The Word After

I was ten when the world collapsed, the world's government went to war, each showing how powerful they were. Eventually it all led to a nuclear disaster, the world burned and crumbled while the people who caused it, watched it all from bunkers. The last thing I remember about being eleven years old was the taste of an orange. It was sweet, sticky, and vibrant a sensory overload that my mind has looped for the last eleven years like a scratched record.

My dad was laughing, his hands oil-stained from the old truck he was tinkering with in the driveway. Alec, his best friend from the army, someone he looked at more like a son. My dad was in his forties and Alec was just twenty one. My mom was in the kitchen preparing lunch along with Viola, Alec's girlfriend. It was an ordinary Tuesday.

Then, the sirens started.

They weren't the rising and falling wail of a passing ambulance. This was a low, guttural vibration that seemed to come from the earth itself. It was the sound of a world realizing its time was up.

"Alec," my father said. His voice dropped an octave, losing all its warmth. "The protocol."

"It's just a test, Ben,"Alec replied, though his face had gone the color of ash. "It has to be a test."

Then the horizon blinked.

It wasn't a flash; it was an erasure. A silent, blinding white bloom swallowed the mountains to the West. For five seconds, the world was a negative photograph. Then came the heat, a dry, searing wave that shattered our windows in a single, synchronized scream of glass.

"Aria! Down!" Dad roared.

He didn't grab me. He shoved me toward Alec. It was a choice made in a millisecond a brutal calculation of distance. Alec was closer to the heavy storm bunker doors in the backyard.

"Take her! Go!"

The ground began to heave. The sound finally arrived a roar so loud it became a physical assault. Alec snatched me off my feet. I caught one last glimpse of my father, he was standing, staring into the white fire, his hand raised as if to shield me one last time.

Then the cellar doors slammed shut, and my world went black.

For the first three days, the bunker hummed with the sound of me sobbing and the muffled, rhythmic thumping from above. I sat on a crate of dehydrated milk, clutching a stuffed rabbit that was missing an eye. Alec tried to comfort me the best he could, but he was as shaken up as I was.

One month after he put me in a respirator and wrapped my face with a wet towel and he opened the storm hatch door. I heard many horrific things that day but I never saw it. He carried me for what seemed like hours. I eventually hears the slam of a metal door and he then unwrapped my face.

We were in a bunker, one that seemed like a home under ground.

"When can we see Mom and Dad?" I asked on the fourth day.

Alec didn't look at me. He was staring at the surveillance system. His knuckles were white. "We can't, Aria. The air it's different now. And the people they aren't people anymore. Your Mom and Dad are somewhere safe waiting for us"

I didn't know then that the radiation hadn't just killed; it had rotted the mind while keeping the nerves screaming. The fallout didn't just bring winter; it brought a sickness that turned the survivors into something hollow.

I stopped asking to go out the night we heard the scratching on the hatch. It wasn't the sound of an animal. It was a rhythmic, mindless scraping of fingernails against steel. Then came the moaning a sound of eternal, starving agony.

Through the cameras, Alec saw them. They looked like humans, but their skin was the color of wet slate, sloughing off in the heat. They didn't breathe; they just wandered through the radioactive fog, guided by the scent of anything still warm. Alec called them The Hollows.

"The bombs didn't finish them," Alec whispered that night, locking the secondary bolts. "The rot did."

"Are Mom and Dad like that as well" I asked scared of the response i might get.

"No princess, there somewhere safe. Probably back at the military base waiting for the air to be safe so they can come and get us" he responded squeezing my cheek.

For the first month I couldn't be alone for even a second, Alec constantly monitored me making sure I didn't attempt to open the hatch to try and find my parents. A year later when the system signaled that the air was clean enough to breathe for a short period of time, Alec left the bunker to search what was left of my house. He told me he was looking for clues my parents might have left about their whereabouts but I knew he was searching for their remains.

When he came back he said he didn't find any clues, I knew he was lying. My parents remains were back there. "What about Viola?" I asked

"She probably went with your parents somewhere safe" he responded

"Do you miss her" I questioned further. "I do, I miss all of them, but all I have right now is you. Thats all I need to help me pull through" he stated with a forced smile.

I didn't question him any further, but I knew he was hiding something from me. I kept telling myself he was just trying to protect me from the dangers of the now ruined world. Alec was all I have left and I was grateful I had at least that.

Alec took care of me, tending to my every need. Every night when I woke up screaming he was there to hold me. I was only an eleven year old girl that had lost her parents and he was a twenty-one year old man that had lost everything he knew.