The Rains of Death

The Rains of Death came without warning in a blanket of orange. It seemed like they started overnight, but really, they had been years in the making. I don’t know what caused them, but it had something to do with humans and pollution. We literally poisoned ourselves out of existence.

My name is Summer Rose Ellington. I am 18 years old and this is my story.

The year is 2068, and it’s been ten years since the last time anyone lived outside the dome. Ten years since the sky was visible in all its depth and glory.

If I lay on the ground and stare up at the gigantic blue dome, it looks like a massive hole in the sky. I can’t see any stars or feel any breeze. All I hear is the sound of thunder and heavy raindrops shattering when they hit the glass ceiling.

I remember looking at the stars every night before going to bed and thinking how lucky we were to see them from our back porch in the middle of nowhere, because not everyone had that luxury. Nowadays, there is one gigantic dome over everything, like a lid on top of a pot of boiling water.

It’s amazing when you think about everything that goes on inside the Dome. People living in this dystopian society, hoping and praying the worst is behind them. There certainly isn’t much room for imagination in this place. There isn’t much room for hope either.

I don’t remember the precise moment everything happened. There are no records of when or how it all happened, but we know one thing for sure — billions of people died and it was the end of life as we knew it. It wasn’t like in the movies where a bomb goes off and everyone runs away from destruction; this was more like a slow creep. It was an overwhelming sense of doom.

And then they came.

The Rains of Death came without warning.

The sky looked beautiful. It was enormous, but it was terrifying. The sky was a vivid color that I can’t describe with words. Luminescent orange mixed into the reds and purples in a mottled mess of colors thrown together so haphazardly that Mother Nature would cringe. Nothing is how it should be. I looked up at it again, and my vision blurred for a moment before clearing to show a scene from another time: one where there were no colors in the sky- just blackness lit by flashes of lightning, like sudden moments of clarity, in an otherwise endless hellscape.

The government seemed clueless at first about how to handle this problem. All we knew about the rains was that they dropped acid rain and corrosive hail that burned to the bone. We were told to stay inside. A couple of days into the chaos, people got sick. “Sidewall poisoning,” they called it. Before you figured out what was going on, you would feel you were going to pass out, and then you would die.

The days blurred into one because the rains were raging outside, and there was nowhere to run. Everyone had to stay inside. It was too dangerous outside, and no one wanted to join the billions of people who died. To burn and boil to death, turning into clouds of smoke with eyes that bulged from the heat and pressure.

What else was there to do but wait and hope that we survived?

Then the rainbows came like a death sentence. We watched them form in the sky day by day, but we didn’t know that they were warning signs of something worse to come.

They were coming. Thousands of them.

As the days and weeks passed, the rainbows became more and more frequent until they had settled into a steady pattern of acid rain that burned everything it came in contact with. People died and things burned, and then nothing grew anymore. Nothing. The forests died, and the grass died, and the ground turned into nothing but dust. But there was no time to mourn the death of everything we had ever known because the war was still on. We were still fighting and sinking every ounce of energy we had into a battle that we couldn’t win.

That’s when the domes were built. They were a place to call home. With the domes came the survivors. Those who had survived the rains. The Government promised the Rains were over, and we could build a life again. Except when you looked up at the sky, the sun was still dark and rainbows burned everything they touched.

The world is gone, and the air tastes like rust. There are no animals, no plants, nothing but rocks and dirt; We only had two choices; suffocation from the poisons in our atmosphere, or move into a dome.

The day they built the domes, I was a little girl. I was only 8 years old, but I felt much older. This wasn’t my world anymore. It was a different place, and everything that I knew and loved had gone away. Gone in the blink of an eye. And now there were these domes all around me. There are no more trees to climb; no flowers blooming in the warm summer breeze. No more grass. No more birds chirping.

Nothing but dirt, fungus, and death.

The Dome was a blessing for some and a curse to others. Yes, people died, but they had been dying long before the Dome came down. And at least it brought a sense of safety, of peace.

The few that dared venture out, hoping to explore or scavenge, never returned. Often we would hear screams echoing from outside our perimeter walls as they died at the hands of whatever lurked there.

In the early days, some people went crazy. They shut themselves away without hope. Some people started hiding from everyone and eating their shoes. They thought they were getting their nutrition from the leather of their shoes. For them, things didn’t have to make sense; they were trying to survive.

As for me.

I feel privileged to be one of the lucky ones. The world is dying but I have a roof over my head and food in my stomach.

The dome was supposed to be a new world, but it wasn’t anything like what they promised us back then. It has all the things you need, but it has nothing else. There will be no new things. No new buildings or new people. We will just keep living like this, in these domes, while we watch the world die.

Before The Rains, I went outside with my dad all the time. We lived in a simple brick house, and we would sit in the backyard after dinner and look up at the sky. We loved that sky. It was so big, and it was so full of light and color. I remember the way the sun felt on my face. I loved the way the color changed over the course of the day. Now nothing changes.

Before we left home, my Mom grabbed a box of treasures that she kept in her wardrobe. Inside the box were some photos, my grandmother’s heart-shaped locket, and some of my beloved toys: Bonita, my first doll, and my best friend Brown Bear.

After we moved into the Dome, I put my grandmother’s locket on and never took it off. I kept it where I could see it all the time. It was a small thing, but it meant the world to me. The little girl in the photo in the locket looked like me; even had the same stupid freckles.

I made most of my childhood memories inside these walls. The grassy flatlands that used to stretch out around us are no longer. The sun disappeared years ago from sight, and the soil is too acidic for anything to grow, besides moss or fungi. But we have food; our own hydroponic system, where plants grow at twice their normal rate with artificial light shining down on them.

Everything stops. It was as if someone had flicked a switch, and it sucked all the life out of everything. The Dome was all that remained.

I would say that I feel sad but I don’t remember what that word means. All my old memories are gone now. One thing that hasn’t changed is fear of death. It’s always with you, lurking in the shadows; waiting for its chance to overtake you again when you are at your weakest moment.

It’s funny how everything is so easy when you’re a kid. I was so young then, and I didn’t stop to think about how we were going to survive this. I wish I had thought it through, but I did not know what life would be like. It’s not like we stopped living, but I guess we just live differently.

It’s not enough for me, though. I miss the sun and the trees, and I miss the birds I would see in the sky. Now there are no birds in the sky; no clouds; no sunlight. It’s just us.

Just us and this stupid dome.

We lost so many people we cared about. I don’t know what happened to my friends. When the Rains came, they left nothing in their wake, not even hope. We were fortunate to be chosen for the Dome project.

The threat of the rains still hangs over us all. Some days I can feel the Dome’s ceiling bow. It’s like there’s something hidden inside this Dome; some dark force that weighs us down and keeps us from escaping. I sometimes think that we are like goldfish in a bowl. We have to stay in the bowl, or we will die.

Sometimes I stare out of the window at night when it’s dark, and the Dome is silent and the only sound is rain. I can see the reflection of the light from the Dome on the water as I watch it swirls and shifts beneath me. Then I close my eyes and imagine that I’m on the shore of a river and I can feel the cold clean water against my skin.

I used to dream about the sky. I used to dream about being outside. I keep trying to remember what it was like and for a moment; I close my eyes and can see blue sky and feel the wet, cold drops of rain patting my face, but then all that will fade away.

I miss the Sun. I miss the sky. I miss my dog. I miss everything.

I keep looking to see what’s outside the walls. Sometimes I am sure I hear roosters crowing, or the sound of a can of soda being opened. I want to feel hot, bright sunlight on my face again. I want to run through a forest while it rains. There’s only moss and mold. Everything is old and decaying.

The dome has become our world; we can’t survive without it any more than a fish could survive out of water. There’s not anywhere to go, anyway. We are all trapped inside this ugly bowl.

There is no future, just now; there are never any plans past today because there might not be a tomorrow. We are all just hanging on. What is the point? Everything is just like yesterday. The day before was the same as now, and the day before that. It’s all the same, and nothing ever changes. You can see the beginning of the end from the moment you open your eyes every morning.

The real world died a long time ago. Nothing lasts forever, right? So we stay alive and keep each other close because there is nothing left but us.