.Chop.Chop…Chop.Chop…

Her face drops into her hands. Jesus.

* * *

Seven years after Lizzie’s birth in Daniel’s Harbour, which was just over a year before Donnie appeared, came The Announcement. It was released by the World Health Organization, and it was verified and certified by the International Council for Science, the United Nations Security Council, and all remaining stable governments and jurisdictions. Cruelly issued on Earth Day, 2027, an annual event fast becoming an embarrassing and bitter global joke, its message was short and anything but sweet.

The official document posted online was predictably long, the language overly dense and opaque. Even the live public statement, broadcast everywhere in every known language, seemed to ramble on as though the upshot could be hidden somehow in the long, tedious proclamation, to be digested individually later. But within a couple of hours the pundits and experts at CNN and MSNBC had it all boiled down to one insurmountable fact and one impossible directive.

It was a brutal summary of recent history at a fatal turning point with an all-too-clear vision of what was to come. It said that around the turn of the 21st century humankind officially became the greatest single influence on the planet’s environment, signalling the start of the Anthropocene epoch. The changes it was bringing were becoming unsustainable and coming faster than anyone predicted, already causing unprecedented death and destruction, endangering the planet and all life, including human beings. The empirical evidence was overwhelming and undeniable, at least to the scientists. Primarily due to deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels, it was clear that carbon emissions were creating a greenhouse effect in the atmosphere, steadily warming the planet, with projections of a global increase in temperature of anywhere from two to six degrees Celsius over the course of the century. This meant certain disaster for the planet and all life it sustains in just decades, including humankind, and the call went out to reduce emissions.

First there was the United Nations’ climate change framework in 1992. Then the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 called on all the industrialized nations of the world to commit to reducing carbon emissions across the board. Twenty years later, in 2017, the Paris Agreement purported to improve on Kyoto. But despite global ratification of these agreements, most nations didn’t come anywhere near the necessary level of emissions reduction. And, thanks to Trump, the U.S. opted out of all agreements over four crucial years before Biden got the chance to try putting it all back on track. The urgency, dedication, and spirit of pro-action to solve the climate change crisis seen during Obama’s second term would never be seen again.

The Announcement proclaimed that, with the ongoing global failure by governments and corporations alike to come together and turn all their talk of carbon emission reductions into significant action, the point of no return had already been reached and surpassed. The critically negative impact humanity had been inflicting on the planet had become irreversible and beyond control. It was accelerating, and the calamitous consequences were unfolding globally at an exponential rate. It advised that conditions for all life would continue to steadily worsen over the next twenty to thirty years, taking life in myriad ways, and that sometime in the 2050s, maybe even sooner, all forms of life would have been wiped off the face of the Earth.

Finally, there was the ineluctable universal directive: henceforth, all thought, energy, and resources expended by all individuals, groups, and governing bodies was to be devoted to one daunting challenge – how best to cope with the plunging quality of human life on an increasingly lethal planet that could no longer be saved. Citizens were asked to please consider others under the circumstances and to conduct themselves as rationally and lawfully as possible. The statement finished by plainly stating that there was nothing further to report at that time and that updates would be issued as needed. No alternatives were given, there could be no objections or arguments, and it offered no instructions or recommendations whatsoever on how exactly they should cope.

* * *

Lizzie looks down at the dirty water in the bathroom sink, up to the mirror, and back down to the water. Disgusting. She knows the washing water will have to be changed soon but realizes that it’s just another task Donnie will have to do for himself from now on. She pictures him living alone in the apartment; it instantly puts her face to face with the transience of her own life and her impending death just hours from now. She shudders.

Water is gold in 2049, especially drinking water. The plumbing in the residential complex started acting up soon after it was built, and it needed repairs more and more often until it broke down for good in early 2048. Now there are no working toilets or running water, and the last overstocking of bottled water for all residents, well over a year ago, came by boat. The plumbing was already gone by then and they knew it would be the last delivery. Now the water supply is severely depleted, even though attrition has meant fewer people needing it, and the black rainwater is poison. The facility is virtually inaccessible, almost empty, with nobody left to fill vacancies.

It has been a long time since anyone could justify using water for a bath or shower. Lizzie and Donnie have been using and reusing a small amount of wash water captured in the bathroom sink for all personal hygiene, each keeping their own personal washcloth and towel. Donnie has rigged up a crude filtering system in the corner of the bathroom with some cheesecloth and a couple of ten-gallon buckets. They use a minimum of soap and the same water for as long as they can stand before filtering it, wiping out the sink and putting it back. Lizzie always needs it changed sooner than Donnie, so she almost always ends up doing it herself. She resents this and regularly complains, but he no longer hears her when she does.

When it becomes unfilterable and unusable for personal hygiene, the washing water is used to wash a few items of clothes, but only when necessary. Then it contributes to a water supply they keep for an even more repulsive toileting system. This vile procedure became necessary after the plumbing started to go, after they could no longer endure defecating in the toilets, sinks, and bathtubs of unoccupied apartments and those of the dead without using water to do so. Eventually they had to seal up the main doors of these apartments with duct tape. With opportunistic cockroaches and rats taking over, whole levels of the complex became health hazards that had to be sealed up and ruled completely off limits.

He looks at the time, then to Lizzie coming out of the bathroom as if in a trance. It’s after midnight, he says, almost whispering.

She scuffs her way over to the sink in the kitchenette, irritable, her old, knitted slippers scraping over the tiles. They’re coming.

Well, I know that! He catches himself and tries to calm, copping a lighter attitude. Where else are they gonna go, right?

She ignores his feeble wit and chuckle, aimlessly opening a cupboard door. I wish we had some real food tonight. She slams the cupboard door and it bangs back half open. She stands there staring at the loose knob, just barely hanging on like she is. Yeah right.

Her head droops then promptly bobs back up with the putrid smell emanating from the broken garburator. Holy fuck!