After the Reckoning

Part one of what i plan to be a 30-20 page short story about 4 siblings surviving in a post apocalyptic world. this is only the first three pages so far but i hope to add more in the next few days.

I wake up to the most terrifying sound I have ever heard. This wasn’t the usual howling of animals at night, or the occasional sound of a radiation event. This was something different. This changed everything.

It was a typical Sunday morning, the sun rose through the ashen sky the same way it has since the reckoning. The drab gray landscape was painted bright orange by the rays that burst the thick dark low hanging clouds ablaze. In my usual way, I had slept in today as I always do on Sunday, but my peaceful sleep was disturbed by that terrible sound. The low trembling sound of earth crumbling beneath a powerful force, the deathly sound of fire consuming everything in its wake, the eerie silence that follows as every living thing stops to listen to their world coming down around them. The bright light the accompanies Sunday kept me from seeing the havoc that was wrought but the fact that I could still see and hear proved that I hadn’t been consumed by it.

I've heard the stories of giant rockets carving destruction all over the world but I had thought that they stopped dropping them after the reckoning. The Reckoning. Such a strange thing now to think about. Only 20 years have passed since the fall of western civilization followed closely within a few years by the rest of the world, yet it seems many lifetimes ago the world wasn’t the hostile nightmare it is today.

I sat, propped up in my bed against the headboard, waiting for the shaking to end, for my vision to come back and the ringing in my ears to subside. Getting up was the hard part. I'm not sure exactly what the attack did but the trembling in my legs suggest it was closer then I had thought. And then it hit me, I knew exactly what I needed to do. Underground, directly below the shanty shack we call home is a shelter specifically designed for this kind of event. Just then the strength returned to my legs and the fog was lifted from my mind. I ran out of my room and to where my sister and two brothers where sleeping. I didn’t need to wake them as the blast had already done my job for me. I grabbed my two brothers and told my sister to get down below.

Twenty years ago, when the attacks had first started in the United States, my mother and father watched from the comfort of their mansion in Massachusetts. I was just a boy at 10 and my baby sister was only 2 at the time. My twin brothers haven’t been born yet. I remember the day of the reckoning as my last day in school. We were finishing a lesson in math class about long division when our teacher got a visit from the principle at the classroom door. I remember the look of sheer horror on her face when she got the news and I remember her telling us to calmly walk single file to the entrance of the school, where, awaiting us , were 15 armored buses to take us to shelters where either our parents will join us or take us someplace else, equally safe. I didn’t find out later that our capital, Washington D.C. along with several other major cities had been utterly demolished by the first wave of attacks.

For the next five years, my family and I lived a totally different life that what we were used to. From a beautiful secluded mansion in the suburbs outside of Boston to crowded fallout shelters in Brockton, life as we once knew it, surely has ended. When it was finally safe to leave the cramped crowded shelters and emerge into the broken and colorless world, I was no longer a child. I had taken over the responsibility of caring for my little sister as my parents sought to rebuild with the remaining survivors. For the next 4 years we struggled but maintained a small community we called "New Hope". Cut off from the rest of the world, we were unsure how faired the rest of the country, so the town of New Hope established a sort of new government with my father as mayor. It was during this time that my mother gave birth to my twin brothers.

With the relative safety and peace despite the hardships of the last nine years, my family has lived without tragedy. That is to say until the arrival of Marcus and Jacob killed our mother during their birth. Our father was hit the hardest by this, and with the loss of everything he had ever worked for 9 years ago, the loss of the person he most loved was too much for him to bare, and so, after a few short weeks, he ended his life by hanging from the beam that supported the house he built. And so there I was, left to take care of three orphaned children on my own in shattered world.

In the eleven years that followed the death of my parents, I had withstood; famine, feral mutated monsters, disease, and the occasional airstrike from some unknown enemy. To say that life during this time was hard is a laughable understatement.

I've had awoken on particularly painful Sundays but nothing as frightening as the one that wakes me today. Perhaps now would be a good time to explain, whenever I say Sundays I'm not referring to the first day of the week. Five years after the reckoning, when the underground vault doors unlocked freeing its 10,000 inhabitants, there where particular days when the radiation from the attacks that still remained in the clouds would brightly illuminate from the Sun shining through a specific tare in the atmosphere that moves in a pattern around the planet. This happened every 38 days and would create an unbearable bright light that would burn the retinas of anyone unfortunate enough to have their eyes open during its peak, as well as strange anomalous occurrences that left horrifying scars on the earth where radiation would gather and burn fiercely for a few seconds then dissipate. These occurrences are very rare and very unpredictable, and on one particular Sunday I remember our neighbor's house being burned to the ground killing the sleeping occupants instantly as the irradiated inferno consumed the roof down to the foundation in a matter of seconds.

In this instance, I had very little time to consider what was going on. I had to act on pure instinct that was telling me to run for shelter, and that’s exactly what I did. I didn’t even have to wake my younger siblings as they had already been stirred by the loud bang and where now on their way to the small 5 person shelter built beneath the raggedy creaking wooden shack my father built 15 years ago.

"What the hell was that" my sister Katrina asked as we ran for our lives for safety.

"I'm not waiting around to find out!" I yelled back.

I slammed the door to the shelter open and waited as my three younger siblings climbed in to safety and jumped in behind them.

"What's happening?" asked Marcus

"I don’t know Mark." I replied.

"I'm scared" whimpered Jacob

.

"I am too, but we're safe here" I hope.

That last part I added in my head. In the last 15 years I have lived here we have never had to use the shelter for anything except for running safety drills. I never thought that we would actually have to do what we had to practice for so many years. And I didn’t actually know if it would keep us safe during an attack. These where things I would have expected my father to know and had he not took the cowards way out he would have been able to instill the confidence in his children where I could not. But now was not the time to curse the b*****d that abandoned his family, I have to be strong and provide them a sense of safety that I cannot share with them.

Through the steel and lead casing that now separates me and my family from the dismal world; I could hear the faint but distinctive sounds of destruction above us as our house is probably being torn to shreds at its very foundation. In the fifteen years that I have spent living on the surface I remember only having to rebuild our home once. It was about seven or eight years ago after a particularly horrendous wind storm caved in our roof. Fortunately no one was on the top floor when it happened but we could hear the sound of the wood splintering and crashing down on top of our empty beds. It was after that I decided that we would sleep on the ground floor in case another storm came through in the night while we were asleep and caused the roof to crush us instantly. The only thing we used the top floor is for storage and I used it to clean the game that I had killed for our dinners. It's strange thinking about it now, how we could hear the sound of our roof collapsing so clear and distinctly, now I have to strain my ears just to hear our whole house being blown to bits. It almost makes me hope that what I am hearing is just the sound of the wood swaying and creaking against the destructive force, but I know better, the walls of the shelter where designed to keep its occupants as separated from the outside world as much as possible.

We'll have to stay down here for a month now as we wait for the radiation to clear out. I hope our neighbors made it to safety as well, what made building our community so bearable was having plenty of able bodies to help. I can't imagine having to rebuild with just my younger brothers and sister as company especially now that I have lived and worked with these people for more than half my life. But I cannot think about that now, I have my family to protect. Their well being is of the utmost importance right now. Everybody else is just going to have to fend for themselves until the thirty long days have passed.

Due to the nature of the shelters that we had built underneath each house in New Hope, they are designed to stay locked after the vault doors are closed if the Geiger counters detect any radiation. They were made that way long before we built them under the houses as the parts were taken from the larger shelters that were in Brockton, where my mother, father, sister, and I lived for five years. The reason they stayed closed until the radiation had cleared was to prevent any accidental openings that would compromise the health of the occupants. Once the meter on the Geiger counter reaches zero (or in our case they were calibrated to a few counts above zero after the initial attacks) the vault door will click unlocked telling us that it is safe to return to the outside world.

One week has passed and the telltale click that means it's safe to go outside hasn’t been heard yet. For that matter nothing has been heard of from the outside world. The week has been spent sharing stories with my two youngest siblings about our dead parents and the lives they lead before the Reckoning.

"They were great people" started Katrina. "They helped found this town after nearby Brockton was destroyed and all of the inhabitants of the bomb shelters there had no place to go"

"But what did they do pre Reckoning?" asked Jacob

"We already know what they have done afterwards, we get reminded every day" finished Marcus

What he said was true, our next door neighbor, Henry, became my father's friend and confidant when we were living in the Brockton shelters.

"Dad was a lawyer, Mom an elementary school teacher" I say, and then it hits me. None of them would have any idea what either of these things are. Katrina was only two when the attacks first started, and Marcus and Jacob weren’t born until six years afterwards.

"Lawyer?" "Elementary school teacher?" asked Marcus and Jacob one after the other.

"Well" I began, not really knowing how to finish; it's been so long since these professions used these words. "It's like this, whenever people in New Hope have a dispute over something, our dad would have been the person who would help one of them get what they want, than him and the other person's lawyer would argue and present their cases in front of someone called a judge, which is exactly what it sounds like, someone who makes a judgments and decides who wins."

"Sounds too complicated" remarked Marcus

"And you guys already know what a teacher is" I interrupted "Elementary school is where kids 5 years old to 10 would go to be taught"

"Sounds like they were very important people" exclaimed Jacob, who's been listening very intently up to this point as if this information would be crucial to his life.

"Yes, they were very important people" I say, disgustedly. Whatever my parents did in their past lives and whatever they did after doesn’t excuse my father's weakness. He abandoned us at a very crucial time and that can never be forgiven.

For the next few days I try to steer them away from conversations about our dead parents and instead treat them to stories about growing up in the pre Reckoning world and how rough life was after, when were forced to live in cramped underground vaults with ten thousand other people.

We were nearing the end of the second week when I hear something very strange coming from outside. It was this rhythmic womp womp womp sound coming from directly above us. Then, something even more strange, the sound of some sort of powerful metal cutting saw tearing through or vault door making this terrible shrieking sound reverberating all around the tiny shelter, bouncing off the walls and making my ears painfully ring. Without thinking, I reach for a pistol I found on a dead cop in Brockton, I load it, and get ready for anything that will be coming from our presumed safe haven. There was a loud click, they must have reached and disabled the Geiger counter, the vault door swung open and a fully suited soldier looking type appears in the threshold, he yells to someone behind him and throws down four strange looking masks, the kind that are bug eyed with small holes where the mouth goes, and commands us to put them on and come out side. He doesn’t even acknowledge my weapon but I keep it out and pointing towards this strange commando.

We comply and are greeted by several more commandoes, all shouting orders to each other through their muffled masks, and amidst the confusion I recognize their accents as American, maybe from the south and mid west. I still feel as though I cannot trust these new people especially with the nature that I have met them, but when one of them who looked the leader type told me to lower my weapon I decided that maybe they aren’t here to harm me or my family. One of the commandoes looks at my twin brothers trying to size them up.

"you! How old are you two?" The commando barked at my brothers.

With the clear and obvious fear on their faces preventing them to respond, I run to the space between them and the commando.

"They're 14" I reply

The commando gave a meaningful turn toward his leader and the leader nodded in some sort of reply. Then two more commandos approached my brothers and grabbed them by the arms, instinctively I raised my pistol at one of the commandoes' holding my brothers head. Just then the other commandoes grabbed at their sidearms and pointed them at me. Calmly, the commando leader told me to drop my weapon or they will be forced to shoot.

"What do you want with my brothers?"

"They are of age and are to be taken to the capitol and be put to work. You can either remain here or be taken in to custody if you don’t drop your weapon."

I slowly place my gun on the dirt.

"That’s more like it." The lead commando turns to Katrina "you girl! How old are you?"

"T-twenty two" stammered my sister.

"Pity, you're too old for service work but you might still be useful yet. How would you like to live in the capital? You'd make a lovely courtesan."

"You are to do no such thing with her!" I yelled to the leader, our masks nearly touching.

"You are in no such position to order me boy" laughs the leader "Hanson! Take the pretty w***e into custody"

"NO!" I grab the gun from the ground and aim directly at the lead commandos face.

"Now now let's be civil, you've already survived so much it would be a shame to die like this" said the lead commando callously.

Suddenly there was a sharp pain in the back of my head then nothing as the world faded black. I awake to find myself alone amongst the wreckage of my home. And the realization that I had lost the most important thing to me shot through me with ten times the pain that was in my head. I had failed to protect my family.

Author's Note

Again this is a very rough first few pages of what I what plan to be a much longer short story