I hid my composition notebook in my bag, along with the tapes that belonged to Dylan. I wrapped them in dirty radiated socks. I had a feeling that the soldiers would freak out when they saw the camera. They wouldn’t look. I hoped they wouldn’t look. They would confiscate them and my composition notebook over my dead body. I could just imagine all the black marks. They would have sanitized, classified, redacted, all meaning the same thing—erased. There wouldn’t be anything left. Though it would have been hard for them to put a black mark over the state of Arkansas.
We asked what happened. All they said was, “We can neither confirm nor deny.” We asked them if we all could have a mask. A soldier said, “You don’t need them.”
“Well, give me yours, then, if we don’t need them,” Freddy said.
But the soldier wouldn’t.
Two soldiers took Rodney’s body away. They wrapped it in a white tarp. His hand was sticking out. We didn’t have to ask where they were taking it. We saw. A huge dump truck. It was full of bodies.
“How to dig your own grave in three easy steps,” Max said.
We laughed. We shouldn’t have. But everything was just so surreal.
“Gallows humor indeed,” Mr. Edman said.
We stood in a circle, being doused with water from a truck. It was cold but kind of comforting. It had been a while since we had felt the touch of water on our bodies.
“Undress,” a soldier said.
“What happened?” Terrence asked.
“Classified.”
“Bullshit,” I said, then screamed.
We started to undress. There were no partitions. We left our underwear on.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Texas,” the soldier said.
“Texas? Why did they bring in Texas?” Terrence asked.
“Well, those there are from Oklahoma, and those over there are from Kansas, and those back there are from New Mexico. So we’re not all from Texas.”
“You can’t tell us what happened at all?” I asked. “We are the ones who lived through it.”
“We have a Polaroid of a mushroom cloud,” Max said, and I gave him a death glare.
The soldier kept on doing his job, but the word mushroom did get him to lower his guard a little while a superior of his came and took away my bag
“We nuked ourselves,” the soldier whispered.
“We did what to ourselves?” I asked.
“It was an accident.” That was all he said.
Dylan and the director looked at each other like they were speaking telepathically. Lots of shaking of heads and nodding.
Bombs accidentally being dropped on our soil? Not that it’d be any less tragic to bomb someone else, of course, but it was so much more embarrassing to have done it to ourselves. Now everything that my dad wrote in that letter that was redacted made sense. It was a warning.
“Is the base still in Little Rock?” I asked the soldier.
At first I thought he was confused by my question, but then he shook his head.
Terrence walked through the puddles and mud and hugged me.
I got dizzy. The thought of no one surviving was logical, but it didn’t mean that it was believable. Mom, Dennis, and Dad—gone? Granny, Pops, Ms. Wilcox, all my teachers, and Kevin, Chuck, Kathy, and Dana too? My knees buckled and I slowly dropped to my knees. The soldier grabbed one of my arms and Terrence grabbed the other, but still my butt touched the radiated ground. My eyes closed.
I didn’t remember anything after that.
I came to in the back of an ambulance with an oxygen mask on my face and an IV in my arm. I looked to my left and saw Terrence staring at me. He had an IV in his arm too.
“Fluids,” he said, lifting his arm. “You okay?” he asked.
I nodded, taking off the oxygen mask and laying it beside me. “Is it true?” I asked. “I mean, our parents—are they really dead?”
“Yes,” he whispered, nodding. “There are not a lot of survivors.”
I wanted to cry. I was supposed to cry. But I couldn’t. I was still in shock. I sat up on the gurney and stared at him.
“We’re the only family we’ve got now,” Terrence said, taking my hand, tears running down his cheeks.
When I saw him cry I started to cry.
Freddy, Max, Astrid, Dylan, Mr. Edman, and the bus driver filed into the ambulance and sat beside Terrence and me on the two gurneys.
“Through all the darkness and tribulations, the hopelessness and lack of remorse—the trumpeting sound of the apocalypse that fills throughout the heavens, remember… we as a race will persevere. We will find a way, a way to make things worse. We will persevere,” I said.
“Is that from another one of your comic books?” Astrid asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s kind of comforting.”
I think that was when we all realized that all of us, at least the ones who lived here, probably didn’t have any family left.
“Do we seriously want to survive this? Like, seriously?” Astrid asked, shaking.
It didn’t matter if we wanted to or not. We did, at least for a moment, but we were in a Mad Max wasteland now.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Well, haven’t you seen Planet of the Apes?”[78] Max said. “Exactly like that.”
“Honestly,” she said, slapping Max on the arm.
“You finally, really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you! God damn you all to hell!” Freddy said, raising a fist in the air.
“Nice,” Terrence said, nodding.
“I thought we needed a great closing line for a movie that we didn’t get to finish.”
“Oh, we’ll finish it,” said the director. “If it’s the last thing I do.”
Eve of Destruction was just a movie about average people going about their day as usual until the unthinkable happened on the day they accidentally nuked Arkansas.
-
The best they could do was to hope that the apocalypse and post-apocalypse wouldn’t be as bad as anyone imagined. But if they were, the human race would adapt—as it always had—and survive.
-
And with a big, loud bang, everything is gone. A bright white light flashes over the landscape of Griffin City. A mushroom cloud fills up the atmosphere. A firestorm sweeps across the land. Buildings explode, burn, and crumble. People are vaporized—their skin melts and their skeleton disintegrates into dust. After, there are human monsters, scarred with radiation burns and charred skin. As time passes, people lose their hair. Blackened bodies litter the rubble where buildings once stood. Animal carcasses flood farms. A white ash covers every inch of the city. Society crumbles much like the concrete and steel. Vandalism and murder are the norm. There is no electrical power; medical care, food, and water are almost nonexistent. But Destiny got lucky, as she was locked in the cellar below Old Barnaby’s Farm with a few of her friends.
For seven days Destiny and her new ragtag group of mutants lived, argued, and tried to survive. But not everyone made it out alive. Fallout was too strong for some immune systems. And the one shining light in the cellar, the one who was nice to everyone, the one who had a wicked layup, was found drooling blood. Rodney died in Destiny’s arms. A single tear rolled down her cheek as Rodney’s body shook from the radioactive particles as they took hold in his bloodstream. Sadly, he didn’t get his mutant powers.
Destiny knew that Rodney would not die in vain. She would make it her life’s mission to avenge his death. Though she wouldn’t know the extent of her powers until she was called to save the city from unknown forces that seek to destroy what is left. She is a mutated child of a new revolution called to protect the future—and the future is now.
78
A 1968 science fiction film directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and starring Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Maurice Evans, Kim Hunter, James Whitmore, James Daly, and Linda Harrison. Astronauts wake up from a deep hibernation and discover that it’s no longer 1972 but instead the year 3978—and they haven’t aged a day, well, except for Stewart. She’s dead and decayed due to a crack in her sleep pod. The remaining crew departs the spaceship and wanders around the planet where they crash landed, encountering talking apes and humans being imprisoned. At the end they discover that the strange planet was home all along. Damn y’all to hell!