by Amy Brashear
“Laura, you awake?” Terrence asked.
“Yes,” I said above a whisper.
He stepped over legs and buckets and fell onto the cot next to me. “Sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I said, rubbing my head. He didn’t give me this headache, but it still throbbed just the same.
“What do you think it will be like?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, out there?”
I shrugged. “But studies have said and then movies have shown that—”
“We don’t know, is what you’re saying,” he said, interrupting me.
“Yeah.”
“But it will probably be hell.”
“Yeah, hell.”
We sat there for a while in silence by candlelight. Then he grabbed my hand and squeezed.
“You know our parents are probably dead,” he said.
“I know.”
“We are probably the only family we have left.”
I squeezed his hand. “You’ll always be my brother.”
“And you’re my nerd of a sister.”
I laid my head on his shoulder and closed my eyes. We’d need our sleep. We had no idea what was waiting for us on the outside of this fallout shelter.
“Terrence, I don’t want to die,” I said finally.
“Me either.”
Chapter Fifty-Four
Day 7 (We Rest)
December 12
Who knows the time?
• • • • • • •
We didn’t want to go outside, but we didn’t want to stay in here.
They said cockroaches were the only thing that would survive. That didn’t give us much hope. Staying put in here, even if it smelled like shit and vomit and urine, meant safety. We didn’t know if safety would be guaranteed if we went outside.
“In the first issue of Teenage Mutant we meet Destiny with powers so great from a nuclear bomb that she can do anything. We could be like her. We were all touched by radiation. But to fulfill our potential, we need to leave this fallout shelter,” I said.
“Are you trying to rah-rah us up about opening the vault door?” Astrid asked.
“Well, I was trying. Is it working?”
“No.”
“I can quote another,” I said, thinking.
“Stop. I’m embarrassed for you,” she said.
“Did you just quote a comic book?” Terrence asked.
“Yes, I did,” I said. “Mine—one of the best superheroes ever.”
We gathered what we wanted to take with us. My Nuke Me tote bag was full of first aid supplies, food, and other necessary items.
“We might have to hoof it to find civilization,” I said.
“Find civilization?” Terrence asked. “You’re making this sound like some stupid science fiction plot to some bad movie.”
“Wait—hoof?” Astrid asked.
“Walk,” Max defined for her.
“Why didn’t you just say that?”
“It’s a saying,” I said.
“Again, your American idioms,” she said, shaking her head.
“We don’t know what’s outside. It could be fine or—” Tyson said.
“It’s fine,” the director said.
“But the radio said—” I started to say, but was cut off by the director going on a tirade about the government and propaganda.
“It was touch-and-go through the first two periods, but I knew that everything would be okay when Mike Eruzione scored his famous third-period goal to put the Americans ahead. Do you believe in miracles?” Rodney asked.
“Hockey?” Freddy asked.
“It was the Olympics—against the Russians. USA . . . USA . . . USA!”
We chanted “USA” like some insane glorified patriotic crazy person. But it helped. Did we believe in miracles? Yes, of course we did. Everything could have been fine outside. Everything could have been normal outside. Like some crazy adventure. A Hollywood joke.
“It doesn’t matter—we’ve got to go,” the bus driver said.
“What he said. I’ve got to find a bathroom with privacy.”
“Privacy.” Max sounded it out for Astrid the proper American way. Like all Americans do with tact and understanding. (That was sarcasm.)
“Let’s get the hell outta Dodge,” Dylan said.
Terrence, with the help of Rodney, grabbed the handle on the vault door and waited until it was time. We had a moment planned. Dylan turned on the camera and filmed our exit. The director stood behind him, giving direction. One of the last scenes for the movie that might never be.
Tyson stuffed the tape that he chose for the moment the vault door opened into the tape player.
“And action!”
At the moment the vault door opened, the director pressed play. The volume was turned to full blast, and “We Are the Champions”77 echoed throughout the hall.
We stepped outside the fallout shelter.
Astrid walked out first. Freddy helped Owen; he was Owen’s eyes. Rodney, Terrence, Max, and I followed behind. The bus driver and Tyson were in the rear, but the director was the last one to leave. He didn’t want to be in the shot. It was our moment. The eleven of us. What started as a novella about four people turned into a story about eleven. Eleven different people all on a journey of destruction. That sounds cheesy and sappy, and for that I am sorry.
It was quiet. The air smelled of burning flesh and, surprisingly, burnt popcorn. But once we got upstairs and to the front door, we saw we weren’t alone. There had been an invasion—by the United States Air Force.
We stopped on the stairs that led to the charred ground where the flagpole once stood. A man in a protective suit, including gloves and a gas mask, was raising an American flag. Dylan was filming it all, including the helicopters that flew in the sky. A perfect backdrop. The director patted Dylan on the back, probably thanking him for thinking of the perfect visual ending to this horrific story.
The men, probably soldiers, carried guns, and they were pointed at us. The soldiers were also wearing protective gear. But we kept walking toward them. We were dirty. We smelled. We probably didn’t look like human beings.
Rodney was walking with a limp and leaning over in pain. He was moaning. He had been for a while. Stomach problems. We all had them.
“Shit,” I heard a soldier yell.
“Copy,” yelled another before he shot Rodney twice in the head. “Confirmed kill.”
Rodney fell to the ground.
“What the hell?” someone yelled, and we ran toward Rodney. We could have been shot too, for all we knew.
The soldier who shot Rodney was getting screamed at by a superior officer. The soldier had yelled “shit,” not “shoot,” like the soldier had thought he heard. The word zombie was thrown around. We didn’t look human—but we were still alive. We weren’t the walking dead. But Rodney was dead.
The ten of us circled around his lifeless body. To survive a fake but real whatever-the-hell-happened, only to be killed by a gun? What were the odds?
* * *
77 Queen, News of the World, Elektra, 1977.
In the summer of the Year of the Horse, meaning 1954, three individuals did the unthinkable: they ventured onto the streets of Pikesville in search of the truth—and to find food.
The following is all that remains of the ordeal. What you are about to read is real and may not be suitable for those who suffer from nucleomituphobia.
Eve of Destruction, Book, page 1.
In the fall of the Year of the Rat, meaning 1984, ten individuals did the unthinkable: they ventured onto the streets of Griffin Flat in search of the truth—and to find food.
The following is all that remains of the ordeal. What you are about to read is real and may not
be suitable for those who suffer from nucleomituphobia.
—Paraphrased by Laura Ratliff
Chapter Fifty-Five
“Now we are all sons of bitches,” I said, holding Terrence’s hand.
“That’s a good line,” the director said. “Can I use that? I’ll credit you.”
“Sure, but Kenneth Bainbridge, an American physicist, said that to Robert Oppenheimer after the Trinity test. You should probably credit him.”
The director patted me on the shoulder.
Dylan had been filming but was ordered to stop by the United States Air Force. They took away the camera and confiscated the tape that Dylan had on him.
“Ugh to literally everything about this,” he said. “I say we flood the world and start over.”
“I think we did,” I said.
“That’s a wrap,” Mr. Edman said, wiping his eyes. What would have been his greatest feature was being taken away from him, and all he could do was cry.
I hid my composition notebook in my bag, along with the tapes that belonged to Dylan. I wrapped them in dirty radiated socks. I had a feeling that the soldiers would freak out when they saw the camera. They wouldn’t look. I hoped they wouldn’t look. They would confiscate them and my composition notebook over my dead body. I could just imagine all the black marks. They would have sanitized, classified, redacted, all meaning the same thing—erased. There wouldn’t be anything left. Though it would have been hard for them to put a black mark over the state of Arkansas.
We asked what happened. All they said was, “We can neither confirm nor deny.” We asked them if we all could have a mask. A soldier said, “You don’t need them.”
“Well, give me yours, then, if we don’t need them,” Freddy said.
But the soldier wouldn’t.
Two soldiers took Rodney’s body away. They wrapped it in a white tarp. His hand was sticking out. We didn’t have to ask where they were taking it. We saw. A huge dump truck. It was full of bodies.
“How to dig your own grave in three easy steps,” Max said.
We laughed. We shouldn’t have. But everything was just so surreal.
“Gallows humor indeed,” Mr. Edman said.
We stood in a circle, being doused with water from a truck. It was cold but kind of comforting. It had been a while since we had felt the touch of water on our bodies.
“Undress,” a soldier said.
“What happened?” Terrence asked.
“Classified.”
“Bullshit,” I said, then screamed.
We started to undress. There were no partitions. We left our underwear on.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Texas,” the soldier said.
“Texas? Why did they bring in Texas?” Terrence asked.
“Well, those there are from Oklahoma, and those over there are from Kansas, and those back there are from New Mexico. So we’re not all from Texas.”
“You can’t tell us what happened at all?” I asked. “We are the ones who lived through it.”
“We have a Polaroid of a mushroom cloud,” Max said, and I gave him a death glare.
The soldier kept on doing his job, but the word mushroom did get him to lower his guard a little while a superior of his came and took away my bag
“We nuked ourselves,” the soldier whispered.
“We did what to ourselves?” I asked.
“It was an accident.” That was all he said.
Dylan and the director looked at each other like they were speaking telepathically. Lots of shaking of heads and nodding.
Bombs accidentally being dropped on our soil? Not that it’d be any less tragic to bomb someone else, of course, but it was so much more embarrassing to have done it to ourselves. Now everything that my dad wrote in that letter that was redacted made sense. It was a warning.
“Is the base still in Little Rock?” I asked the soldier.
At first I thought he was confused by my question, but then he shook his head.
Terrence walked through the puddles and mud and hugged me.
I got dizzy. The thought of no one surviving was logical, but it didn’t mean that it was believable. Mom, Dennis, and Dad—gone? Granny, Pops, Ms. Wilcox, all my teachers, and Kevin, Chuck, Kathy, and Dana too? My knees buckled and I slowly dropped to my knees. The soldier grabbed one of my arms and Terrence grabbed the other, but still my butt touched the radiated ground. My eyes closed.
I didn’t remember anything after that.
I came to in the back of an ambulance with an oxygen mask on my face and an IV in my arm. I looked to my left and saw Terrence staring at me. He had an IV in his arm too.
“Fluids,” he said, lifting his arm. “You okay?” he asked.
I nodded, taking off the oxygen mask and laying it beside me. “Is it true?” I asked. “I mean, our parents—are they really dead?”
“Yes,” he whispered, nodding. “There are not a lot of survivors.”
I wanted to cry. I was supposed to cry. But I couldn’t. I was still in shock. I sat up on the gurney and stared at him.
“We’re the only family we’ve got now,” Terrence said, taking my hand, tears running down his cheeks.
When I saw him cry I started to cry.
Freddy, Max, Astrid, Dylan, Mr. Edman, and the bus driver filed into the ambulance and sat beside Terrence and me on the two gurneys.
“Through all the darkness and tribulations, the hopelessness and lack of remorse—the trumpeting sound of the apocalypse that fills throughout the heavens, remember . . . we as a race will persevere. We will find a way, a way to make things worse. We will persevere,” I said.
“Is that from another one of your comic books?” Astrid asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s kind of comforting.”
I think that was when we all realized that all of us, at least the ones who lived here, probably didn’t have any family left.
“Do we seriously want to survive this? Like, seriously?” Astrid asked, shaking.
It didn’t matter if we wanted to or not. We did, at least for a moment, but we were in a Mad Max wasteland now.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Well, haven’t you seen Planet of the Apes?”78 Max said. “Exactly like that.”
“Honestly,” she said, slapping Max on the arm.
“You finally, really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you! God damn you all to hell!” Freddy said, raising a fist in the air.
“Nice,” Terrence said, nodding.
“I thought we needed a great closing line for a movie that we didn’t get to finish.”
“Oh, we’ll finish it,” said the director. “If it’s the last thing I do.”
Eve of Destruction was just a movie about average people going about their day as usual until the unthinkable happened on the day they accidentally nuked Arkansas.
* * *
78 A 1968 science fiction film directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and starring Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Maurice Evans, Kim Hunter, James Whitmore, James Daly, and Linda Harrison. Astronauts wake up from a deep hibernation and discover that it’s no longer 1972 but instead the year 3978—and they haven’t aged a day, well, except for Stewart. She’s dead and decayed due to a crack in her sleep pod. The remaining crew departs the spaceship and wanders around the planet where they crash landed, encountering talking apes and humans being imprisoned. At the end they discover that the strange planet was home all along. Damn y’all to hell!
The best they could do was to hope that the apocalypse and post-apocalypse wouldn’t be as bad as anyone imagined. But if they were, the human race would adapt—as it always had—and survive.
Eve of Destruction, Book, page 199.
And with a big, loud bang, everything is gone. A b
right white light flashes over the landscape of Griffin City. A mushroom cloud fills up the atmosphere. A firestorm sweeps across the land. Buildings explode, burn, and crumble. People are vaporized—their skin melts and their skeleton disintegrates into dust. After, there are human monsters, scarred with radiation burns and charred skin. As time passes, people lose their hair. Blackened bodies litter the rubble where buildings once stood. Animal carcasses flood farms. A white ash covers every inch of the city. Society crumbles much like the concrete and steel. Vandalism and murder are the norm. There is no electrical power; medical care, food, and water are almost nonexistent. But Destiny got lucky, as she was locked in the cellar below Old Barnaby’s Farm with a few of her friends.
For seven days Destiny and her new ragtag group of mutants lived, argued, and tried to survive. But not everyone made it out alive. Fallout was too strong for some immune systems. And the one shining light in the cellar, the one who was nice to everyone, the one who had a wicked layup, was found drooling blood. Rodney died in Destiny’s arms. A single tear rolled down her cheek as Rodney’s body shook from the radioactive particles as they took hold in his bloodstream. Sadly, he didn’t get his mutant powers.
Destiny knew that Rodney would not die in vain. She would make it her life’s mission to avenge his death. Though she wouldn’t know the extent of her powers until she was called to save the city from unknown forces that seek to destroy what is left. She is a mutated child of a new revolution called to protect the future—and the future is now.
Max Randall and Laura Ratliff. “Origin Story,” Teenage Mutant #1 (December 1984).
The End Is Here.
Epilogue
It’s been thirty years since half the state of Arkansas was nuked by an accidental intercontinental thermonuclear bomb detonation. It was a Broken Arrow accident. It was Hollywood’s fault.
Mad Max was right all along. Hollywood would do something idiotic and the government would cover it up.