New World

No one took the news reports seriously. I didn’t either honestly. Not until it happened. All my life I’d heard reports of NASA saying asteroids were headed for our planet. Bigger ones always missed, so it makes sense that no one believed one as massive as the one that hit was on a direct course to hit us. Luckily for me, one of my best friends had a father, who was a huge doomsday prepper. Kaley and I made fun of it alot but to be honest, the bunker he built under their backyard was pretty cool. It had 5 different floors and was like a maze. We played hide and go seek down there everyday when we were kids. We’d have sleepovers in there and even claimed our rooms just in case anything ever did actually happen but we never really believed it would.

I remember the day the news first reported it would happen. I worked in a bar downtown in San Diego and the manager had the reports on almost all the tvs. Everyone was laughing it off, saying the astronomer who first noticed the asteroid was crazy or ‘they’d heard that before and it never happened’. Kaley called me around 10 pm and asked me if I’d come over after work. She sounded genuinely nervous so of course I agreed.

When I got there, her father, James, was pacing the house grabbing everything he thought he’d need in the bunker; family pictures, all the food in the house that wasn’t already packed in the bunker, a satellite radio. Kaley had one thing, a heart shaped locket her mother had given her just two weeks before she died of cancer when Kaley was 12. I could tell they were both genuinely nervous.

“Grab everything you can think of!” James said. “We need to be ready.”

“They said we had at least 5 months before we even have to worry though...if we even really need to worry.” I replied.

“Of course they’d say that!” he yelled. “They don’t want to cause a panic. Could you imagine how much faster everything would go to hell if everyone panicked?” Kaley and I just stared at each other.

“Kaley, Brooke...MOVE! We need to get this done now!”

All night I helped them pack and move things into the bunker, still believing they were being a little extreme and nothing was going to really happen or that NASA would find a way to stop it before it happened like in that movie, Armageddon. It wasn’t until the next morning, before the sun was even about to rise that I realized he may be right about them lying to avoid a panic. In the night sky, there was something I had never seen before. It looked like a giant comet blazing across the sky. Out of nowhere, a boom so loud it sounded like a bomb going off right next to us.

“GIRLS GET IN THE BUNKER, NOW!” James yelled. Kaley took off towards the bunker door. As the wind picked up, I turned around. On the horizon, it looked like a huge wall of fire, destroying everything it came into contact with, the mountains behind the city our neighborhood overlooked, buildings, trees. I just stared. I could hear James and Kaley yelling for me but I could barely make out what they were saying. Suddenly, James grabbed me, pulled me inside the bunker and slammed the door shut. We ran down the huge staircase leading down into the bunker's main room and slammed that door shut too. The roaring on the surface was so loud despite being at least 60 feet down. I collapsed to the ground.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up in the room Kaley and I had chosen as kids. It almost seems like a bad dream and this was just another of our sleepovers.

“Hey, you want some coffee?”

I rolled over and saw Kaley in the doorway. “Yes, coffee sounds amazing. Especially after the dream...or nightmare I just had.” Kaley just stood there.

“It wasn’t a dream…” she said softly. “Everything is gone. Everything on this side of the world anyway. The other side is preparing for the wave of radiation from the asteroid. Seems it was big enough to try and wipe out the whole planet.”

“Try? Either it will or it won’t.”

“Well, luckily for the human race, there were doomsday preppers everywhere all over the world. Guess my dad wasn’t so crazy after all huh?” She tried to laugh it off quietly but I could tell she was scared of what would happen now. I was too. Who knew how long it would be before the surface was habitable again...if ever in our lifetime at least.

“Has your dad made any kind of contact with anyone else? Or tried to?” I asked.

“So far, no. Only the people here. Apparently, the bunker isn’t just one bunker. It’s several that all attach to each other. My dad and some other people in the neighborhood all put money together to build it over the years.”

“Well, let’s go see what it looks like outside of a game of hide and seek then.” I told her as I gulped the last of my coffee.

Two Months Later…

It didn’t take long for Kaley’s dad to become the leader in the bunker. There were probably a hundred people total down here, if not more. People with access to the bunkers had called friends and relatives as soon as NASA announced the asteroid. Anyone who took it seriously must have come immediately and gotten ready just in case.

Everyone had jobs. We had a greenhouse to grow food, a cafeteria, a school for any children under 16, a hospital even. Kaley and I were headed to the main conference room where they had biweekly meetings to discuss how to keep things running smoothly so we all had a chance of survival.

“It’s been two months since the asteroid hit on the east coast of the US. As far as we know, everything is gone. At least here on this side of the world. We can guess from the radio silence that everything may be gone on the other side too but we don’t know for sure. Radio signals are blocked. We need volunteers to go to the surface. We need to know if anything survived and gather any kind of salvageable supplies.” James told the people. Sadly, only a handful were brave enough to go up.

“Kaley, we should go.”

“Um...why? I like it down here where I know it’s safe.” she replied. I looked at her for a second, but I understood why she wanted to stay. I raised my hand to volunteer. James’ eyes settled on me for a second disapprovingly, but he didn’t say no.

“Well, I’m going. I’ll bring you back a present.” I told her. I started to walk off but she grabbed my arm. “Wait, take this.” She took off her locket and put it around my neck.

“I can’t take this Kal. Your mother gave this to you. What if I lose it or something happens to me?” I asked her.

“It’s good luck. I trust you with it Brooke. I’ll feel better if you take it with you.” she said.

I looked at the heart shaped locket for a second. “I promise I’ll take care of it.”

Not even an hour later, myself and the other volunteers were strapped up in radiation suits, just in case. Where they got them, I didn’t ask.

“Alright,” said Mike, one of the other volunteers, “we have about two hours worth of oxygen so we need to try and make this a quick trip. No messing around. Grab anything salvageable and be careful not to snag your suit on anything. We have no idea what radiation levels are like yet. We won’t know until we get to the surface.”

I jumped as the door slammed behind us. Only one staircase and another thick steel door between us and whatever was left on the outside. I held my breath as Casey, another volunteer twisted the giant knob and slowly opened the door. We all gasped. There was really nothing left. A desert where the ocean had once been on the California coast, burned remnants of trees where forests to the other side had once been. What was left of buildings in the city almost seemed spooky.

“Remember,” MIke said, “make this quick. We’ll go in groups of 2 and meet back here in an hour. Radiation levels seem to be relatively low. Be careful. Brooke, go with Finn. Casey with me. Max with Lexa.”

Finn and I walked down what used to be Main St. Surprisingly, most of the buildings seemed to be intact for the most part but looked like they had been abandoned for years.

“We need to stop here,” I said outside the old pharmacy. “We need all the medicine and first aid we can get. Maybe there will still be some bags we can use to carry the stuff.”

“Good thinking.” Finn replied. He slowly stepped through the broken glass door. I expected to see bodies from the unsuspecting people who thought they had time but there was nothing. I went straight back to the pharmacy to load up all the meds I could find. Finn grabbed everything first aid related. Both of us worked quickly so we could get out of there. Out of nowhere, we heard a crash coming from the backroom and we paused and looked at each other.

“Maybe it’s an animal,” I said. Another crash.

“Yeah, a huge animal. I don’t want to find out. Hurry, grab what you have. We can come back for the rest later.” Both of us zipped up our bags and headed for the door. Just as we crossed through the door and back out into the light, I could have sworn I heard a growl. We started running and didn’t look back. When we finally got back to the meeting place, we both stopped and leaned against the building, panting hard from running.

“Maybe it was an animal that escaped from the zoo.” Finn said. “Anything still alive is probably hungry and in fight mode.” I said nothing. He didn’t see the fresh blood on the ground at first. When he looked where I was looking, I could tell he was suddenly nervous again. Something darted behind us into an alley. We both turned around.

“MIKE? CASEY? LEXA? MAX?” Finn yelled. We got a shriek in response.

“That doesn’t sound like any animal I’ve ever heard before.” I said. I slowly walked towards the alley where I’d seen the figure dart behind us with Finn close behind me. I started to scream when I saw Casey lying there, obviously dead, surrounded by creatures I’d never seen before. Finn's hand went over my mouth and stopped me. He jerked me away and yelled “RUN!” We pushed through a steel door and slammed it behind us. Finn found a loose railing and pinned the door shut with it.

“What was that?” I cried.

“I don’t know. We need to find the others. They’ve got to be close by.” Finn said as calmly as he could. “Maybe they went back to the bunker after Casey..” I couldn’t even finish the sentence.

“Maybe Mike did. Did you see which way Lexa and Max went?” he asked. “No.” I replied. “Finn, we have to find them.”

“We will. But first we need something to defend ourselves with. We have no idea what those things are or where they came from. There’s a gun store right around the corner. We can get ammo and guns there and then go look.”

I couldn’t believe this was the world we now lived in. The kind of thing we once only saw in movies, now our reality. This new world sucks already.