Love Stain

Writing was on the wall, and everyone could read.

By the middle of the 21st century, nuclear war slipped from threat into certainty. Every armed country became Earth's executioner. It was not many, only enough for devastation. A toddler could count the number of men who held the fate of billions. No one trusted them, but no one could stop them either. What could the commoner do?

The Doomsday Clock could warn an innocent populace with educated guesses, but no one knew the last straw. We could only predict what would happen after. We could prepare for it.

Reinforced bunkers became the priority. Government contracts made architects, designers, and contractors dance. The population bid for a space within.

In a cruel irony, every person who destroyed the planet held a V.I.P. seat on its lifeboats. They would learn nothing of death's lesson, and they would be first in line to the next apocalypse.

I should have been outside such privilege, but I was a lucky. Through no merit of my own, I had guarantee of a small apartment, though I went to it alone.

She should have been there with me— Jade, the love of my life.

Jade was an engineer of great renown. She could dumb down a lot for a history professor like myself, but I never held conversation as an equal. That did not matter. Jade liked to talk, and I liked letting her.

The memories of our time together are to me as spring is to winter, warm but increasingly difficult to imagine. I think of how she looked in her office, deep in concentration over supports, weights, practicality, and comfort— drafting a harbor for when the world went to Hell.

Blonde hair shimmered gold in sunlight. Hands moved, and marked, and scribbled out. Half-blue nails filed a paper in her folder for work. Jade's fingernail polish always chipped because she kept busy with her hands but refused not to paint them. That neared the end of embellishment, however. Jade rarely wore jewelry and never a necklace. The ornament was hardly necessary. My love was born with a port-wine stain down her neck and chest. As she grew, it receded piece by piece until nothing was left of the birthmark but a Rorschach heart beneath her collarbone. The thing tilted at an angle, and when we laid in bed, I could see physics catch up to dangle it from imagined chains around her neck. A locket, she called the mark, one that would hold all her love to me, forever and always. We could never lose our devotion so long as she safekept it.

Jade saved my life.

I was average in my field while she was one of the best in hers. It was Jade's work and design on the behemoth Themis project that won us the apartment in its concrete walls. The bunker was an awesome palace built to hold twenty-five-thousand inhabitants. It was the largest stronghold on the east coast, and capitalists bid over each other for the right to its exclusion. Jade made us a package deal. Her employers accepted the terms with little dispute. After all, old money would still want the best education for its children. I could continue teaching while she performed routine maintenance, pretending life was normal as it waited out nuclear devastation.

Across the globe, there were enough shelters to save almost ten percent of the planet's population. If such a small number sounds cruel, Noah took eight. Ten percent was impressive, and that was only the count of governments and the private sector.

It would be a long time until we could count individual survivors, those who built independent sanctuaries. Their creation became a priority for many, but access to materials quickly ran out for civilians. Supply and demand doomed a great many to half-completed strongholds. Food and water faced similar shortages.

There was no deadline to prepare in an arms race, only arbitrary Armageddon. No one knew the exact hour of our destruction. When victims said farewell to their loved ones that morning, they could not know the permanence of its declaration.

"Bye," Jade said to me. The low collar of a pink blouse showed me her heart. "Four-hour commute today. I won't be home until late." Her second project, another bunker farther south, was nearly complete. It was not so grand as Themis, nor so complete, but she was excited to work on it, even on days when she had to travel to the site.

"Okay, bye," I told her with a kiss.

It was all so ordinary that neither of us pledged, "I love you." How could we know to make it special? How could I have known to keep her there, with me?

The sirens went off in the middle of my afternoon lesson.

I received a notification on my phone that no one in the classroom shared, instructions ushering me to Themis, where to go and what to bring. I grabbed Jade's go-bag along with mine. She would meet me there.

A beautiful mind prepared for rushing pandemonium into the bunker. There were twenty-six entrances into Themis, one for each letter of the alphabet. I went to V, as told, and the process confirming my identity was arduous and invasive. Authorities would not tolerate stowaways.

I waited for Jade.

There was no cellular signal beneath dirt and concrete, and phones became useless. I waited and I listened to the little radio provided in my room. I waited until our council announced blasts started in California. The doors had to close.

I begged with the first authority I could find but received the same answer all the way up the chain. Jade was locked without, and there was nothing I could do to bring her in, to let her share the salvation she made for me.

I faced the end of the world alone, surrounded by thousands.

Bombs erupted. People cried. Nuclear twilight descended. Our invited guest made itself at home in a world meant for us, for life. It would choke that promise for the next ten years.

Themis was not Hell, but neither was it Heaven. Existence was difficult at times, disheartening and depressing. Slowly, I forgot the light of the sun. All that rose for me were artificial solar and lunar projections upon elevated ceilings, timed to the second, unaffected by seasons, object of no poetry.

I visited the gardens to boost my spirits. Trees were everywhere to assist in recycling oxygen, but plants outside of them needed agricultural purpose. Man could not eat a rose. That was why I liked timing my visits to the farming quadrant. When mature crops were picked and new ones planted, you could see rows and rows of budding flowers that soon turned to tomatoes or strawberries or pumpkins. I rarely bought fresh produce. The crops went almost exclusively to the upper-class. But sometimes, as a treat, I would loose the purse strings and buy an apple.

I thought often of those inhabitants in isolated areas, those removed from populated targets. Would the effects of the blasts reach them? Would they carry on as normal, or would they freeze and starve? We had news aplenty. Themis's communication was in constant contact with other surviving bunkers. How much information they regulated was unclear.

Present and future were uncertain. Past dwindled.

I taught my students about the history of a world each freshman class remembered less and less. Near the end isolation, my lessons often devolved to reminding eighteen-year-olds of rainstorms.

We were wild creatures in a cage and longing for the key.

It was ten years before the doors of Themis opened. Their timer would not be interrupted; otherwise, someone with access might panic, doom us all. When we did open to the world, it was not for civilian travel. Those first two years were solely for government reconnaissance. Every soul waited for report.

Newscasters became more dour— or more honest. Children were encouraged to leave the room. Some bunkers had no survivors while others housed less than fifty. According to records and pictures, they might have been better off dead. Trauma of their survival would poison the mind for the rest of their miserable lives. I left the neighborhood lounge whose television I watched, unable to look.

Thoughts turned, inevitably, to my Jade. I wondered what became of her and how. After the end of that first open year, she came and told me herself.

A strong hand knocked on the door of an apartment we were meant to share. I barely recognized my visitor, and when I did, I fell to my knees. I cried, and she waited while I did.

She was a whisper of the woman I knew while I had stayed the same, learning nothing, changing only in the twenty pounds I gained from luxury and sloth. Our lives entwined once and now again, but time apart showed its mercies or cruelties. The blonde hair I knew was half-white from deluge upon deluge of stress. Wrinkles outlined cold features. Fingernails flashed unpainted. A tight-collared shirt wrapped over the chest she once displayed, hiding our love.

It was Jade but not my Jade.

She let me compose myself before taking me to a cafe down a street she designed. I treated her to expensive coffee. She treated me to her story.

No.

No, she cursed me with it.

Eleven years ago, on our dies irae, she received the same warnings. Jade dropped work and ran to her car, but it was mayhem on the streets. The four hours she should have taken turned to nine. When finally she arrived, Themis was closed. Every doorway was a pleading crowd, and Jade joined them in beating on the entrances until her hands were bruised. When she got someone to listen on an intercom, her promised place was refused. For the safety of all, no more could be allowed inside. The process of confirming identity was too lengthy, and everyone would try to stow away in Themis. She should have arrived in time if she wanted sanctuary. As a small token of appreciation, they offered to alert her spouse she was there.

With few options in a world turning inhospitable, Jade turned back the way she came. A base with hardly tested its life support welcomed an experienced engineer with open arms. She kept them alive, and they her.

Physically, she was alive.

Jade's fortune did not prosper because she escaped nuclear winter. From there, her quarantine made reality of nightmares, despair, and desperation. There were too many for the bunker to support, but numbers dwindled fast. Without order prepared, anarchy rose before— finally— control. Then there was the smell. Bodies were sealed in unfinished tunnels, and every adult was ordered to help. Those memories would never fade. Dreams were always ready to remind her. Months later, a growling stomach made her regret the waste. While I battled seasonal depression, Jade lived Nazino Island.

There were further details which made me gag, and I wanted to turn off the news radio. I listened dutifully.

When she was done, Jade lowered the collar of her shirt and showed me her broken heart. Scars tore across in thick lines from half-blue fingernails, forever digging their knives into mauve flesh. Love became her voodoo doll.

How she hated me.

I should have stayed home and waited for her when the sirens cried. I should have left Themis when she came begging at its doors. We could have survived together.

We could have died together.

But I abandoned her at every opportunity to save myself. I listened to her voice on the intercom and refused when they offered to let me out, to let me go to her. I condemned her to a tragedy I would not share. Love could never be so grand, nor should it.

She was right.

And I would do it again to avoid her fate.