Decimation - Week of 4/16/18

This is by no means a complete work, more of a short story, but I'm hoping this will give me a bit more of an audience.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The air shifted, warped in front of our eyes and dissipated like a cloud of smoke before we could even blink. The familiar lurching sensation in my stomach returned full force. It made me glad our supplies ran low and we hadn’t eaten in a couple days, vomiting seemingly out of nowhere as we returned to the living world would certainly seem suspicious.

I suppose I should start at the beginning, but that was really the end. It was commonplace anymore for people to gossip about doomsday scenarios: antibiotic resistant bacterias, chemical warfare, radical politics (don’t get anyone started on terrorism…); the list goes on endlessly. “Just waitin’ for the bombs to drop,” people liked to say. Well, no one suspected our own planet would be the one to do us in.

I take that back, plenty of people suspected it, plenty of people warned us. But all of the potential catastrophes made everyone numb to the idea, and they quickly became faux pas the way a scientific term slowly becomes slang or insult. The world had decided to reset itself, and as a result all of our nuclear caches and stockpiles decided that would be the perfect time for fission. The world reset and took as much of the human stain with it as it could. We had no one to blame but ourselves.

Then there was the four of us. I didn’t know any of their names, had never thought to ask. It didn’t seem terribly important, not when survival was the priority. We had all crowded into a broom closet as the shockwaves of multiple detonations destroyed everything around us, the dust pans and cleaning chemicals rattling on their shelves. For whatever reason this room was built like a bunker, and the crashing support beams, crumbling walls, and screams of thousands of lives being lost never made it to us. Even the door was an oddity, being far heavier than it any right to be. The fiery hell outside clawed, scraped, and rampaged, but it couldn’t so much as peek into our shelter. This all seems strange in retrospect, coincidental even, but in our panic we just called ourselves “lucky”.

After the carnage wore down, we finally scraped together what courage we had left and pried the door open. It wasn’t the same place we had left behind. The ground had become a twisted amalgamation of steel, concrete, plastics, and what I can only imagine was melted flesh (based purely on the smell). The mall we were in was gone, the once bright blue skylights were now just sickly yellow-brown sky. We could see for miles, but it was all the same: decimation.

One of us vomited almost immediately. I can’t remember if it was me. I do remember feeling sick, and very confused. The shock still hadn’t set in, the adrenaline of a near confrontation with death still trembled through me. Or maybe that was the shock. We stood gaping, none of us could speak, as though our language had died with everything else. The transformation was so sudden and so complete that not even a shred of flora remained, bits of plastic were still on fire or smoldering, as were pieces of fabric that had fused with the metal and glass.

The world, our world, was dead.

                  Again.

It was our fifth time returning now.