2099; All Lights Out

Homeless

"I'm clueless, and I shouldn't even be pretending to have my shit more figured out than the others" Derek muttered to himself. 

"Someone has got to do it" He said to himself moments after again with a rather audacious look on his face.

"2099 is fucked. Time travellers, choose wisely" He again whispers to an imaginary ghost with a weird grin on his face.

Flashback to 2 weeks ago

The light bulb twitches as a strong wind sweeps through the slightly open window in Derek's living room. He looks up, away from his mum's dinner- his very delicacy. While he's still caught in the whole idea of the wind and the light flicker, his mum slips as the wine bottle in her hand falls hard to the ground causing a great splash of the red beauty bottled up while the glass pieces find their way to the farthest parts of the room like distant lovers.

Derek hurried to help his mum out, to check if she was okay. She has been sick for two years now, with a rare form of cancer. Sheila had tried so hard to keep herself from giving in to this cancer without a fight. That explained the dinner she always made and enough of talking-time she made out for Derek. Derek hugged his mum in that moment of shock as she shivered.

While he clung tightly to his mummy, the light bulbs flickered again. This time, there was no wind or anything. This was beginning to scare the 17 year old boy as his embrace became tighter to the point of choking his mum enough to make her cough.

"I'm sorry, mum" he said as he walked her slowly to the couch to sit and poured water into her glass. 

As he poured water into her glass, he looked towards the T.V which had been on for too long he barely even noticed it. This was because most of the time, Derek either had his headphones on or had the T.V muted.  The lights flickered yet again, but strangely, so did the studio's at the T.V Station where his eyes were fixed upon.

"The fuck?" He muttered. Before he could say any more cuss words, the whole lights went off one by one with his lips barely moving fast enough to catch up with the light's loss. Every gadget and electronic device went off. In less than 7 seconds, everywhere was dark. This darkness was new to him, it wasn't the one he or anyone must have seen growing up. 

It was night after all, the moon was supposed to be hanging somewhere up there, but tonight it wasn't.

This was the preview of the darkness that would shape the rest of the world.

Derek tried to find his phone which he had slipped into his back pocket earlier. He slipped his fingers in and as he brought it out expecting to get a beam from the screen saver, it was to his utter dismay when all he got in return was silence and blindness from the device in his hands. The phone was charged, so that wasn't the problem. Derek couldn't make sense of it all. 

"A blackout, now a dead phone? You've got to be kidding me!" He said angrily as he walked blindly, using the dining table chairs as a support to trace his way to the couch where he left his mum.

"Mum? Mum?" Derek yelled as his hands could feel nothing but emptiness and the couch itself. He was sweating, but that wasn't his concern as his heart raced faster than earlier. He walked around the couch without any help finding his way as all he could think about was what could have happened to his mum. 

"Mum? Mum?" He yelled so loudly as he had walked back and forth the room more than three times and couldn't find her or any traces of her at all.

His anxiety empowered his thoughts and he raced up the stairs which were also as dark as every other corner of the room. He half-slipped on the 7th stair case as he was running. He flung all the doors wide open while screaming "Mum" with tears heralding his every words. 

After minutes of helpless crying and searching, his body couldn't take any more running as he was panting loudly and mildly hyperventilating. He walked down the stair case as he rubbed his hands through the wall to trace his way back downstairs.

He found his way to the front door of the house and opened it to himself. It was no brighter outside than the darkness that flooded the insides of his house. He got down to the porch of his entrance, stared up into what looked like the sky. There was no moon, there was no star, there was no colourful constellation or floating body of light hanging up above. 

"What was this?" Basking in this recurring soliloquy, he heard shouts and screams from the house next door. That voice was familiar, but it wasn't his mum's. It was someone he knew from school. He hurried to the house and without an iota of courtesy in his actions, he flung the door open and he was stunned as he stepped right in what looked like…