Under the Surface

Desert wasteland.

That’s always what the world looked like in all the movies after a nuclear war.

Arid, dusty, blistering hellscapes littered with derelict buildings, deserted busses, fuckin’ tumbleweeds. The wild west without the cowboys and outlaws are the type of images that spring to mind.

Well, can’t say they got it completely wrong, but then there’s more than one kind of desert.

Guess our band of outlaws weren’t so far from cowboys either.

See, people had only begun to resurface after the largest fires went out. That was 7 years after the last bomb dropped. The usual suspects of course; all of the biggest powers on the planet reaching melting point following the collapse of the world economy, the deterioration of society and culture brought along by a pandemic that ravaged the worlds population.

I don’t remember much about the early days. I was only 8 years old when everyone started getting twitchy about some virus that was making the rounds. Stuff started closing down real fast though- governments around the world were forced to intervene, businesses that had survived for decades were bankrupt over-night. Hospitals were struggling to cope, triage tents everywhere… white has-mats… the whole shebang.

The fact that we would have recovered from the pandemic isn’t even the most tragic part. It’s the fact that the only thing we can blame for everything that transpired after was pure human nature.

Now isn’t that just the darndest thing?

But, as they say, life always finds a way.

7 years on, we breached to the surface for the first time, none of us expecting to have ever made it so long underground. But provisions were critically low. We’d suffered some losses in the early days- it never felt like a race against time. It felt like everyone had their own personal clock that was ticking away. Like some of us just chose to give up. Plain and simple. The laws of nature are incredibly sobering when you consider the hand you’ve been dealt in comparison to others. I can’t say I blame anyone for cutting their losses. But I was young, and I don’t think I had the quit in me… come what may, I wanted to live.

So, with the threat of starvation imminent, those that were strong enough were sent up and out into the nuclear winter. I was fifteen when I surfaced and among the youngest of our bunker to volunteer.

The first thing we hadn’t been able to anticipate was just how alien our landscape would seem to us. It was like some bastardised version of Alice in Wonderland where we emerged from the rabbit hole and fell through the looking glass.

The sky, we had assumed would look something like a white out following a snowstorm. But what we were faced with was skies of red. I looked to the three others that had also volunteered- their faces all distorted through the visors of the respirator masks we all wore. I still knew from their build and gait who each of them were. To the right of me, almost shoulder to shoulder stood Jonah- two years my senior, he’d taken me under his wing, both of us orphaned long before the bombs dropped. I looked to him now for reassurance, but the slow, mournful shake of his head, the drop of his shoulders and the way I could almost make it his silent “Fuck me…” was a knock to my resolve.

Following a few paces behind us were the twins; Nathan and Ricki. Nathan had been something of a thorn in my side for the duration of our residency in the bunker. I put it down to my growing closeness to his sister. Our squabbles had done me a favour though in the long run. There had been no law below the surface- well… very little. Two teenagers fist fighting was the least of anyone’s worries, and as long as it didn’t look like true dissent, no one involved themselves.

The horror stories had done enough to keep true crime mostly at bay. Word had somehow made it back that other bunkers had begun ejecting their criminal population to the surface with not a scrap of clothing. There was no crime imaginable that was worth the slow and painful death of your lungs dissolving or your extremities freezing and breaking off one by one.

Shaking off the muffled grumbles of disapproval from her twin, Ricki flanked me to my left and gripped my shoulder. “It’s worse than we imagined… God, how can it be worse?” Her question was rhetorical of course and it trailed off as she shuffled forward from where we stood, her footprints crunching through the settled ash that fell in a constant, sickening flurry.

As we followed, I knew we were all tasting it. It was the metallic taste of our own blood on our tongues as our cells were slowly being destroyed by the radiation. We said nothing. We knew this was the world now. Not a single thing to be done about it. We just had to keep going.

So I guess in light of it all, Ricki’s idle, haunted murmurs appealing to ‘God’ stuck with me. “God, how can it be worse?”

I scanned my eyes over the ruin of our world and felt my chest constrict. We’d killed our God… there was no God here.

Our objective was simple; scour the landscape for anything. We needed food, medicine… water. Whatever was left.

We managed to find some bare necessities. Some old vending machines that had made it- food that was too processed to ever expire. That was our bread-and-butter… for want of a better phrase.

The truth of it all was what they really wanted us to find were seeds. They’d known the war was coming, had seen it a mile off. So they’d been savvy. They’d decked the bunkers out with the capacity to grow crops without the natural sun. The only problem was they hadn’t managed to harvest enough.

You would think it might then be a simple mission that we faced. Simple enough. Find and retrieve. What could be so difficult about that when we’d already agreed to brave the surface?

People.

Always fucking people.

The bunkers had saved many lives, not nearly enough, but more than we could have hoped for. The issue with living underground in separate bunkers was that things got tribal. What else could anyone expect when completely isolated for so long?

So of course, each bunker had the same idea. Or we had to assume that was the case. That is what made the whole thing a little trickier.

How would we navigate that situation? Who would call the shots… literal or otherwise?

It seemed a pity to me that after so many years of survival underground that I might meet my fate facing down the barrel of another survivor’s gun. How… frivolous.

A big word for the offspring of a nuclear war, but my mother was a teacher.

Facing down that burning sky as we all shifted in silence, I felt overwhelmingly defeated. I had nurtured such grand ideas of survival and heroism for seven years, but up there under that bloody atmosphere where so many lives had perished and been reduced to soot, I felt so close to death that I could have lay down then and there and succumbed to it all. I was simultaneously made brutally aware of how crucial our mission was, and altogether how hopeless it was. I was a child, and yet I had already lived past my life expectancy.

Jonah skulked past me, his gun loaded and hugged tightly to his body, his elbows in, knees slightly bent. He’d clearly made his decision a little faster than I had, but ultimately it made sense. He was right. We had to keep trying to survive. There was no point to anything else.

Ready to follow on behind the others, I took a tentative step forward into ash that had not yet been disturbed. Something crunched.

Lifting my foot from beneath me, I squatted down to inspect what I had stepped on. I expected some kind of bolt or nut- it had been metallic. Perhaps a spring or a screw… something from a car.

It wasn’t.

Reaching down, I scooped up into my heavily gloved hand something that should not have been. In my palm, a simple heart-shaped gold locket gleamed.

Looking it over, I had broken the hinge and bent it out of shape but very carefully I opened it. In the left half a smiling toddler, two front teeth missing, dimples in each cheek. In the right half, nothing… the picture was missing.

I stared at that toddlers image for what felt like a life time. It was almost poetic. I knew very well that that child was more than likely deceased, but it still hurt me to think that even in a locket, their parents were nowhere to be seen. Their lives, like the locket itself had been discarded, meaninglessly lost, separated… stamped out.

“Come on, kid. Best not to stick around.”

I looked up at Jonah, my hand clenching around the locket defensively as he peered down at me. He must have doubled back when he realised, I wasn’t behind him. He extended his hand to help me up. I took it.

Pausing to fasten the locket around my neck, I took that toddlers image with me. Maybe it was to honour such a short life or remind me that something had come before this. That once upon a time, people made things that were beautiful. That people were capable of more than this.

Walking beside the only family I had left, I found myself disagreeing with Jonah, maybe for the first time.

“You’re wrong you know. Sticking around is the only thing left to do.”