My grandfather was one of those people who worried about the Russians nuking us back in the early days. Around the time of the Cuban missile crises, he bought land out away from any major city. It truly was in the back of beyond.
Now grandpa made a lot of money working for a major airline contractor. He used that money to build the house I grew up in. Though to call it a house is like calling a wolf a lap dog. He built a bunker in every sense of the word. The house was built to survive a near miss from a nuke, or at least as well as anything above ground can.
Concrete walls four-foot thick, military grade blast windows, Solid steel doors, I swear to God, five inches thick. The roof was a dirt bank that over hung the top of the house. It was meant to give protection from fall out.
And that was just the above ground part. Once you go threw a hidden door you would find a door not out of place in a bank vault.
Grandpa served in Europe after WW2 he patterned the rest of the house after German bunkers he saw over there. The concrete walls were laced with metal. Walls, ceiling, floor all had it. Grandma thought her husband was insane. Then the Russians detonated that monster nuke in Siberia just to show they could. After that she gave him her full support.
Well those bombers never flew from Russia. His friends laughed at him for all the money he had wasted.
Then came the long years of the cold war. With tensions rising higher every year. My Dad grew up through that. If Grandpa had been afraid of the Russians, Dad was absolutely terrified of them. He expanded and added storage rooms for huge supplies of food, water, and place to grow plants underground. He also added an inner bunker.
I don't know how they got it down there, but somehow he and grandpa put a truly massive foot thick steel door on this inner bunker. A canon couldn't punch threw the thing!
All of this maybe while Mom and I are still alive.
It started in the winter of 2011. We had all been hearing about the Mayan prophecies, Nostradamus, Web Bot you name it. Every thing said the world was coming to an end.
But I had grown up listening to that shit.
"Oh we'll never see 1996, world come to an end before then. Nope we'll never see 1999! Year 2000 that's it, Y2K, worlds coming to an end."
Well we passed those dates and others. Dad kept the food in the bunker replaced ever few years of so. I've probably eaten more MRE meals than some solders with twenty plus years in.
Just after the New Year 2012 the tornadoes started. The south got hit, then the Midwest. Then by mid spring it was stranger places. California, New York state, Chicago got hit twice for gods sake. Alaska? Who the hell ever heard of a tornado in Alaska!
Hurricane season started around Easter. By June they were running out of names. I saw the footage from Cuba when it got pounded by a Cat5. Then Haiti, still rebuilding from an earthquake just a few years earlier, got hammered! Then Mexico and south Texas took the last of it.
And that was just the first monster. By mid summer we had five Katrina size hurricanes hit the US coast. From Texas all the way to Maine no shoreline was completely undamaged.
The pictures! New York under 20 feet of water, Miami...fuck just gone!
Then there was looting of course. Mostly just people trying to survive. Course some people seem to think they need ten flat screen TVs to survive.
There were riots in several cities. Riots over food and water, over police shooting looters, over why no one was doing anything.
All on an election year. I think that more than anything lit the fire under the government's ass. I'll give it to them they did try.
The word from the rest of the world was if anything worse. Earthquakes every where, Storms, hell they had a blizzard in Africa!
As governments stumbled their militaries took control. All over the world counties came under marshal law. Then in many places the 'Fanatics' over threw the military.
We watched the news in horror as footage of the first nuke sense World War Two got used in war. The death toll was enormous.
It wouldn't be the only one to fly, as little nations screamed and religious idiots yelled 'Jihad' from every temple.
I don't know when the count passed a million dead. Ten million? All I know is when Yellowstone went up in August such little numbers became meaningless.
We felt the tremors even in our concrete world.
Mom, Dad, my baby sister, fifteen years younger than me. Her world was going to hell before she had even seen it.
Our surveillance cameras showed the first looters, refugees, survivors, what ever you want to call them. They broke into the house up stairs. They used a truck to ram the door to the garage.
They were pathetic wretches. Hacking volcanic ash from damaged lungs. Two men and a woman. They were looking for food. We had left nothing up there of course. They never found the hidden door in the back of the house. They wouldn't have been able to open the three-foot thick slab of lead and steel anyway.
Mom had cried seeing them. She wanted to help them.
I don't think Dad would have opened that door for his best friend in the world.
It was strange watching the monitors, like watching TV, but with no sound. They lived in our house for a week or so. They slept in our beds. Never did learn their names.
A second group came through about the middle of the second week they had been there. All men. All armed.
They gunned down both of the men. Then Dad turned off the view screen and made us all leave. I think he alone watched as they raped the woman to death.
Then they ate the bodies.
He called me in and showed me that part. Mom could never know the use some of her old cookware had been put to.
There was no food upstairs and even as strong a place as it was upstairs they didn't stay long.
Dad told me they killed one of their own and ate him just before they left.
After that maybe one or two others just wandered threw. Never stopping for more than a night.
After October even that stopped.
November rolled around. That's when Dad got sick.
We don't know what he had, but nothing seemed to help. He died on Thanksgiving Day.
Mom and I wrapped his body. I checked the radiation gauges. They had spiked once or twice back during the summer, but nothing much since then.
When we cracked open the big door the air stank. Smoke, sulfur stench, like rotting eggs.
We carried Dad outside. I couldn't even recognize our yard. None of the trees were still standing, most were burned stumps.
It was bitter cold. With Mom holding the gun and watching I tried to dig him a grave. The ground was as hard as stone. The soil tilled in the spring for our family garden was to frozen to dig into.
We used rocks from the garden wall to build him a cairn. We worked as quickly as we could.
We were terrified.
The sky!
It looked like heat lightning and northern lights mixed in a black thundercloud.
Every thing was covered in a thick layer of ash, like gray snow. It covered us by the time we were finished. Not wanting to take it back inside with us I made Mom strip and then myself. That I saw a woman in bra and panties for the first time, and that she was wearing a respirator seemed fitting for this world.
That she was my Mom was the weird part.
As November fade into December we began to feel trimmers ever so often. Soon concrete dust cover every thing in the bunker. Mom kept it dusted off with a fanatic edge to her cleaning.
I took to sleeping next to Mom. She would be curled up around my sister and I would hold them both.
Clocks had no meaning now. Why bother when there is no sun to tell the time by. It was buried under hellish clouds. Day was night, night was day.
