#23 Lawrence Woods – Recorder

This is the first time that I’ve actually sat down and started to write this all out. I don’t really know why I’m doing this, but Rachel and others seem to think that it will be important for those who come after us.

“Those who come after us.” How ridiculous. There aren’t any more. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada. The entire human race has been reduced down to sixteen men and women cowering in a concrete bunker on the edge of a nuclear wasteland. No food, no water, no medicine and no hope. Ten thousand years of existence and it will end here, and in the not too distant future.

But if this letter will make them feel more comfortable about the end, then I’ll do it. It’s such a small thing, and at this point small things are the only things that we have left.

No one knows who or what started it. Some people think it was one of the nuclear powers, finally getting sick and tired of sitting on their multi-billion dollar arsenals. Other claimed that it was an insurgent power. I think that it was just a stupid engineering mistake, an egghead forgetting to carry the two and creating a time bomb instead of a missile.

But we do know that the first bomb blast set off the next blast, which continued with the next one and the one after that. The countries that weren’t being hit by their own missiles were being blasted by reprisals from the countries that were.

By the time the mushroom clouds had settled, most of the Earth was a desert wasteland. But unlike in the movies, there was no mutation to allow us to survive. We didn’t have vaults of paranoid survivalists, protected from radiation and rich with the resources to rebuild. The land was poison. The air was toxic. The water was death. Nothing could live. Everything died.

Everyone except for us. Here in our cozy little bunker, eating though our rations of canned meat and dehydrated vegetables. I suppose that there could be other redoubts out there that were spared from the blast. But they would be in the same straights as us. Low on supplies and no chance of new sources.

All we can do is sit here and wait for the end to come. And I will write until the end.

Category: 2011, Horror, Scifi