Welcome to the Fallout

This one isn't belonging, which is always good (although, if I twisted it....) It's actually quite similar to the belonging scenario I've been working with for exams, but came from the idea of nuclear apocalypse (yeah, real original Tansy), the idea of being alone and finally, of owing someone an unspeakable debt. The title comes  from a Switchfoot song.

Welcome to the Fallout

So this is what it feels like to be truly alone.

I should probably savour the few minutes I have left, feeling some sort of pride, or satisfaction that I had outlasted the rest.

Instead, it’s only grief.

I hadn’t known Jordan well, but in the last few days we’d spend together, almost certain that we were the last people left, I felt like I knew every thought he had – probably because I shared each one. It was sad to see him go. I’d almost felt a tear welling up in throat, but I’d cried all I had when Phoebe died. Seeing the last bit of life seep out of her eleven year old body had been too much. I swore that nothing could be worse than that.

Except maybe this.

No one knows why we survived to the last – technically, I suppose, we didn’t know, and as the only people left alive, no one else could offer their opinion. Jordan said that we’d gotten some sort of vaccine before the panic set in, when they’d tried to immunise students against the Fallout. Too many batches of the vaccine had already been tainted though, and it ended up doing more harm than good, bringing about the events which led to panic.

Irony. That’s what it was called.

The Placebo didn’t work for very long either. When news of the Fallout was just starting to break, the 

government had assured us that they’d saved the water, that it was safe to drink. They told us that taking the pills would keep us healthy until we could be taken somewhere else. We’d all believed them so blindly that we’d tricked our bodies into believing it too, holding back the illness until it manifested, horribly, in thick swellings and ugly growths. Placebo can hold back a headache; it was no match for the cancers.

I’d been able to talk to Jordan. He’d been around my age and had somehow escaped the Fallout not just with his life, but a sense of humour. He was a breath of fresh air in this stagnant, toxic environment. We could be philosophical, funny or just plain stupid – it was just a relief that the only other person alive wasn’t a raving lunatic. I supposed he could have been, and I was just too mad to notice. I don’t think self analysis counts for much in psychology, but I think I’m sane.

We’d camped out in the old bunker, surviving on the contents of tins long past their expiration date, wrapped in multiple old sleeping bags, just talking. After so long of solitude, and fear of making any connections lest they be severed too soon, it felt… normal. Like we weren’t both dying. Like we were just two people, getting to know each other, without the risk of radiation sickness or rouge cannibals (although they’d mostly died out) or impending doom.

Like one of us wasn’t going to have to bury the other.

Buried. That’s what he’d said. He wanted to be buried.

“If I’m this sick I want the earth to get sick too.”

He’d said it as a joke but I knew it was really a command – if he died before me, he would be buried.

So, with these last minutes of my life, each breath becoming heavier as the thick cancerous lump presses at my oesophagus, that’s what I’ll do.

There’s a shovel in the bunker and Jordan was still wrapped in a sleeping bag when he’d taken his last breath, so I can drag him. I don’t have the strength to carry him. Decency is long gone.

I can’t bury him in the yard though. Feeling my minutes tick by slowly, I drag the bag to the gate and open in onto a street in broken shady suburbia. The trees are sick too – they feel the Fallout, just like us.

There’s a little park across the road. I don’t bother looking for traffic – the lump seems to be expanding every second, making it harder and harder to inhale. I’ve got less time than I thought.

There’s a lake in the park. Years ago, I would have called it kitch and tiki-taki, but right now, with the sun setting through thick smog in a deep red, it’s breath-taking. The only place.

I summon the last of my strength to dig a shallow grave. It’s definitely not six feet, but no one cares any more. I feel like I’m burying Phoebe to give her a mermaid tail at the beach on a summer afternoon – my body gets hotter and hotter and my breaths get shorter and shorter. The shallow ditch hardly fits the body, but I do him the dignity of taking him out of the sleeping bag. If he’s going to poison the earth, I’m not waiting for the polyester to decompose.

I collapse next to the lump of earth, feeling an even bigger lump in my throat. Is it the thyroid cancer? Or is it emotion? Are the tears in my eyes for Jordan, Phoebe, the whole of humanity… or just myself, alone in the world, the end of humanity.

I wonder if, in the future, another civilisation will rise from our poisonous ashes. Will they find us, beneath their feet? Will we become an archaeological dig, catalogued and classed from our mass grave of millions? Will they know that I was the last person alive, or will I just be tossed into a pile of bones in a greedy dig for oil?

In my final moments, with my last, choking breathes, I sob. Just twice. Then my throat seems to close over and my body stops mid breath – all I manage is a barely audible cry before the dancing black worms of my vision eat away my soul.

……so this is how the world ends……..

………not with a bang………..

………..but a whimper………