First and foremost I want to explain what this blog is all about. THis is not going to be a regular blog, this will be a fictional diary of a character I have created who has gone through a nuclear-winter type apocolypse and goes through her life leading from the tragedy to her time afterward wandering though what is left of civilization. I think this is all I need to say here on this, I'll update as often as I feel I need to, so keep an eye out for new topics as they go from day to day of her life...
The Beginning of the End: My Story...
For anyone who may come across this log of my life, I want to share the history that may be long forgotten by the time this is found. I want to let anyone who survives this hell know the truth, of at least one who survived the initial collapse of society. By the time anyone reads this, I may be gone, or still alive, working on another of these journals to leave someplace where someone may find it one day. This is my story, from before the collapse to wheenver I stop writing this, or until I die, from who knows what. As long as I survive though, I will continue to write, and leave these journal entires behind for others to find.
My name is Sarah Saunders, and until the collapse, I was just an average student in a community college in some town of less than 10,000 people. There was nothing special about me at all, except that I only struggled with being visually impaired my entire life. Other than that, I was average as can be and studying to be a teacher. I was at school when it happened, when the collapse hit... Most people think it came on over a period of time, but that wasn't the case. It came down all at once, and no one still knows who did it, in the end. The consequences of so many nuclear explosions... of so many bombs of all sorts... has rocked the entire planet, as far as anyone here can tell.
When it happened, I was in the middle of class with others. We felt the explosion rock the campus, blowing out the windows. The power went out before we felt the blast, becasue it was our power plant they had hit with the bomb. It wasn't a highly radiated one, but the debris from it, and the plant, rained down for miles around. The wind carried the heavily polluted air into the smaller towns all around. My parents were working that day, but were home when it hit. Becuase of that... I lose them that day. They were driving home when the cloud came down on them in the car... they ended up driving off of the road, into a tree. When everything else happened, they had to die in one of those ironic sort of scenarios... Completely normal, and so unlike them...
We had been lucky in school, the rooms were built of concrete block, and the windows were barred with heavy shutters to keep the light out of the rooms. THough the windows shattered, the shutters kept the debris, for the most part, out of the rooms. Instead, we moved to the hallway, closing the doors and putting things under them to keep the dust out. I remember the day like it was yesterday. We had no way of knowing what had happened, but in some ways we all knew. Our cell phones were dead, we had no way of finding anything out, except for finding out the time of day, that was all our battery powered phones, now just giant clocks, were good for. I remember the time, it was fifteen minutes after three in the afternoon when we finally looked at our phones.
There were a lot of us, I remember that, but some people had panicked and run when it happened. We finally went outside to look, and everything was covered in dust, windows shattered in cars, and we could see some cars were even turned on their sides from the blast. We thought it had been over then, at that point, we thought that was the last of the destruction, but we were wrong. We heard it before anything else, no one ever saw it, and if they did, they never lived to tell about it. I was one of the lucky ones, I hadn't ventured outside to see, I had looked, but not gone far at all. Then I heard it, the sound of something falling from the sky. There were only a few of us then, the few of us there were, ran and dove in the center of th ebuilding, in the hallway. I don't remember anything after that, no noise, no heat, nothing... But then I woke up, a giant chunk of wall only an inch or so from my head, dust and smaller bits of debris all over me. When I came to, my ears were ringing, my glasses, blessedly, wereunharmed, but I felt as though my entire core had been shaken. I looked around, and it seemed only a couple of us were left, our professor included. One entire room was gone, a car had been lifted up and slammed into the wall, everything in the room had been blown out another window as the car slid through the room and out the opposite wall. The force of the blast... it should've killed us, but somehow it hadn't. It hadn't fallen far from the school at all, but thankfuly it wasn't a nuclear bomb, not the second time... if it had been, I'd be dead. But everything was gone then, the world I knew was gone, and I would later find out the damage and destruction tha thad been caused, on more than just our small town, but all over our country and others... The radiation wasn't going to fall for some time, but when it did, we woudl fall into nuclear winter, already the Earth was feeling the effects of the debris thrown into the atmosphere. The temperature was dropping, evne in our sub-tropical climate. The first week was hazy, evne now in my memory it makes little sense. I don't know how I survived that week, the grief I felt, the fear, the anger, the helplessness... I don't even remember who helped me through it, or how I came around to realize I needed to survive... I couldn't give up...
It's all I knew after that, was that I had to survive... and discover what had happened to the world I loved, the world that had been blown upside down in a single moment...
~S. Saunders
No comments:
Post a Comment