The Klaxons Sounded

Dad and Eddie built the shelter in June 2037. They worked all summer long, using blasting caps to blow a chunk out of the hillside behind our house. Dad borrowed excavators from work, clearing the rubble aside, piling it up to conceal the entrance.

Mum and I kept busy in the kitchen, filling hundreds of glass jars with fruit preserves and pickled veggies. It was hot and exhausting work, the steam from the boiling jars turning our skin red, our clothing sodden. The twins were still too young to be much use, so they were put in charge of counting. The tablets they once used for playing games and watching cartoons was now in charge of life-saving lists – every box of rice and gallon of water documented. Our future calculated by the number of days we could survive on those rations.

The shelter itself was small. Just two shipping containers wide. One with six metal bunkbeds, made cozy by the colorful quilts Mum had sewn for us all. I protested at the lack of privacy in the shelter, so Dad bought curtains to divide the dormitory into three sections. The large septic system at the back meant we had a working toilet. It wasn’t fancy, but it was better than most.

Each night we huddled around the television, watching the news fearfully. We saw London in flames, the Eiffel tower toppling. Doomsday was coming, you could see it in the reporter’s eyes as they fell silent, letting the video footage speak for itself. The war was getting nastier. It was only a matter of time.

Towards the end we started sleeping in our living room with the tv on. That way whoever stayed awake could hurry us out to the shelter faster. When it was my turn, I snuck off to see Jonah. I wasn’t sure he would be there, but as I approached our tree on the top of the hill, he was sitting beneath it, fiddling with something in his hands.

“Hey you,” I whispered, and he jumped.

“Thank goodness! I didn’t think you’d be able to get away. And I had to see you tonight.” He wrapped his arms around me, and I snuggled into his warm flannel shirt, ignoring the distant sounds of shelling from beyond our valley.

The sky lit up like fireworks, it would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been so sad. We sat together in silence a while, enjoying these precious stolen moments.

“I have something for you,” he said, his cheeks as red as the fires on the horizon. “It’s a locket, it was my grandmas when she was young. I…I put our photos in it, so we can always be together.” He moved my thick hair to one side, fastening the silver chain around my neck. I held the small heart in my hands, opening it to find our yearbook photos. It seemed like forever ago. Had we really been so young and naïve?

“Thank you, it’s beautiful” I told him, and for a brief moment everything seemed okay.

“I… I’m sorry, Krista. My parents didn’t tell me till now, but they’ve arranged for us all to go stay with Uncle Jude on his farm in the Highlands. Dad’s taking a job up there and it looks like we don’t have plans to return… I’d take you with me if I thought your folks would be okay with it…”

For a while we hugged and cried and clung to one another.

“We’ll be together again when this is over, won’t we?” I asked, and he nodded.

“I already promised you, didn’t I?”

I watched from the garden as Jonah left, his family hauling a trailer with their possessions piled high. I held tight to his locket and the promise that came with it. Smoke hung low over the valley from the burning city beyond. It felt like the end of the world already.

Then the klaxons sounded. Dad and Eddie grabbed the twins, both still somehow asleep, brown curls sticking to their sweaty brows. Mum was crying, as she ran to grab Grandma Edith’s mantle clock. I was the last one to step inside the shelter, listening as the missiles pounded away in the distance. The klaxons whined continuously, and I sent a wish out into the night that Jonas and his family were ok, wherever they were. And then we swung the heavy door closed.

Everything was silent in the shelter entrance. The door sealed with a turn wheel, and padlocked three times by Dad just in case any of us panicked and tried to leave. He gave Mum and Eddie each a key, that way nobody could leave without the agreement of the others.

We sat around in the deepest part of the shelter, where the stored food and water was stacked high on shelves, protected by the natural rock of the hill above. At the back there was our old King-sized mattress from the spare bedroom, and that night we all huddled together on it, numb with fear. The hum of the air-filtration unit and the fridge were the only sounds, and Mum stroked my hair like she did when I was tiny. We couldn’t hear the klaxon inside the shelter.

The morning came, or so the clock said. Dad marked an x on the calendar, and it hit us – it had really happened. The nukes had been fired, by now most of the world must be dead or dying. I cried a lot that first few days, thinking of Jonah and that last kiss we shared. He couldn’t be dead!

We ate well for the first month, living on the freezer meals Mum prepared in batches, just in case the generator failed. We heated them up in the microwave, dipping the last of our homemade soda bread in the hearty stews. The twins drank the last of the fresh milk – from then on it was only powdered stuff, which nobody liked enough to drink on its own. It worked ok in tea and coffee, though, and the gloopy porridge we cooked on the electric burner.

We spent most of the time trying to keep the twins happy. They were only eight, not able to comprehend why we had to stay inside the shelter all the time – surely we could go out and play again soon? They kept going over to the calendar and asking how many more X’s before we went home? It was pitiful. So we invented games - gambled for nuts, played music and held dancing contests. It was crazy, dancing to pop singers who were probably all dead by now.

Mostly we slept a lot. It was hard not to think about all the people outside, and Dad was worried we would be attacked by hungry, desperate gangs seeking refuge from the fallout. Our shelter was well hidden, but a few people out there knew about it. The men who delivered the shipping containers, and the septic tank people. We were probably on a map somewhere and Dad made sure to keep his shotgun loaded ready for any trouble.

But none came. We worried about that. How many were dead? Was the whole world gone apart from us? Or were there others, holed up and lonely like we were, longing to hear a human voice over the radio? We couldn’t get a signal in our shelter, the thick rock and metal prevented it. Mum suggested Dad could open the door and take a Geiger reading. See if it was safe to open the door for a while and get some fresh air inside. But he wouldn’t be swayed. If it was badly contaminated outside, we would be letting the radiation in. With Eddie in remission for his leukemia it wasn’t worth the risk of contaminating him.

So, we remained in the shelter. I busied myself with the food, going over the supplies each day and trying to invent some new combination of spam and pasta and cheese powder to sustain us. Mum had taken to her bunk, she was depressed and struggling. Dad was still forcing himself to stay upbeat, telling bad Dad jokes and turning everything into puns. Eddie spent more and more time alone in the toilet, reading his comics in the only part of the shelter with a lockable door.

Months passed. Christmas drew near, and to our surprise Mum had stashed our artificial tree under her bunk, and some decorations. We each busied ourselves trying to make gifts out of the empty tins and packaging. I painted a picture of our dog, Monty. Dad had released him in the back garden the night of the klaxons, leaving some dry dog food torn open on our back porch for if he survived. We missed Monty more than anything – more than ice-cream and television and walks in the woods. I thought the painting might cheer Mum up, but it had the opposite effect. She withdrew even more, barely turning to watch when we turned the fairy lights on and sang holiday songs.

One by one we saw our first birthdays in the bunker pass by. We celebrated the occasions with a bowl of butterscotch angel delight, though it wasn’t the same with milk powder and water. Eddie was growing thin, I noticed blue circles under his eyes and he slept more and more. I heard Dad crying in the pantry one night, his anguished sobbing more terrifying than the nukes themselves.

Eddie whispered to me that the leukemia had returned. I think I already knew. I tried to comfort him, making all his favorite bunker meals, but he ate less and less as the days went by. I had to spoon feed him. His skin had a waxy sheen to it and his sweat smelled sickly sweet… Mum lay in his bunk with him now, unwilling to be away from him for even a moment. The twins wouldn’t go near him anymore, they thought he looked like a zombie.

And then, while we slept, he died. Just nineteen years old – it wasn’t fair! He’d had such plans. University, travel – he’d wanted to be an archaeologist, see the Pyramids. Instead he was dead, and we were trapped in our cramped bunker with his corpse.

I drew him a picture of the Sphynx, placing it in his hands as Dad zipped the body-bag closed. Mum howled and ran to the bathroom. She didn’t come out all day. I helped Dad carry Eddie to the empty freezer. It wasn’t hard, he weighed so little.

The second year passed. We rarely talked anymore, the twins had developed their own language and ran wild, but my parents just let them. I read and re-read my books, wishing I had thought to bring longer novels. I stopped brushing my hair and I wasn’t even upset when the CD player broke. I’d grown to hate all the music we owned.

We’d all given up by the time it ended.

A knocking sound - so faint, clanging on the bunker door. Dad grabbed his gun, ready to defend us. Mum walked right by him, using her key and Eddie’s to unlock the padlocks. She turned to Dad and said “Just open it, James. I can’t live like this anymore. I have to know.”

The door swung inwards, and we blinked hard against the brilliant sunlight. Slowly my eyes focused, and a familiar face emerged from the light.

“Krista?” Jonah said tentatively, as though he didn’t recognize me at all. “Is that you? My God – have you been in there this whole time?”

I couldn’t seem to speak, or even move. I just stared at him, and at the green trees behind him, white clouds in the sky above.

“The radiation…” Dad said weakly, reaching for his Geiger counter.

“What radiation? Oh, no! They never did fire the nukes, it was a false alarm. They announced it the next morning, a peace treaty was signed… you guys didn’t know?”