Tomorrow We'll Live

A rose colored fire torn sky burned the day and scorched the Earth through a shredded atmosphere, simmering all that remains below in ultraviolet radiation now. An ash colored skyline reveals crumbled buildings, all former beauty long lost as we emerge from our den to another bitter cold night among inhabitable wreckage. I clutch my heart-shaped locket, a reminder of hope and love now gone in a brazen, dead world. An endlessly dark abyss.

Scavaging for the limited resources remaining, I carefully rummage through the debris left. The final testimony of our military might. Our own self destruction. The soil will no longer yield crops and the seas have receded. Dust storms roll over once green valleys turned lifeless. Acid rain now burns and erodes our land. I gather what I can from the pantry of a collapsed home and retreat to our fallout shelter before the bitter cold presses through my radiation suit.

Those that made it to the shelter when the war broke out live there now. No one who's ever ventured out to find another shelter or more survivors has ever been seen again. All power lines and communication towers were incinerated by the bombs, and the few remaining powerplants melted down. In the company of just five others remaining, loneliness has been redefined and taken a life of it's own.

The rusted metal on my locket, now lacquered from my grasp takes me back to the day you gave it to me. We laughed in a bistro cafe under a loving blue sky as the spring breeze gently combed my hair. "Now my love is with you even when I'm not." I hear your words still clear and crisp in my mind as I picture the little gift box and stare at the now tarnished heart-shaped locket. Perhaps under a blue sky with food in our bellies and hope in hearts I will find you. Will our horses ever traverse the landscape again? Will we ever feel the grass between our toes and smell the flowers in the air?

Something in the fields of debris scrapes my suit as I shuffle through, pinning for you. My suit is torn. The wind howls and screams across the land unhindered by the trees and structures reduced to mere cinders.The fragility of life in this barren terrain is unparalleled. How could I have been so careless?

My radiation suit hisses as I climb out of the rubble. "Take my hand!" I hear as my balance faulters. I open my eyes to the see the red sun rising, a stunning sight to behold in all it's fatal beauty. How did I lose track of the night? Heat waves rise off the ground as I stumble forward, nauseous. "You have to run! You're out of time." How long have I been exposed to the radiation? How long was I daydreaming? The dark rushes over me once again and all is quiet.

My hope dwindles as my heart sinks. There is nothing left of society, the environment, the very population we were all part of. All gone. Abandonded crackled highways twist across singed landscapes. Playgrounds stand twisted and mangled, longing for the sounds of the children who will never play there again. I'll never see you again. How could you have survived this? So few of us did. Will I?

"Radiation poisoning. Worse than last time. There's no telling how much damage she's done long term, or if she can even recover. I've done all I can, it's up to her now." I can hear them speaking, but I'm far away from this corroded land now. An existence void of the promise of life. Of love. Of any hope. Can I give up now? Is there a sleep that awakens not to a gauntlet of human atrocity, but to an Eden of rebirth and life in abundance?

"Why did she wander off? She was away from the other two for hours." Says a deeper, bolder voice I recognize to be Micah, a former military commander attempting to lead the way to our survival and salvation. I can feel the sting of lessions spreading across my body as I clutch the locket, desperate for it's cool touch to sooth me.

"She's our best scavenger. Do everything in your power to save her. We can't lose anyone else." The powerful voice retreats in the background.

"Hang in there for us, dear…" the gentle voice of Sarah, our only medical doctor. We were lucky to find her in the basement laboratory of the near by hospital immediately after the fall out. She happened to be running tests as the walls came down around her, sealing her from the waves of fire that swept across the land. Digging her out took two days ontop of the five she was trapped. She was severely dehydrated but unharmed. Since that day we've grown to adore her and her sweet bed manor. We've all grown close, like an orphaned family, clinging to each other for support in a hopeless battle uphill.

I retreat into my mind and begin to evaluate our disintegrating reality. The small farms we attempted to grow in the fall out shelter continue to produce weak and malformed crops. Underneath it lies a fresh water lake, protected by the shelter from the poisons and radiation. It too will soon run as dry as the seas. Provisions are now limited to what canned goods we can find amidst the disaster. We are living in denial. No one was prepared for this, there is no recovery plan. The radiation is here to stay, the sky is torn apart. Life is unsustainable. We are face to face with extinction, the final summation of a war that ended the day it began. As I lie on the exam table, in an altered consciousness, my heart breaks. We're fighting a losing battle and we're running out of time.

Once again I am sinking into silence taking my search of my world and you inward, putting it all to rest. Their voices grow dim and distant, a far cry from the piercing alarms breaking through. "She's crashing!" I can see the oceans before they boiled and the mountains before they crumbled within reach now. I feel the sun on my face gently warming my wind swept skin. There is no pain. I'm no longer lonely as I can see your face emerging. Is this a dream? A hallucination? Or maybe the only hope for a new world and reality, is to let go of the last one.