Cold

It was the year 2100 and John was cold, cold to the bone, but it was all he’d ever known. Had the sky not been full of low cloud he would have seen the Atlantic Ocean below him to the east. He had moved to the Appalachian Mountains in South Carolina, two years earlier. Together with his family, he lived within a small community of fellow survivors that had moved south from North Carolina. They had been forced to move south due to the plunging temperatures and it now seemed that they would need to move again. While the first year had been a marked improvement, during this the second year, the temperatures had begun to plummet, just as they had in North Carolina.
John’s family had lived in New York for generations, but had been forced to move ever further south, as climate change began to take hold. He remembered the tales of his father, tales that had passed on from his father and his father’s father, before he passed on, aged forty five. The so called experts back then had apparently predicted ever rising temperatures as climate change took hold across the planet. How wrong they’d been, the exact opposite had taken place. The northern and southern hemispheres were now uninhabitable, way too cold and ice covered. Even worse, it was a process that continued, hence the need to migrate south.
The tales had become folk lore, tales of how life had been, before the cold and the ice came. While the tales were difficult to believe, they gave John hope that perhaps one day the sun would find a way through the low lying and dark clouds.