Degrees
The thermostat read ninety-eight when Sarah woke. Inside. The AC had been running all night, that mechanical wheeze from the unit outside her bedroom window like an old man dying by degrees. She turned it down to seventy-two and listened to the compressor kick into overdrive.
On the news they said one-twenty three in Phoenix. Record-breaking. The meteorologist’s shirt showed wet patches under his arms as he pointed at the angry red blob spreading across the weather map like an infection. Cooling centers opening. Rolling blackouts expected.
Sarah’s electric bill had tripled since June. She worked from home now—the office building’s HVAC had failed and wouldn’t be fixed until September, maybe October. Everyone working from home, cranking their individual units, the grid groaning under ten million desperate attempts to push back the heat.
The mailman didn’t come anymore after eleven. UPS stopped deliveries at noon. The asphalt on Elm Street had gone soft, tire tracks pressed into it like fossils.
Mrs. Chen next door ran her AC so hard the transformer on their block blew twice in a week. When the power came back on, everyone’s units fired up at once, a symphony of mechanical desperation that you could hear for miles.
The reservoirs were bones in a desert now. Lake Mead showing bathtub rings like geological time compressed into decades. They’d found more bodies in the mud, people who’d disappeared when the water was high and the world was different.
Then came the rain. Three days of it falling like God had opened a faucet, streets becoming rivers, cars floating like toys. Sarah’s basement flooded. The AC unit in her neighbor’s yard disappeared under brown water, still running, gurgling its last breaths.
When it cleared, the humidity made the heat worse. Steam rising from hot pavement. The air thick as soup. Everyone cranked their units higher to fight the moisture.
The fires started two weeks later. Grass dry as paper despite the flood, the earth baked hard as concrete. Lightning from storms that brought no rain, just heat and wind and electricity. The flames moved faster than cars, eating subdivisions, jumping highways.
Sarah watched from her sealed house, AC running at maximum, as orange light painted her windows. The power grid failed before the flames reached her street. The silence when the AC stopped was absolute.
She opened her door for the first time in months. The heat hit her like stepping into an oven. Down the street, someone was screaming. The asphalt had begun to bubble.
The evacuation center had no power either. Hundreds of people in a concrete gymnasium, breathing each other’s exhausted air, waiting for generators that weren’t coming. Outside, the fires burned toward the next town, where the AC units were still running, still feeding heat back into the atmosphere, still believing they could win a war against physics.
The superintendent posted a sign by the door: Cooling Center Temporarily Closed.
Someone had crossed out ‘Temporarily’ and written ‘Forever’ in black marker.
Sarah lay on the gymnasium floor and listened to the collective panting of a species that had outsmarted itself. Through the high windows, she could see the glow on the horizon where the next city was burning, their AC units still running right up until the end.