We didn't know

I felt something cold in my hand when she reached out for me. She pressed it into my palm and it was cold, so cold. I knew then that it was over.

For years my mother had a feeling. Not a bad feeling necessarily just a feeling of change. Nothing foreboding, just a sense of extreme change. Something she felt the need to be prepared for or at least acknowledge that something as easy as everyday life could change. I wish now that her feeling was stronger. I wish she knew just how bad things were going to get. I wish she would have prepared more. I wish she would have taken more precautions. I wish she would have taught us more…..I wish so many things right now as that coldness touches my hand.

As my brothers and I were growing up we always thought our mom was a little bit out there. Not crazy by any means but just a little too cautious. She worried too much about certain things. We had a basement pantry that she would get super antsy if it wasn’t well stocked. She would buy ammunition for the few guns that we had but we only would go shooting once or twice a year. She would make sure our vehicles always had fuel but we never had extra fuel. She would buy us survival gear but we would never actually learn how to use any of it. We rarely went into the woods. We would talk to our friends about the supplies that we had. We would sometimes talk about what one might do during an emergency but we would never really delve into exactly what should be done. Over the years we glanced over so many things that I truly wish I knew so much more about now. Maybe if my mother had listened closer and paid more attention to that feeling she had I wouldn’t be feeling this coldness. This coldness that means I didn’t know enough to save them, to save her.

The collapse was like a switch being flipped. One day we were at school, a week before Spring Break. Our teachers at the end of the day said we should take home our Chromebooks for the weekend because there was a chance we might not come back to school on Monday. They said they would email us assignments that we would need to complete at home before Spring Break and then we would return to school like normal after the break. That was 2 years ago. We never went back to school. We never went back to normal.

AX45 was the virus that ruined normal forever. It wasn’t the virus that was truly the cause of the collapse it was the reaction to AX45. It created terror. I was 13 when the collapse happened and even I could see people we panicking for little reason. The origin was somewhere in the US. Other nations panicked about this virus. AX45’s death rate was only about 10% but when the US wouldn’t shut down international travel someone took matters into their own hands. 2 nuclear bombs were set off just inland on both of our coastlines thousands of feet above us. These nuclear detonations triggered an EMP which essentially threw our world into The Collapse. The Collapse of our government, the collapse of our economy, the collapse of our society.

We thought we were safe. We had some food, we had some guns and ammunition and we had some survival gear. What we didn’t have was knowledge. The one thing that can truly save someone during the Collapse was what we didn’t have. People knew, they knew the things that we had and when The Collapse happened they came for it. When your child is starving you will kill your friend. I know this now. We would’ve tried to help them if they had given us a chance. We didn’t know not to trust. We didn’t know that we needed a safety perimeter, we didn’t know how to shoot, we didn’t know how to survive. We didn’t know how to keep our mouths shut about the little that we did have.

Now I know what I need to do. As my mother reaches her hand out to me and presses her now bloody heart shaped silver locket into my hand and I feel the coldness. I knew it was over. But now I know what I must do to begin again. I will learn, I will learn to trust myself and only myself. That is where my mother failed, she trusted other people and not herself and we all paid dearly for it.