I look out the window, watching the families of the disappeared people lock themselves inside their homes; it seems like everyone’s doing that these days. Tension is in the air ever since the temperature has been growing ever higher and more people have been disappearing; people are disappearing every day now, and people are growing more and more frantic by the day as each person disappears. We’ve faced threats to the existence of the remaining people on earth but none quite like this. I can’t help feeling like we won’t be able to get ourselves out of it this time. I think everyone here is starting to come to the same conclusion. I watch as more people disappear and are never found. I think they will disappear one by one until there is no one left to mourn those who have disappeared.

“Come on,” Kayla says to me, pulling me along. It’s been years since climate change nearly destroyed our planet, since we salvaged everything left behind and found the only part of the earth that remained intact. I was five when that happened. I and Kayla have been best friends since we were three. She knows me better than I even know myself. I can’t lose her too, she’s all I have.

We’ve been exploring the forest since we first arrived here, but we haven’t reached the farthest point yet. Kayla had been acting weird all day. She wanted to explore the forest like old times. She’s always been a risk-taker. 

The forest isn’t how I remember. It used to remind me of home, now it just feels dead. 

“We should head back,” I say. “It got so much warmer all of a sudden.”

“Just a bit further,” she urges. “Maybe we can find the source of the heat.”

I check my watch. “I can’t,” I tell her. “I need to be back by 5.” 

She’s standing there with a strange look. “I’m going to keep going,” she says.

The next day, I go to the meeting place we discovered all those years ago. When I get there, she isn’t there waiting for me. I start to worry. What if she disappeared? But she couldn’t have; she is the one friend I have had through this whole thing since we first got here. I can’t lose her too.

The next day, I decide to go into the woods and find her, hoping with all my heart that she just got lost or fell asleep…

I start moving, though at a slow pace. Suddenly, I stop. I have this foreboding feeling that I’m crossing some kind of barrier or boundary and won’t come back alive. But all I care about now is Kayla. I know that she’d do the same thing for me, except that she wouldn’t hesitate to cross the barrier. With that thought in mind, I push through my imaginary barrier.

I step back; the heat is overpowering. It washes over me all at once, and I’m unprepared for it. I step back another step, but I have nowhere to go. I open my eyes and frantically look around. My jaw drops open in horror. My eyes are burning, but I can’t close them. I’m staring at a mass of bubbling lava and tar. There’s nothing I can do. I see the lava spreading rapidly. As it spreads, it accelerates, feeding off of the trees and forest floor.

I stumble as far away as I can. Every part of my body feels like it’s on fire. My eyes start to stream from the heat, creating tear tracks on my dirty face. The headache I have been holding back suddenly spills over, and the breath is knocked out of me from the sheer force and pain of the heat and my exhaustion. I collapse onto my knees. Through my streaming eyes, I see something start to happen to the mass of fire and lava that is the source of all of this dreadful heat.

The mass of lava is morphing into something. It contracts and then explodes into flame. The fire engulfs the forest and the village; it is killing the last remaining patch of inhabitable earth. It wipes over the whole land, killing everyone. There will be no survivors. I close my eyes and swallow, knowing that will take me like it took Kayla.