The Girl Who Knew

Sammy Warren was a quiet, introspective person whose current goal in life was to survive the impending apocalypse. It was a consuming hobby, but one that required no tangible action whatsoever, because the plan had been laid years before by Sammy’s father, who was also called Sammy. Sammy Sr had been eighty-one years old when he died, and just senile enough that the rest of his children ignored him utterly when he urgently told them all of the date and manner of the world’s impending doom. Sammy Jr, being afflicted with crippling anxiety even before her dad’s announcement, had been the only one who listened. Consequently, Sammy Jr was the only person alive who knew of the existence of the Room.

Sure, one might think that Sammy felt an obligation to tell her siblings about the Room. But her older sibling and two younger sisters had ignored Dad in the first place, and Sammy had no reason to think any of them would want to hear about it now, three years after Dad had passed. Every time Sammy even ventured the conversation into the subjects of climate change, or political disaster, or nuclear weapons manufacturing, or anything that might casually steer its way towards the reality that was quickly approaching, one sibling or another would get up and leave the room, which would deflate Sammy so much that she’d go quiet almost immediately. Sammy was not made for conflict, even with the threat of total annihilation hanging over her head. (She reasoned that soon, Pol and Bri and Mal would be forced to accept the truth, once the outside evidence started piling in. And then they could be helped).

But for now, it was Sammy keeping the secret of the Room, and keep it she did, with unflagging attention and daily, sometimes hourly, ritualistic reminders. It was an exhausting schedule, but one that Sammy had decided was necessary for two reasons, both of which had been whispered by their dear departed daddy on his deathbed:

1. The Room could be entered and exited only once, and would seal itself permanently afterwards; and

2. The Room could be entered and exited only by means of a very unique set of passwords, one including a sound, one a clap of the hands, all of which Sammy now kept in her head and nowhere else.

These two facts made the Room both mythical and utterly unforgettable, since Sammy had never seen it and never could until it was absolutely needed, but also knew that they would need it and therefore she could never stop thinking about it.

“Why, Dad?” Sammy had whispered back, upon hearing these conditions. “Why make it so hard?”

“Because only I know what’s coming,” he had responded (upon hearing this, Bri made a u-turn from where she had been coming into the room with coffee). “And there’s stuff in there you’re going to need, my dear. You can’t let anyone else in there to see it before you go in there to get it. And you can’t take anything out until it’s all over. You’ll stay in there until it’s all over, and then you’ll have what you need.”

Sammy didn’t ask how he knew what they’d need or how he knew what was coming. Accepting her dad’s word was familiar ground, one she saw no reason to change just because he was dying. “I meant to tell you long ago,” Sammy Sr wheezed, nearly an apology, and then he breathed one more breath and died.

“He cut it kind of close there,” Bri remarked from where she had stayed in the doorway after all.

Now, three years later, Sammy felt the date quickly approaching. The world continued its spiral into chaos, and Sammy’s speculations on the Room grew wilder and wilder. It had to be weaponry waiting inside. No, it had to be a new type of food crop, one that could not be destroyed by radioactive fallout. No, it had to be something that the siblings themselves would be adept in, because how else would their dad ensure their survival? Which meant it would probably be something to do with tools (Pol's specialty), or books and music (Bri and Mal's), or data analysis (Sammy's), but which of these things and to what end Sammy could not guess.

The date approached, and the world spiraled harder. Then one day, exactly six months before the Date, Sammy caught Pol and Bri whispering with heads ducked closely together, and when they broke apart Pol cleared their throat and said, “Sammy, we’d like to talk to you.” And when she said nothing, “We’re worried about you; you’ve seemed so - ”

“Lifeless,” Bri muttered.

“- preoccupied since Dad died.” Pol fidgeted, looking everywhere but at her. “We wanted to give you time to process, since you two were so close. But it’s been three years, and you seem even more…distant lately.”

Sammy leaned forward. This could be the moment. She felt five years old again, jostling for attention from their oldest sibling. Believe me, Pol. “Listen. This may sound crazy, but please listen. Do you remember - what Dad told us before he died?”

“Oh, please,” Bri said, “You can’t possibly -”

“I’ve been watching,” Sammy went on, ignoring her, heart pounding, this is my only chance, my only chance, “I’ve been watching the news and the reports. I’ve been tracking it all. Everything Dad said, it’s happening.”

Sammy went on, she spoke and spoke, she listed facts and figures, and she watched as Pol and Bri’s faces slowly and definitively shut down.

“This whole time?” Pol said slowly, much later, “This whole time since Dad died you’ve been waiting for the…apocalypse?”

Sammy felt something shift.

“And what is it you’re going to do again, when it happens?” Pol asked.

“I…there’s a place we can go,” Sammy said. “All of us. It will save us.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is it?”

“Nearby.”

“And you’ve seen it?”

“I…no, I can’t, not until we need it.” Sammy was close to tears, frantic with the need to explain, for Pol’s expression to relax and them to say, of course we believe you, of course, but their face was getting tighter and tighter and she felt them slipping away. “Please, I know it may sound unbelievable, but Dad did this for us, to save us!”

“Sammy, Dad had brain cancer,” Pol said, “He didn’t know what he was saying.” They stood up, ignoring her responses, her protests, and they wrapped her in a tight hug. “It’s all right,” they said quietly. “Don’t worry. We’ll be all right.”

In Pol’s arms, Sammy relaxed. Even though they hadn’t believed her, she felt lighter somehow, unburdened at least in some small way. This feeling lasted the next three, quiet days until the morning when she woke up and Pol told her they were going on a vacation, just the four of them, all the siblings. It would just be for a few weeks, they said, just to lift our spirits and get us away from the city for a while, away from this house (where Dad died, they almost said), and out into the country. We’ll be back in a month, Pol said cheerfully, after we’ve had plenty of fresh air and quality time. We rented a cabin with a huge back porch and four big bedrooms, and we’ll all work remotely and play plenty of board games. They talked and talked and Sammy, despite her initial panic, relented: it was just for a month, they had plenty of time until the Date, and this would help her siblings relax around her, until she could convince them again of what was to come.

But she couldn’t have guessed that the end would begin sooner than she’d anticipated, sooner than her analyses had predicted. Three weeks into their vacation, just days before they would have packed up to return home, the first huge wave of attacks began and the roads closed. Nobody could travel. Nobody could return home. And so it went for the next four months, and finally her siblings turned to her and asked what they should do and she could do nothing because the Room was so far away and so unreachable. “We have to try,” she said, and they got in their car with its last precious tank of fuel and they travelled in the night with headlights off and they tried to reach home, but the air crawled with death and the land crawled with death and she knew what was coming, one way or the other.

And so the Room passed, just as they did, into the ever onward.