Time: Before the Current Era, Pre-Biblical in fact, Pre-Historical.....

The Earth has fallen off its orbit, making a wide elliptical shape that takes it further from the sun than it ever should be in certain seasons. The Earth has given up half of itself to sharp tall mountains of icy blue and black for this season, and everything living there is dim and struggling to survive.

I live in a town on the outskirts of the dim land, with many other people who go about in loincloths. There is a giant in our town whose name is Alex. He's a bit off but not exactly slow, maybe he's just "different" and we all treat him as such in our minds. Everyone's obsessed with getting fire for their homes...

We must take a trip to meet up with the head of the human community. This trip is very far away, so we take a prehistoric vehicle, not altogether so different from my honda. Arriving at the human capital, I first notice that a percentage of the people are wearing big black capes that hide their entire body and even the face. When we stop the "car" (it's made of stone), some agents pull Alex from the car and immediately throw one of these black robes onto him, saying, "He has the disease! He has it!"
This was how they marked the people who were going to die from the great human plague. We were not supposed to touch them. Anyone who was seen touching them also got a black robe. I thought of the many times I'd shaken his hand or embraced him ina friendly way, and then worried for my community back home. Would we all perish in this dark world before the sun came back to us??