2029

2029: a short story

There goes another nuke, just kilometres away. Since this started, that's all I can hear, explosion after explosion. At least we're okay, the last six left, and we thought coming back to George Town, my home town, would be fun, until a nuclear war broke out a month ago and people started bombing everywhere. George Town has changed a lot since I left, the town centre has gone from only a couple shops, just a few take away's and the occasional clothes shop, to being more filled with Kmart like stores, but now, after the bombings, it's changed even more. I got some of us to a bunker that I made a few years back, just in case this ever happened, and thank God I did, because I managed to save some of us. Alex, Rustam, Leah, Caitlin, Shae and I got to the bunker after we saw on the news that this had started, lucky as well, because last I heard almost half the population was wiped out.

 But, being the last six left in the world isn't as bad as it sounds, until you realise that if you even walk outside there is a risk of dying. Every once in awhile we hear what seems to be talking outside the bunker, but the little bombproof window shows it's just the human turned mutants, muttering and moaning, as they stumble into one another. "Do you think we'll make it out anytime soon?" asked Leah, with a concerning tone, "Hopefully" I reply, hoping she doesn't hear the uncertainty in my voice. As we sit in pretty much silence, I offer the first snack anyone's had in a few days, because we've been saving our supplies for breakfast, lunch and dinner only, I decided today that if we are going to survive this, we need more a day than the cans of fruit, vegetables and spam I've kept in the bunker. That was when I realised, I'm going to have to start making supply runs soon, because we have less food than what we had yesterday, so somebody's been eating more than their fair ration.

I explain to everyone " Someone has been eating more than their fair share of food, so I'm going to have to leave the bunker to get more supplies. There is a local IGA nearby, and if I run as fast as I can, I will be able to get out there and get supplies." "We're coming with you" I hear from the other side of the bunker, it was Rustam and Alex, who haven't really said a word since we've been in this bunker. "Okay, but make sure you have something to protect your mouths from the radiation, and something to fend off those mutants." We open the bunker door, and head into my shed, which I built over the bunker. Alex grabs a shovel, and Rustam grabs a machete, and I decide to grab one of my favourite comic book weapon, a baseball bat covered in barbed wire. As we head out of the shed, we realise that the radiation has kinda evaporated, so we don't need masks, so now we know we can make supply runs a lot more. I hear a loud smash, then I see Alex shovel busting the head off of a mutant in the distance, and then I encounter my first mutant, but I freeze, because coming face to face with one of these things is scarier than watching The Blair Witch project in the middle of the night by yourself. Then, it must've been a sixth sense or something, because all I see is my bat, smashing the mutants head, knowing that to kill a mutant, you have to destroy the brain.

As we make our way to the IGA and encounter mutants on almost every turn, we hear a faint talking, not like the moaning of the mutants, but actual, human speech. "Don't you think we should investigate?" Rustam said, "It might be actual humans" I believed that there's more than six people left, so we did investigate, as we searched the house where the talking was coming from, we see a cellar door, so I knock on the cellar door, then dead silence. Alex decides to open the door, and we hear a gun cocking, we hold our weapons up, and enter the cellar. "Angus? I haven't seen you for years" I hear, scared for my life, we go further into the cellar, to find seven people, two of which, I remember from grade six, Amber and Andreas.

"But, how long have you been here?" I ask, wondering how they survived the blast. "About a week, I kinda lost track of time." Andreas replied. I look around to find other people I remember from grade six, Briannah, Belinda and Ethan, the other two I don't know. "If you stayed in this basement, how didn't you get infected?" Alex asks, taking the words out of my mouth. "That's the thing, there was more of us, but they got infected and we locked them over there." Briannah mutters, but there's no noise at all coming from the chained door she motioned to. "Can I open it to take care of them then, instead of letting you be at risk?" I ask, they say yes, so I walk up to the locked door, break the old lock, and open the door, but, there's nothing in there. "Is this where you said you kept the infected?" I ask, hoping that I'm correct. "Yeah, at least, it was" Ethan said. "What happened?" Questioned Rustam, "We heard another bomb the other day, they must've escaped" said Ethan, but I didn't believe him, in fact, for as long as we've been here, I didn't believe much of what anyone was saying. Maybe it's just the fact that I haven't seen these people for a while, or maybe it's the random dead bodies in a pile over in the corner.