"And this is why I always argued against solar panels," my dad ranted, drawing from his cigarette, before puffing smoke out through the opened driver's side window.
I eyed the glowing orange end of the cigarette, not caring either way for the smell of smoke around me. Ever since mom divorced him, he had no woman to demand that he stop smoking, and given our situation—humanity's situation—I felt no need to ask him to stop his bad habit. Honestly, I may as well have joined in. It's not like I expected to live to twenty, let alone long enough for lung cancer to strike me down. "You give yourself too much credit, Dad. That was a dumb argument to make before the Cloud."
"Before the Cloud," he scoffed, bloodshot gaze focused on the road before us, illuminated nicely by the headlights of his truck. "I swear, your mom leaving us is what made that shit up there happen."
Lowering my head, I contemplated his cynicism. Without a doubt, he had rubbed off on me.
This was a dark world, with black days and eerie nights.
It had been this way since the Cloud drifted between the sun and the Earth. Some theorized that it was a godly hand meant to eliminate our species, but it didn't take the form of a hand—it was amorphous. Scientists tried to test it, but every spacecraft they launched into it disappeared, losing signal as well as all its pieces and parts. Nothing would fall back into our atmosphere, so either the rockets and probes lost control and continued toward the sun, or they were somehow absorbed into the blob.
"Kev?" Dad's pitch rose questioningly. He must have realized that his statement about Mom stirred up something sick inside me; he slapped on a layer of pointless optimism in a useless attempt to lighten my mood. "You're gonna ace this exam. Don't worry about college. You'll get in wherever you apply."
"Ace it? I'm not that smart." I rested my head against the window and pushed myself harder into the passenger seat. "Besides, college is pointless now, no matter how you spin it."
"Don't get down on yourself. You compare yourself too much to … Elizabeth."
I coughed into my arm, surprised that he mentioned my friend without any prompting on my part. Usually, he came off as being unaware that we weren't the only two people on Earth. "Liza, Dad. Been five years since she's gone by her full name, you know?"
"Five years?"
My gut twisted. I thought he might reference Mom again since she'd left us around the same time Liza began to hate the long form of her name. However, to my relief, he said nothing more and simply waited for me to speak again.
Comfortable enough to address what had been on my mind since before I got into the car that morning, I asked, "Doesn't today feel ominous?"
"What—because of the exam? You're just nervous."
"Not the exam. I feel like something bad is going to happen."
To be fair, had anything out of the mundane happened that day, there was a fifty-fifty chance that it would be either bad or devastating. That's just how the world worked.
When the Cloud covered the sun, a lot of plants died. Not just where I was living in Bloomfield, Indiana, but across the globe. Depression rates skyrocketed, and a large number of people killed themselves. Despite still having the moon and stars at night, when we faced away from the Cloud, that dim light wasn't enough for us humans to make much vitamin D, and every country that was once warm essentially turned into Alaska 2.0. So much for global warming, although pollution, on the whole, continued to hurt. Maybe the Cloud was trying to save us from burning to death ... by starving us out.
Even though this made our days forever dark, suspicious, and sketchy, life went on. It had to.
Sure, not everyone went on with it. But I wanted to, and I wasn't alone in that. I still had classmates for a reason, right? We hadn't all died or disappeared.
"Nothing bad is going to happen," Dad said. Yet, I couldn't believe him.
The point of this car ride was to take me to an old high school where senior exams were being held. It wasn't the place I normally attended: seniors from all over Greene county were instructed to go here specifically for finals. Probably because of its central location and the presence of colleges around it, which would likely attempt to recruit some of the visiting high school students.
Regardless of its practical placement in the county, the layout would be entirely new to me, and dread was starting to overwhelm me. New places had that effect on me ... Relearning to navigate life in the dark was like sticking your hand into a blender, not knowing if it'll be plugged in or not when you flick the "on" switch.
A lot of kids had gone straight to farming, "new agriculture" being a necessity for humans and animals alike, and those that didn't go into agriculture wanted to go into somewhat similar fields, like botany, biotech, or ecological studies. We had to figure out how to feed everyone and everything, so the majority of life on Earth wouldn't die out.
"Not everything goes wrong, Kev," Dad insisted, in response to my silence.
He grinned at me, some ashes falling onto his thick jeans. He could have used a dentist appointment—he complained about an aching tooth all the time, but because it was hard to see outside, I guess he felt no need to keep up appearances, or health. He rarely brushed his hair, or cut it, so his graying brown locks flopped in dishevelment around his shoulders. On top of cigarettes, he smelled like garlic from a simple soup we ate last night. I guess he hadn't changed his clothes.
Dismissing his empty encouragement, I looked out and watched as the car's headlights disappeared under the bright lamps of the rundown school's parking lot. If not for the few streetlights we'd driven past, I wouldn't have been able to spot a single house or vacant shop on the way here.
"I'll pick you up in three hours."
"Okay," I muttered, unbuckling the seat belt before we had come to a complete stop. "Be prompt."