DECEMBER THIRTEENTH
RUBEN KING
PLANET EARTH
YEAR 2075
The King family lived in the pretty part of town.
Pretty, as in the part where the plague hadn’t yet started to spread, as in the part where the ones living there easily could afford inside climate control so they wouldn’t have to care about how the world outside had been ruined.
Ruben had taken his family to the not-so-pretty-parts of London. He had been careful not to let them see those parts, to keep them far from there. Until now.
He had ordered the drone taxi to hover over one of the most poor parts, where the cold hit them like a wall, even though the taxi was comfortably warm.
“Look at those people,” Ruben told them. “Look at them.”
They did.
The people below them wore thin clothes and gas masks.
“Do you know about the plague?” Ruben asked his children, then, before any of them could answer, he added; “Of course you don’t, I payed your teachers not to tell you about it.”
Dana opened her mouth, brows dragged together in a face of pure hatred.
“The plague,” Ruben interrupted once again. He was no longer quiet, rather the opposite, desperate to tell the truth, to explain himself, realise himself from all the guilt he was carrying. “Has been spreading for years. It’s a disease. You catch it, pass it on, then dies. All in the span of a few days.”
Dana’s mouth was still open.
Gaten’s chin was trembled once again. It was the second time his father had made him cry in less than a week.
Bruna just said, “Ruben.”
“The disease settles in your lungs. You spread it every time you cough. It fills your lungs with water until you drown in your own body.”
“Ruben.”
He didn’t listen to her. All that mattered to him was for them to care about what he had to tell them. He had to make them understand, to not hate him.
“And the other type of plague is even worse - they don’t even know what it it yet!”
“I want to go home,” Dana said, her body stiff, face blank. “Home,” she told the drone taxi.
“Stop,” Ruben ordered the taxi, which had started moving, but now obeyed.
“Home!”
Ruben didn’t even have the energy to stop it once more, instead, just leaned against the wall and let the taxi take them back home, Bruna staring at him like she didn’t recognize him the whole ride.
Back home, Gaten had climbed up Bruna’s lap and refused to let go. He refused to meet his father’s eyes, pressed his tear stained face against his mother’s shoulder like a toddler.
Dana had first said that she hated Ruben. Then that she hated Bruna. She had screamed, then cried.
It took hours for Gaten to look Ruben in the eye, for Dana to calm down enough to have a conversation with him.
“Do we really have to leave tomorrow?” Gaten asked, still hicccuping.
Bruna nodded at him.
“But what about Santa? And christmas?”
They ended up on the living room floor, giving each other the gifts that they wouldn’t be able to keep anyway. As Bruna smiled at the sight of the necklace, Ruben knew that he had something to told her, something important.
But it had to wait.
He suspected both Dana and Gaten were in shock, since no one of them asked anything about the evacuation at all.
Maybe they hoped Ruben would forget about it, or that it would forget about itself if no one talked about it.
But Ruben knew that this was their last day on the Earth.
