Bingham, New Mexico

The sirens woke me up that morning. I thought it was a drill. For months we were preparing for the day that some man drunk on power and oblivious to our faces or names would start a war over pride and greed and doom us all. It’s funny how the world adjusts to a fear like that, it seemed so far off until it wasn’t. The sirens endlessly screeched, heralding the end of the world, an obnoxious reminder that there was nothing we could do to stop it but hide. We didn’t have time to run. The bombs fell within the hour. We huddled in the old storm cellar for three days as the world crumbled and burned, but we survived. The concrete stairs that once led up to a perfectly mowed yard now led up to a barren wasteland. The air smelled of death and breathing it felt like it. We saw the bodies of neighbors and friends beside their once happy homes, everything we knew had been reduced to rubble and ash.

My sister, Millie, was the first to get sick. We thought the vomiting was because of the stress and fear that accompanied our new reality, especially on a child so young. Then we found the Joneses a few streets over. They were burying their youngest, his first symptoms was vomiting too. We buried Millie next to him three days later. That was the day my symptoms started. By the time my body began to adjust to the initial radiation poisoning, I was the only one left. As I buried everyone I loved, I thought about just staying there with them. The radiation would take me eventually, why should I suffer? There would be easier ways for me to go than choking on my own blood, or slowly starving to death. I had almost convinced myself this was the best option when I saw my mother’s silver heart shaped locket laying on her homemade grave marker. In a world so full of orange and red, the silver stood out like a tiny beacon of hope. It was her mothers, and her mothers before that. I was the last survivor that I knew of, and my brain couldn’t stop thinking of the legacy they left for me. So I resolved to fight. If the world was ending and I was to be alone, I was not going down easily and would take a piece of them with me.

As I walked towards the edge of town, I fiddled the locket. I used to rub it as a child, I remembered every groove, but the pattern felt different. I assumed it was a chip from the end of the world, it tends to damage a few things, but upon closer inspection, I found a small black dot. I couldn’t walk very far without being exhausted, so I decided to stop and investigate it. It was barely the size of a ballpoint on a pin and shiny enough to see a small glimpse of my haggard face. I had aged twenty years old in a week. My hair was falling out from the radiation, I was covered in the dust of my hometown and the people that used to inhabit it. The path my tears had left days ago were still evident on my face, even though I didn’t cry anymore. The end of the world has a strange way of numbing you.

I slept under what should’ve been a blanket of stars. The bombs replaced light pollution with a permanent haze over everything familiar, but I was slowly getting used to it. In the morning, I continued trekking towards the edge of town. It was a tiny town, there were probably more survivors elsewhere. I watched the cockroaches scuttle around me as I walked. I thought about how similar I must be to them to survive this long. At least cockroaches had each other. I sat down next to a large group of them and watched them interact with each other. One of them broke off from the group and scuttled slowly across my foot. I picked it up and looked closely at it. It’s eyes looked nearly identical to the black ball I found on my mother’s locket. They looked awfully large for a cockroach, but I hadn’t given them a second thought until they were the only living thing I had seen for days.

After four more days of short walks and long breaks, I saw the city limits sign. “Bingham, New Mexico. Population 165.” With some spit and some dirt, I created a mud paste and covered up the last two digits so the population would accurately reflect what had become of this once quaint little place. I decided to take another break under the sign, as I looked up at the green metal square, I noticed wires running all over the back of it. They were connected to small holes where the screws were. The screws all had a fuzzy top on them, unlike any screws I had ever seen. Granted, I was unaware of what nuclear radiation does to the average screw.

When I felt rested enough, I started to walk out of town. As I attempted to cross city limits, it felt like I ran into a wall. There was nothing in front of me, so I tried again. This time, I hit it hard enough to fall back. At this point, I was convinced that the radiation had seeped into my brain, but something was not right. The world had ended in a nuclear firestorm, but invisible walls were outside the normal apocalyptic expectations.

I reached my hand out and slowly stretched it until I hit the wall again. Keeping contact with the wall, I moved my hand slowly to the left and shuffled along it, expecting it to end. The longer it kept going, the more anxious I got. I started moving faster and faster, wondering when my hand would feel the nothingness again. The nothingness never came. Before I knew it, I was running alongside the wall, hand pressed flatly against whatever this was separating me from the rest of the world and the answers I now so desperately needed. I don’t know how long I ran for, but by the time my lungs were burning worse than ever before and my legs were numb, I finally stopped. I slammed my back against the wall and tried to catch my breath, I couldn’t stop coughing. The poor air quality, radiation and physical exertion was taking its toll. I could feel the blood coming out of my mouth and on my hands. For the first time since the death of my sister, I began to cry. Coughing up blood was almost always the last symptom before death.

After the days of walking, the blistered feet, the exhaustion, I was going to die alone and by an invisible wall that made no sense. The tears turned hot and I realized I wasn’t sad, I was angry. Angry at the world for ending. Angry at world leaders that pull strings that affect everyone else. Angry at whoever invented the nuclear bomb. Angry at my family for leaving me. Angry at myself for surviving when they couldn’t. But most of all, I was angry at this stupid wall, and I was going to do everything in my power to tear it down. I didn’t care that I wouldn’t likely make a dent in it, but I had nothing else to lose. I sat up and spent every last bit of my strength beating at the wall with balled fists until my knuckles were bloody and the exhaustion took over as I fell asleep next to it.

I heard a mechanical beeping when I woke up. I opened my eyes and the world was too bright. I was staring into big white fluorescent lights. The beeping noise was a heart monitor. I had a breathing tube in my nose and tubes attached everywhere. I was in a hospital. I stumbled out of my bed and looked down to see myself in a paper gown. I frantically looked for my clothes and my mother’s locket, but they were nowhere to be found. I could feel my heart beating faster than I thought possible. I saw a window out of the corner of my eye. In the window was a clear sky and a clean New Mexico desert. There was no ash, no rubble, no death, no radiation. Then, I heard my own voice. I walked out of the room I was in and walked into a room full of screens and computers. I saw my face, comforting my dying mother from her point of view playing on a monitor. Beside the keyboard lay my mother’s locket. I ran down and grabbed it, the person watching the video grabbed me and yelled for security. Two burly men came and began to drag me back to my room.

Along the way I saw videos playing on the monitors. I saw my friends burn alive. I saw myself bury my father. I saw families huddle for safety only for their house to collapse on top of them. I realized I was watching the end of the world from the perspective of hidden cameras. In a moment of clarity, I realized that’s what the black dots and the wiring on the sign were. They were ways to spy on the apocalypse. Which meant they had time to prepare beforehand, and instead chose to let us die.

A new anger welled up in me, I began to fight with all I had. I escaped the security guard but was almost immediately cornered by two new ones. All four escorted me to my room and strapped me down as I continued to scream and thrash around until they gave me a mild sedative. All I could think about was the death and destruction I saw and how nothing was done to save us. We were nothing more than pawns to them.

Eventually, a woman with a white lab coat and a tablet came in. She didn’t bother introducing herself, she instead began to hook up a new IV and begin to take blood samples.

With a hoarse and damaged voice I asked, “Where am I?”

She smiled artificially, “Just outside city limits.”

“How did you survive?”

Her voice had a sickly amount of fake sweetness as she said simply, “Sweetie. The bombs were a test. They only went off in Bingham. That’s what the dome was for, and why you should’ve left it alone.”

I felt that familiar anger in every fiber of my body. “You’re a mass murderer.”

Her laugh was a low and quick cackle, “I didn’t push the button, I’m just in charge of the research.”

“Research?”

“On the day when we can’t stop the world from descending into nuclear warfare, we need to find a way to survive it.” She paused and stared deeply at me. It was a violating stare, as if she was evaluating a piece of meat at the market, not another human being. “No one was supposed to survive. We were going to test the bodies after, but you were special.”

Through gritted teeth I spat, “I have lost everyone for this test. I am not special. I am alone.”

Her sickly smile returned, “You are special. Whatever is in your blood is the key to the survival of the human race.” She readied a syringe filled with clear liquid and began to place it in my IV and push slowly. My heart rate began to slow and my mind began to go blank. She placed a hand on my forehead and whispered, “Your sacrifice is going to save the world. I am sorry you won’t get to see it.”