Bingham, New Mexico
The sirens woke me up that morning. I thought it was a drill. For months we were preparing for the day that some man drunk on power and oblivious to our faces or names would start a war over pride and greed and doom us all. It’s funny how the world adjusts to a fear like that, it seemed so far off until it wasn’t. The sirens endlessly screeched, heralding the end of the world, an obnoxious reminder that there was nothing we could do to stop it but hide. We didn’t have time to run. The bombs fell within the hour. We huddled in the old storm cellar for three days as the world crumbled and burned, but we survived. The concrete stairs that once led up to a perfectly mowed yard now led up to a barren wasteland. The air smelled of death and breathing it felt like it. We saw the bodies of neighbors and friends beside their once happy homes, everything we knew had been reduced to rubble and ash.
