After the Blast: Chapter One

They emerge and split. What do I mean? Read on...

     New York had been reduced completely to dust in the blink of an eye, something that people around mourned, and something people around the world cheered about. They thought nothing had survived. They were wrong.

     Zeke had been sitting in the basement of the skyscraper he worked at for about four months now, after hearing the news of the nuclear attack. His buddies, Mitchell, Jordan, and Terrence, were the only remaining survivors that he knew of. When they heard that it was safe to step out into the world without being seriously harmed by the radiation, the group took the chance and stepped outside.

     Zeke's blonde hair blew in the stolid wind that greeted the group when they emerged from the wreckage of their once fine establishment. His icy-blue stare took in all of his surroundings: dust and debris. The extent that had been pictured by Zeke had not even skimmed the surface of the real destruction, and he was not able to hold himself together. He sat down and sobbed as hot tears streamed down his face and onto the ground. He could not believe that in an instant, everything he had worked for, everything he loved, had been evaporaated by the blast.

     Mitchell saw Zeke's reaction and walked toward him cautiously so as not to alarm him. His green eyes began to adjust to the light that the sun cast upon the wasteland and he pushed his messy brown hair out of the way as he gently put a hand on Zeke's shoulder and asked, "Zeke, are you gonna be alright?" Zeke stood up, eyes bloodshot and still full of tears, and nodded in a false sense of bravery.

     "Hey, is it me, or does it seem like we aren't the only ones left?" asked Jordan in a very quiet tone, suitable for the silence that permeated from the once glorious city. They all began to have the same feeling in the pit of their stomachs: were they the only ones left, or were there others like them that had survived? Did they have the same intentions as they themselves had? Questions had to be answered later, as Jordan turned his completely bald head to transfix his nearly-black eyes on Terrence, a cocky twenty-something with spiky brown hair and blue eyes, not like the ice-blue eyes of Zeke, but still very soul-penetrating.

     "Look, we came out here for a reason, and that isn't to stand around and cry like a bunch of frickin' babies!" shouted Terrence. His words cut the silence like a warm knife through butter, awakening them to the realization that they were, very possibly, the last people in New York City. "If I was the commander of this group, I..."

     He was not able to finish his sentence. Zeke confronted him, forcing his back into a wall with a thud and getting as close as he could without their noses making contact. "Thank Christ you're not the leader of the group, otherwise we would have been dead long before now. You listen to me and you listen good, if you don't like the way I do things around here than you can go off on your own. If you wanna live and see the day where you will talk to people about the blast..."

     He was cut short by Terrence's voice, "But how the hell do we know that there is anyone left? We heard no international news on the damn ham radio that was in the basement, so how do we know that the world isn't completely destroyed, how do we know that we aren't the last humans on the face of the Earth?"

     Zeke couldn't take it anymore. He punched Terrence in the mouth with such force that when Terrence rose, he was bleeding from the mouth and the nose. "Get away from this group before you kill us all!" snarled Zeke. His voice was low and commanding, and the stare made Terrence feel if he didn't go, many more painful episodes were soon to come. Terrence looked for help from the two guys, but they just shook their heads and looked at the ground. Seeing as he was getting no support, he looked around and walked in the general direction of possibly the last standing building in NYC. As Terrence walked away, Zeke could not help but shiver at the insanely large amount of logic that Terrence had stated. What if there was nobody left in the world but them? He knew he couldn't let himself think like that, simultaneouly saying, "Let's go, I have a feeling that building's trouble."

     They began to walk further inland, knowing that survival depended on a group effort. They had difficulty leaving behind Terrence, who was slowly becoming harder and harder to see, but they knew that the way he was going could only mean suicide. Their journies would take them elsewhere, and the whole group knew that whatever the good Lord put them up against, they would overcome it in any way possible. They just didn't know how hard their struggle would become...