Your money won’t save you. A bead of sweat dripped slowly over the bulging vein in Scott Harper’s temple. His usually clean-shaven face was now shadowed by the scruffy beginnings of a coarse beard. The muscles in his jaw jumped, strained by the tense clench of his teeth. In his right hand, he nursed the second glass of whiskey he’d poured since waking up, and yet it did nothing to ease the stress, the terror, that had settled over him like a thick, heavy blanket.
Once upon a time, he had been on top of the world. Heir to a third-generation oil company, with a young, beautiful wife on his arm, and a fleet of high-end sports cars in his jumbo-sized garage, he had been untouchable. The only thing he needed to worry about was which thousand-dollar suit he was going to wear to his next big meeting.
For almost one hundred years, his family had been big in the fossil-fuel industry, and for almost one hundred years, they’d been allowed to expand their reach, dig further into the earth and extract millions of barrels worth of oil. His father, and his father before him, had carved out strong, solid careers in the field, and having experienced first-hand, since birth, the wealth that came with such a responsibility, Scott had happily joined that particular race – as soon as he’d graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with the necessary business degree, that is.
He had only been only twenty-three years old when he was left to fly solo in an important meeting about a fracking site in California. He’d spent far too long in front of the mirror, dark hair styled with far too much wax, practicing lines that, in the end, were far too elaborate for the people he’d be dealing with.
When his father found him, he’d laughed, clapped his shoulders and said: “Listen good, son. The only thing those people care about is what’s gonna make them the most money. The only thing we care about is what’s gonna make us the most money. Nothing else matters, you got it?”
It was a lesson easy learned. Following that exact rule of thumb, the job had been a breeze for years. Working under his father, Scott had helped make their company hundreds of thousands of dollars. By the time his father retired in the fall of 2013, that number had risen to the millions, and Scott had been excited to reap most, if not all, the benefits from there on out.
Your money won’t save you.
Those benefits had dwindled faster than anybody expected them to. The Harpers were proud people, and a part of Scott had always imagined they were invincible. Even though he had long buried his grandparents, and his own were growing hunched and grey, he believed that as long as their name stood and their legacy survived, so would they.
As fate would have it, however, he had three children, all of whom were bright, healthy, beautiful girls. And by 2018, when climate lobbyists were banging at his door, ready to tear down the walls of everything his family had built over the years, a horrible sense of dread and desperation had started to settle into the darkest parts of his heart.
He had needed a boy to preserve his lineage. And even in the face of the so-called ‘facts’ thrown in his face by those crusty conspiracy theorists damning him to hell for everything he stood for, he all but begged his wife to try for another child. He loved his daughters, but more than anything, he needed a son.
Halfway through 2019, while the Amazon rainforest burned an acre a minute, his wife, Lydia, fell pregnant once more. As the lungs of their planet shrivelled and died, he had sat in his luxury penthouse apartment with his family and flicked happily through a book of baby names; shopping for high-end strollers and cribs – only the best for the newest member of the Harper clan. They ploughed thousands of dollars into preparing for the child before they even knew the sex.
Nine months later, Lydia had given birth to – thank the God Almighty – a blue-eyed baby boy. Scott thought he would have been overjoyed at the arrival. Hadn’t it been what he’d always wanted? But a lot had changed in nine months. The company had taken a heavy hit in the wake of the escalating climate crisis, and that’s exactly what it had come to – a crisis. It was no longer just a few lobbyists that were causing problems in the industry. In one year alone, there had been an alarming surge in strikes and protests around the world, putting an incredible amount of pressure on the company to change their ways, to move towards clean, renewable energy.
Scott had been scared. His son was supposed to grow up in an empire, to become the next oil baron in the strong line of men who had built and shaped Harper Industries. But what if all that awaited him were death threats from jealous, anti-capitalist nut-jobs? What if he was met with hordes of people who wanted nothing more than to see everything they had crumble to dust? What of the thousands of ungrateful millennials frothing at the mouth for the blood of the wealthy? Was that the world ready to welcome his son?
Your money won’t save you. Five words. Those damn five words, screamed at him in airports, outside his office buildings, sometimes even outside his apartment building. They had always been scoffed at and brushed off with a disgusted curl of his lip. Jealous hippies.
But those five words haunted Scott Harper now, in the backend of 2025. They rang round and around his head, clear as a bell. They sliced deep, ripping open the very fabric of his being. Everything he thought he knew, everything he had been purposefully ignoring for the greater good of this so-called ‘legacy.’ He could see it all with painful clarity now.
There was no legacy. His family had done nothing to help this world. They had raped and ruined the very earth they all walked on and pawned the blame off on the masses for drinking through plastic straws. It was the greatest trick the 1% had ever pulled, he thought. A cleverly crafted smokescreen of deceit to keep people busy and complacent while a small handful continued to ravage the world for their own personal, egotistical glory.
That wasn’t to say the masses were without blame. Like sheep, they bleated and moved with the herd. There was no room for people who wanted to disrupt their status quo. They had been more than happy to lie down, to close their eyes and ears to their immediate problems. They shamed and shunned those who wanted to stand and fight. And that was what had lent a hand to the wide-scale destruction of life as everyone knew it. Their silence, their delusion, their own ability to turn a blind eye was unforgiveable when the earth screamed for their mercy.
Scott stood, tumbler in hand, and stared at the wide, flat-screen TV mounted into the wall above their huge fireplace. Today, they were discussing safe zones in the US… at least, the few that were left. In a few moments, he’d be seeing reports of another hospital that had collapsed under the strain of staying open. Between the heat, the lack of food and water, the death of over-worked staff…
For years, he’d sat in his cushy leather recliner and watched the global death toll rise higher and higher; the tragedies seemed unending. There was no keeping up with it. Especially when it reached home-soil and the reality of humanity’s situation – his situation – finally settled in.
The entirety of the Amazon rainforest was gone now – the people and the animals who inhabited the grounds died with it for a quick profit. He’d managed to strike a deal with a company in Brazil when they tried to rebuild over the ashes. A hundred different species in exchange for cold, hard cash.
Your money won’t save you. The Pacific Islands were gone. Some locals who hadn’t been completely attached to their homes up and left before the worst of the waves had consumed them. Others had stayed in protest, and others had stayed in hope that they’d receive help… It had all ended the same. Scott, sitting high above the rest of the world, miles and miles away from that particular disaster, hadn’t seen reason to put his hand in his pocket. Then he’d watched the footage on the news – helicopters flying over a choppy sea littered with bodies and debris where there used to be homes and streets and cities and life. His youngest daughter cried for two hours while he and his wife worked their way through two bottles of imported wine.
Your money won’t save you. “What could I have done? Realistically? What could I have done?” It was the first night he’d asked himself those questions. But as he’d began to realise, it was much too little, far too late.
The end of the world had arrived far sooner than any of them had anticipated. It was a fiery ball of famine and floods that had rolled faster and faster, and he’d laughed and kept working, working, working against everything that had tried to slow it all down and change the tracks.
His family had a secure bunker they could’ve retreated to. It was something his father had built and stocked up during the height of unease surrounding nuclear warfare. Scott was of the sick, twisted belief now that perhaps that would’ve been a better outcome for them all – a better way to go out that this slow, horrific heat death that had already cooked people in the African Republic from the inside out. But should he take his family and hide away in the bunker… that was the death that awaited them when the food inevitably spoiled, and the water ran dry. Those bunkers weren’t built for this apocalypse, the one he and so many of his colleagues had spent years investing hundreds of thousands into.
Your money won’t save you. Scott swallowed the rest of his whiskey in two gulps, relishing the bitter burn in his throat. This wasn’t a luxury he deserved to have; he knew that now, but there was nothing left to dull the shame, the guilt, the pure fear that ran through his veins from the moment his eyes opened to a new day.
His sleep was restless, broken by nightmares of watching his beautiful family burn, sick in the knowledge that he hadn’t kept them safe. He couldn’t protect them. He couldn’t save them. The window of opportunity to do so had long closed… slammed shut by his own hand.
The past few years had aged Lydia by ten. The weight of what their selfish convictions had meant for the fate of so many others caught up to her long before they brought Scott to his knees. It had been a week since she’d drained her stash of wine – two since she’d even cracked a smile.
Their daughters were old enough to understand what they’d done now. It had been six months since the scathing argument with his eldest: “IF – and that’s a really big if – I survive this, I will never forgive you. Never. If you don’t burn with us now, I know you’ll get your chance once you’re dead and gone.” She hadn’t said a single word to him since.
And his son… his absolute pride and joy… still too young to understand how severe the threat to his life was. Too young to do much more than sob and scream when the fans and the AC broke and the sweltering temperatures left him short of breath. Just old enough to question why.
Your money won’t save you. The thin, dead-eyed news reporter on the plasma screen had just received news that another glacier had melted. Accompanying that was a haunting picture of a skeletal polar bear drifting on a piece of ice that seemed far too small to support its weight. Tears pricked Scott’s eyes, and with shaking hands, he refilled his glass.
Your money won’t save you. Once upon a time… it would’ve. It did.
Once upon a time… Scott Harper was untouchable. By the activists, by the facts, by the whole God damned world.
Your. Money. Won’t. Save. You. It had taken him too long to see it. But now, here at the end, amidst entire social and ecological collapse… his bank account had been rendered worthless. His entire life rendered worthless in nature’s final fight to rid herself of her parasites. She could rebuild – she would rebuild, over and over until it was time to bow out with grace.
But it would be without Scott. Without his wife. Without his children. There wouldn’t be a single trace of him, or his family, left in this world when it was all over. There wouldn’t be a trace of anyone left when it was all over.
And that, perhaps, was the only single comfort left to find.
The End
