PROLOGUE: The Doomsday Conference

Prologue to my working novel, AFTERMATH.

PROLOGUE

The Doomsday Conference

I see no other alternative.
At least, that’s what I must tell them.

I have rehearsed my lines over and over and over. As far as any of us see, this was inevitable. We had been on the brink since the Cold War.

And now, finally, just one side had been tipped too far.
I rise from my leather-bound chair and walk around my desk.
“Prime Minister Wells, they’re ready downstairs” a voice told me, Stephen Adebowale, my chief of public affairs. He was useful, had been incredibly. He would be a martyr.

“Thank you, mister Adebowale” I say to him “Go, make peace before the end, my friend” I smile. He shakes his head “I have made my peace, God has heard my prayers. My family will be safe and we will live on in His kingdom” he said, his voice was content. I smiled to him “I’m glad, you have been brave” I tell him as I walk away.

I walk down the stairs, people talk amongst themselves about, I can only assume, the great big news.

As I descend the final flight of stairs from 10, Downing Street, London, I play my lines in my head once more. I am ready to inform the world of their greatest misery. Their grandest failure.
I push the door of my home, the most sought after home of all British politicians, to be greeted by a see of flashes and voices. Cameras and phones and boom mics.
“Prime Minister Wells, sir!”
“Mister Wells, please, I’m with the Guardian”
“Thanks Harry. Yes, I’m outside 10, Downing Street, where Prime Minister Oliver Wells has just appeared before the hastily prepared press conference”

I stand and, at first, I only listen. Hearing their questions, their voices. Now I realise I must speak. I am ready for this.

The Doomsday Conference.

“Today, my nation, I address you. Not as your Prime Minister, but as your equal. A British citizen like you and your families.” I notice the conference crowds silence, though their incessant flashing lights continue. “Today I received word from President Obama that President Xi Jinping has declared nuclear war on America” I tell them. At that moment I feel my nation take the inbreathe you take when your husband is told he is terminal or your daughter was hit by a car.

The inbreathe that signifies the realisation of human morality.

I continue to talk to them “As we have anticipated such a horrendous occurrence for some time now, we had plans made” I reach into my suit-jacket pocket and pull from it the ticket I had pulled from in my many rehearsals. The ticket said “EDEN Inc. Preservation”. I look across my audience. “Anyone who currently possess a ticket is urged to make their way to one of the five designated preservation units across the country. Your unit is written on your ticket” I look across at them once more, then close my eyes. “I recommend you are in your unit before 2pm this afternoon.”

“Thank you, my nation. May God protect you now”

Those were my last words to my country and I hide a smile as I return to my home. A smile of knowing that went how I had rehearsed. Though, this was an unexpected interruption.
“What is happening, Oliver?” my wife asks. Marcia Wells. Beautiful, intelligent Marcia. Ignorant, insufferable, yet all too necessary Marcia. She walks by my side as we ascend the building “Where is my daughter, Oliver?” she asks me. I sigh rather than answer, walking ahead. My future plays like an old film in my head.

“D****t Oliver answer me!” I hear her words, but I do not heed them. She was nearing the end of her usefulness. I walk into my office, after typing in my 7-digit code. I walk through my office toward my desk, Marcia screams to me “What f*****g game are you playing here, Oliver?”, I sighed and begin to unbutton my suit jacket.
“Marcia, please, stop being such a loudmouth b***h and listen to me. For once in our marriage, stop talking and listen to me” she seems taken back by my words. Expectedly so. I removed my jacket and shirt and stand before her. She seems lost and confused. Her mascara, now ruined by her tears of rage, has streamed down her red cheeks. Her lips, thin and blood red, twist in a frown that seems to be wanting to cry and scream. I look her in her eyes of brown and gold and green and see nothing. No love, no hatred, no emotion.

I leave her and walk to my dresser to the far left of my office. I, once more, type in my code and the steel door of the dresser slides open. Within, hangs one large, mens body suit. Made of lycra and metal. I remove my trousers and underwear and slide myself, awkwardly and uncomfortably, into the suit. I place my watch and keys and wallet in a bowl atop a shelf to the left of the door and turn back to my wife.

“You are going to die, within the next hour and half I assume” I tell her, she let out a whimper and pursed her lips again. "Why, Oliver?" she asks, her tone bitter and resentful,

“Why is not my fault” I tell her, “Why is the Chinese and the Americans engaging in needless war with one another”, she looked my in my eyes, her lower lip quivering like a child. A child who fears the next strike from a ruthless parent.
“Where is my daughter, Oliver” she spat.
“Your daughter?”
“Mine.”
“Is she not the fruit of our loins, Marcia?” I ask my wife,
“She may be your blood, but I am the only one she knows as a parent”
I laugh at her, “She respects me as a man of power”
“She resents you as a monster without morals”
I raise my hand and strike her across her face “I have morals, and a sense of how to play them” I say, she holds her quickly reddening face and says nothing.
“This, Marcia. This is why you die today”
“Why, Oliver?” She asks, her voice was small.

“Because you betray me with words of hate”

“I say what no one else dare”
“I am the leader this country has always needed, Marcia” I tell her, “I am the leader this country will always remember”

“Of course!” She laughs a little “Oliver Wells, the leader when the world was swallowed my radioactive fire” she says “Out in a blaze of glory?”
I shake my head “Your ignorance sickens me, Marcia” I tell her “I will be Oliver Wells, the leader who saved the worthy and let those who were not melt in an earthly hell” I tell her, she looks repulsed. I feel repulsed.

“You think you’re God, don’t you?” She asks, “Judging the sinners and saints, who goes to heaven, only you decide? Is that your play?
“I am God, Marcia.”

“You’re sick.”
“Your words, my wife, are like acid” I say, “Fortunately my bodysuit is resistant”
“Where’s my suit?”
“You’re going to die today, Marcia” I walk to my seat and sit, she looks at me. Her eyes were overflowing with a mix of fear and rage and resentment and pain. I exhale slowly, and flick up a glass case on the desk, a button lay underneath. Blue, with a ring of hazard colours around it.
I look my wife in the eye, “You’re going to die today, Marcia” I push the button. Slowly the windows behind me, the ones which overlook Downing Street, begin to disappear behind rising sheets of lead. The light in the roof turns on and hangs between us. I rest my hands on the chair and sit in comfort. I reach a helmet from underneath my desk and slide it over my head. I look at her.
Marcia Henriette Francine Wells. Marcia Winston, by maiden name.

Born to wealth, the daughter of King Charles' cousin.
Married at the age of twenty-eight. Pregnant at twenty-nine. Our daughter born, and seventeen years later, here she dies. Weak, empty.
She looks at me and begs “Oliver, don’t let me die”
“Why, my wife?”

“I’m pregnant” She says, her voice now a whisper as she drops to her knees, her dress getting caught beneath her. I look at her, and say “Really? We’re having a baby?”, she nods with tears dripping from her face.
I pause for a moment.

I look at her, then close my eyes and rest back in the chair.

“Aren’t you going to save me?” she pleads, “For the baby?”
I look her in the eyes and give her a smile as warm as I can muster in the drastically cooling room.
“No.”

And with that, her cries fill the room as the frozen air seeps in through the vents and piping, and liquid nitrogen cools across the floor. I hear my wife scream in agony as her flesh is frozen to the floor. She tries to run away, tries to stand. In her most successful attempt she tore the flesh all down her shin, nearly exposing bone. Then she collapsed, more ice encasing her body. She would still be preserved, perfectly in fact. But she is dead and I am alive.
“Our daughter is safe, Marcia” I tell her body, “I will let her know how you died a traitor to the country and its future” I say with a nod of reassurance. Slowly, I feel my bodysuit put me to sleep and the ice take hold.
When I awaken, I will be King.

On September 18th 2016, the world came to a violent and abrupt pause. Across England the wealthy and important had been cryogenically suspended in time within pods in underground bunkers, named EDEN Shelters. Everyone else had to seek refuge, or simply die.
Stephen Adebowale and his family of devote Christians stood in a field, holding a cross in each of their hands. They watched the bombs fall until they became nothing but shadows.

The first country to strike has never been known. But the war, World War III, lasted only one minute and forty-five seconds. From then, there was no one left to push a button.
England was roped in through contractual obligation.
Russia took advantage to attack Ukraine, and North Korea launched at everyone who had fired.

Some of the innocents, the civilians, took refuge in caves, others in underground sewers or subways. Some in boats or submarines, some in helicopters or hot-air balloons.
Many accepted death and cried with their families at home.
Whatever they did, most of them died.
The world was swamped with flames. Then life paused.
The seas paused, the sky paused.
Life had stopped for a few moments.
It was not until a hundred and eighty years after the war that life continued.
But life was never the same.
The end of this world, was only the beginning of a new one.

next chapter