After Annihilation: Would you want to survive?

by Gauri Mittal

  I moved farther away from the mouth of the cave, Peaches burying herself between my heels, nearly tripping me on several occasions. I recognized the rock at some distance from the cave. It provided me with a sense of direction. If I took a right and kept walking straight, I would reach the road between the forest edge and my home.

  We started our walk towards the road, slowly and silently.

  An hour had passed, but the eerie burnt forest still surrounded me. I willed myself to keep walking.

  Finally, the road came into view. Terror gripped me, slowly tightening its grasp, as it dawned on me there was no sign of the buildings that should have been there. There was only a mass of concrete, the structures razed to the ground. My heart started beating rapidly and acid built in my stomach. Holding in my terror by a thread, I ran across the road, willing the slabs of concrete and high rises to reconstruct themselves. Maybe I was lost. Yes, I was lost, and this was not the building of my apartment. The area just seemed familiar. I tried to reason with my brain.

  Taking tiny steps, I moved across the road. A piece of burnt machinery of what had once been a car was lying at some distance from where I walked. A small tower of rocks that kids had been building the day before was still stacked in front of what should have been the main gate to my apartment building.

  As if in a daze, I walked to where my apartment should have been. My parents were supposed to have been waiting for me here, anger and worry etched in their faces.

  I stood like a rock, staring at the rubble in front of me. The smell of burned flesh pervaded the air. Pieces of burnt torn clothes and flesh entered my vision. It was a burnt body, its skin hanging from the fingers. The batch on the uniform told me it belonged to the watchman. A wave of nausea hit me, and I vomited all over the ground. The world around me spun as unrecognizable mutilated body after body clouded my vision. Had I died in that hole inside the mountain? Was this Hell?

  I got to my feet and staggered towards what should have been the main door to my apartment.

  “Mom?” I called out. “Dad. I am back.” This was all a hallucination, maybe due to the hit I had received on my head the night before when I fell into the hole. But if I didn’t call out to them, how would they know I was back?

  “I’m sorry I’m so late, Mom,” I was calling out, standing right next to the pile of concrete that should have been the living room. “Dad, I sent you a message about where I was, didn’t you receive it?” I refused to accept the reality being perceived by my eyes.

  I continued to walk around the rubble that was the length and breadth of our apartment, saying, “Mom? Dad? Okay, I learned my lesson, come out now.”

  The false calm I had been speaking with started to fail. Raw panic started taking its place.

  “Mom! Dad! Please, come out! Mom!” I began shouting over and over.

  Among the rubble, I noticed something shiny. I stood at a distance, only staring, not daring to get a closer look, lest it be the manifestation of the cause of my rising fear. I moved towards it slowly, bent my knees, and removed the small piece of concrete half covering the object.

  It was the mirror my mother used every day to put kohl in her eyes. Right beside it lay a broken pair of glasses, the golden rims telling me they belonged to my father. I fell to my knees, touching the objects, willing them to make my parents appear in front of me. A sharp piece of rubble pierced my right knee, but I paid no heed to the pain. I started going through the rubble, trying to find any trace of my parents, having a vague awareness that I was shedding tears by my vision getting intermittently blurred.

  I got up and frantically started upturning the smaller blocks of broken concrete. There were other bodies. Two of them. Burnt beyond recognition. Extreme fear took hold and my anxiety reached a crescendo. I again vomited, which helped my body ebb the panic.

  I ran to areas nearby to search for a clue, but it was all in vain. For miles, everything was empty of life. Not a plant was left. As if all life had instantaneously vaporised. I came back to what had once been my home. I started calling out to my parents at the top of my voice. I knew in my heart what had happened. The sorrow that clutched my heart was so intense, I felt it as a physical pain.

  My lip started quivering. I sunk to the ground, and the screaming began. It felt like the sound was coming from outside, but it was me, and I couldn’t stop. I screamed for my father, for my mother, again and again, wishing through all the pain for them to reappear.

  As my crying lessened and I regained some sense, my mind flashed to the image of Aarav. It gave me solace. I fished out the cell phone from my pocket and unlocked it. There was no signal, but there was a single text message from Aarav. I opened it anxiously.

  Find a deep basement enclosure, now. Go in and don’t come out for at least 48 hours. There is going to be a nuclear attack.

  My body went numb. I sank down onto my haunches, started shaking with terror, and held on to my hair tightly for an anchor. I closed my eyes tightly, shutting myself out of my present reality. Slowly, I began concentrating on my breath. The movement of my abdomen as it swelled up with inhalation and collapsed with exhalation. Steadily, slowly and deeply, it went on. Breathing in and breathing out. Until only the awareness of the breath remained. I lost perception of time, but my body brought me back with the pain in its knee.

  Slowly, I opened my eyes. I stood up and faced the truth.

  First I looked at the date and time on my cell phone. It was the 23rd of March. Two days and nine hours had passed since I had been unconscious in the cave, not seven as I had previously misunderstood.

  Then I began calling my parents’ cell phones, but it was futile as there was no cell reception.

  Finally, I typed out a message to Aarav. Call me, please. Everything is gone. I can’t find my parents. Please call me, Aarav. The message remained unsent.

  I pocketed the mirror and the pair of glasses that belonged to my parents. Whether this sudden destruction of the world was a fact or my hallucination, it was at present my reality. And I needed to accept it. Calling Peaches to my heels, we started off back to the cave, the only place of safety I currently knew.

  I fluctuated my awareness between this single-minded goal and the rhythmic movement of my abdomen with the breath to keep me from collapsing in hysterics. We kept on moving, without stopping to think or letting my mind wander. I looked at Peaches. For her, I was an anchor. The same kind I was looking for myself. I felt a tinge of happiness mixed with self-pity, knowing she had one.

  Chapter 2

  At the edge of the now erased city, Aarav sat astride his motorbike. His face was smeared with dust, a look of utter desolation on his face. Varshi had been the very centre of the attack, and he knew all hope of the AA rescuing him was gone. They would never enter this radiation hotbed. He would have to find a way out himself.

  The alert had reached his phone minutes before the attack had begun. He had been moving some furniture from the basement of his high rise to his apartment in Varshi. As soon as he had received the alert, the thought of hovering death caught hold of his mind. The ones who had started it would have to take responsibility for the destruction of humanity.

  Madhavi was out chasing her dog, so what would she do? He had tried to call her repeatedly after she hung up, but the call wouldn’t go through. He calmed himself, trying to think logically. He recalled all that he had read about safety protocols in case of a nuclear attack. He needed to shut all the windows and confine himself to the basement immediately. Alone in the basement, he made sure sealed water bottles and food in tin cans were available and stacked in a bag behind the sofa. The AA would rescue him. He had registered this basement as one of his safe houses.

  Next, he called up his parents and brother, repeatedly but they wouldn’t pick up. He messaged them all, telling them to find shelter. Then he called Madhavi, but her number was out of reach. He tried calling his friend Dhruv and then Sonakshi and Divya, but the call didn’t go through. He had troubled Dhruv all through
the last two years of their college, telling him all about safety protocols he had read about. Though his friend had then listened without interest, Aarav hoped he remembered enough to help him survive the first blast.

  Then he’d waited. It wouldn’t be long. Immensely restless, waiting for possible death, he shifted his awareness to the creation of a text message about all that he had learned about survival in a nuclear attack and sent it to everyone in his contact list. He sat in the middle of the basement, crouching with his head tucked between his knees. He kept calling his parents and brother. He was able to get through to them, but the call lasted only a minute. He let them know he had taken shelter and they were to do the same. They were just telling him how happy they were he was safe when the line disconnected and the explosion happened.

  There was a flash like the sun that filled the window near the roof of the basement, and Aarav was thrown back almost ten feet. He fell unconscious.

  When he came to, he was disoriented. Then fear clutched at his heart and leaked through his eyes. His parents, his brother, his Madhavi. If only he could see all those he loved one last time.

  *

  Divya and Dhruv were out for a late-night movie when they received the alert. Sonakshi was to accompany them but had fallen sick at the last moment. It was the last day the movie was screening, and Dhruv did not want to miss it. The movie theatre was sparsely crowded. The other ten other people in it left in a panic as soon as they received the message. It was in Sikki, Sikka’s native language, followed by English.

  “Do you think this is a prank?” Divya asked him.

  “No, it’s from a government agency. Everyone got it. Didn’t you see how they all ran? We need to find shelter.”

  “But where, Dhruv? It says in the message we need to go underground.” Divya started crying.

  “For God’s sake, Divya, now is not the time. Stop crying. It’s stressing me out.”

  “But I need to call my parents. What if they didn’t get the message?”

  “We don’t have time.” Dhruv grabbed her wrist and pulled her after him. “I know an underground place.”

  It was a short distance run from the mall. Under a shopping complex under construction was a hole that had been dug to put in pipelines. Dhruv crossed the complex every day during his journey to work. Hordes of labourers worked in the scorching sun each day to build the new complex, little by little. One such day, they had been digging the hole in the ground, and Dhruv had halted a while to observe the men and how they would sweat in the heat and still keep working. He had marvelled at the discipline of body and mind that their work required, wondered if the pittance they were paid for such work that required complete taming of mind and body against the stresses of the environment was not against the principles of humanity. Was work that required usage of the intellect that superior to physical work?

  Dhruv and Divya reached the construction site after a five-minute run. There was commotion on the streets as hundreds of people, some in cars and some on foot, were out, trying to find shelter. Horns were blaring all over the place. People had abandoned cars in the middle of the roads. Men and women were running amok, screaming, and children were crying.

  Divya followed Dhruv in a daze, holding on to his hand. Her short, crimped hair flew wildly. The two jumped over the barriers that had been erected around the construction site. In a corner of the site, a deep, wide, dry hole had been dug out. A short wooden ladder lay among the stacks of cement and mortar. Dhruv picked it up and threw it into the hole.

  “I can’t go in there, Dhruv! I want to go home, please!”

  As if in response, Divya and Dhruv’s phone beeped at the same time. Locked in the basement alone, Aarav had sent a message to each of his contacts. It was a long message, and as soon as the two of them read it, they set to work.

  “I knew I should have listened to him,” Dhruv said.

  He picked up a large tin shield covering the cement-mixing machine, asking Divya to help him. Her hands shaking, she obliged. Together they lifted it up and brought it down to cover the hole partially.

  “Aarav is a member of an online forum about nuclear war survival, Divya. That AA online group he was always talking about, the one we never took seriously. You know he’s always been a geek. Well, it’s going to save our lives this time.”

  Divya’s eyes were shedding silent tears, but she continued working with Dhruv. “We need to call our parents, Dhruv, and Sonakshi. What if… what if it is the last time?”

  The tin shield in their hands, they stopped and looked at each other for a moment.

  “I’m here, Divya,” he said. “Let’s get in.”

  The two descended the ladder, Divya’s purse on her shoulder, while Dhruv assisted her from above. Once inside, Dhruv pulled the shield over the hole with some difficulty, readjusting the brick over it to hold it in place.

  Divya had begun calling her parents. Once the hole was completely shut, the enclosure filled with darkness. Dhruv descended and called up his parents too.

  “Mom! Did you see the message?” Divya was saying. “Why not? Listen to me, Mom. You, Dad, Raghava, and Raman all have to find an underground shelter, now! There is going to be a nuclear attack!”

  “No, no, it’s not a fake message! It’s real. Go to Mrs Sharmila’s house—it has a basement. Hide and close the windows. Don’t come out for at least forty-eight hours. Best if you stay for ten days. Don’t eat anything don’t drink anything from outside. Mom! Mom, please, find a shelter. Please take everyone with you.”

  She paused, listening to her mother. “Yes, I am safe. I am with Dhruv. Please, you have to do as I say. Dad! Yes, it’s true, it’s not fake. Please, it’s urgent!”

  Dhruv sat in the dark, staring at Divya, his phone in his hand, ringing without an answer. His heart sank. Like all was lost. But on the last ring, the call was answered.

  “Papa!” he said. “Did you find shelter?” He had just spoken the words when the explosion came.

  The phone dropped from both their hands as the force of the blast wave knocked them unconscious.

  *

  Sonakshi was an early sleeper. She went to bed at ten at night and woke up every morning at five. Today was no different. She had had a nice talk with her parents and three sisters back in her hometown and was now soundly asleep in her bed, in a small shared apartment.

  She never knew what happened or when it happened. In an instant, the bustling city of Sikka was a gone, along with her barely lived life.

  *

  It had been ten days since the nuclear war had broken out. Pinaar and its allies—Calam, Aarkans, Port State, and Figbark—had formed an alliance against Iddis, Rehaar, and Ijaha. The other side had retaliated with a counterattack right after the first two missiles had struck. Rehaar and Ijaha on Aarkans, Port State, Figbark, Calam. Iddis on Pinaar and Calam.

  Jashar was a nuclear powerhouse, but it had bound itself in treaties against the use of nuclear power in a state of war. Aarkans, having great diplomatic relations with Jashar, was confident in the latter’s support. But Jashar flipped the outcome of the war in many ways. The main reason for its sudden support for Iddis was the last-minute signing of a treaty between Rehaar, Iddis, and Jashar, which allowed sharing of Iddis’s oil reserves with Jashar. This sudden change in loyalty, along with the fuelling of Aarkans’s fury, contributed to the total destruction of what would otherwise have had been a war of only five countries. Jashar emptied out its war arsenal in favour of Iddis.

  While Aarkans and Calam were extremely strong and vicious contenders, Rehaar could not risk them winning the war. And Rehaar could not take on Aarkans and Calam without Iddis. The major forces of Rehaar had secret nuclear bases in small allied countries all over the world, as did Aarkans. Accordingly, the sides were split. Most of the Central World aligned with Aarkans and Pinaar, while surprisingly big chunks of Oceanic with Iddis and Rehaar.

  The war spun out of control, and humanity finally poisoned the Earth enough to destroy i
tself.

  Chapter 3

  Aarav had been confined to the basement for one day. Besides him lay a broken vial of the drug TP580 and a discarded syringe, which he had injected twenty-four hours after the blast to protect his stem cells and the linings of his intestine from acute radiation sickness. He switched on the radio on his phone time and again, thanking his stars he had headphones in his pocket, which acted as the antenna. Although, there was no station broadcasting anything—not even the government station—the sound of static still gave him a feeling of connection with some form of society.

  He prayed and obsessed over the safety of all his near and dear ones. He had taught his parents time and again the steps to ensure safety in case of a nuclear attack. But now that he thought back, they had always been doing something—reading the newspaper, looking at the television, working on their laptops. Had they really paid attention? He could only wonder. If only he could have talked to his brother one last time. If only he knew whether he had read the detailed message he had sent out just before the blasts. He might have; they all might be alive.

  At times, his mind would fix on the vision of a single face. It belonged to Madhavi, laughing while teasing him about something juvenile. Her hair was open, as he had seen it only once, at a college party.

  *

  It was the third year of college. The cultural festival week had ended, and the last day included a DJ session with dinner and a movie screening at the open white screen in the grounds of the college.

  Dhruv had been throwing dirty clothes out of his wardrobe at Aarav, while the latter was engrossed in studying for the test the week after. “I need to look good tomorrow. I want Divya to look at me for once,” Dhruv was saying.

  “Ugh! Your clothes smell, man! Did you mix dirty laundry with clean clothes again?” Aarav scrunched up his nose.