I was a child when it started. Born in the year 2070, so yes, I was seven at the time. I had heard people talking about the war; they had told me how it would eventually kill us all and destroy the world. But there was no possible way I could fathom the scale of the destruction, or the sincerity of their words. After all, I was only a child.
I wasn't alone, I was with my father. My father who told me he would protect me, and keep the monsters away. My father who lied to me, who told me everything would be okay. My father and twenty other people were with me when it started. The doomsday whistles had just started up, and we were headed for the nearest bomb shelter. We didn't run, we walked. I don't know why we didn't run, I guess on the inside we had already conceded to our fate.
I was a child at the time so people didn't often tell me the truth, one of the lies they told me was that when an A-bomb goes off the destruction happens almost instantaneously. But when it happened to me it went so slowly that it felt like hours.
The first thing that hit us was the sound, that part happened fast, almost too fast to even hear it. It was just a big boom, I only heard for a second before my eardrums burst and I went deaf. The second thing to hit us was the light. It was a vicious yellow-green illumination that burrowed into our eyes and boiled our pupil's into raisins. Then the radiation came. Whenever I used to think of hell I always pictured burning, but there was no burning. There was no fire. There was just melting, and disintegration. Everyone's hair just turned into powder and floated away. Their skin turned into liquid and just, splattered everywhere. I'm still not sure what happened to their bones, they were there one second then gone the next.
After that I died. And I just kept seeing it over and over again, not just happening to me and the other people I was with, I saw people dying all over the world. I thought for sure I was in hell, but I was only dreaming.
As a child, I thought that when someone dies, they stayed dead. Maybe that was true before the holocaust; maybe this is all just some bizarre side effect of the radiation. But all I know now is, people don't stay dead. They just fall into a state of inactivity for several days, and then wake up again.
Of course, I'm sure that you don't believe me. But the simple fact of the matter is that it doesn't matter whether you believe me or not, because it doesn't make it any less true. I know it's true, because I've experienced it firsthand. I was a child when it started, but by the time it was over I was a man. I awoke from death along with twenty one other people three days after the bombs dropped, and once we realized what had happened knew what we had to do.
Mankind's covetous nature and lust for power had already murdered the planet. A world where the very same men hold immortality exists beyond the most heinous limits of imagination. Death, though tragic, plays an instrumental role in human society. Fear of death keeps man's venturesome disposition in check, and death itself regulates the population, not to mention that it washes away the worst in humanity. Were people to discover that they could no longer die, the world would never rebuild itself. We knew that we must work together to contain this secret in order to protect humanity from itself.
How do we do it? Just because we can't keep people dead doesn't mean we can't keep them in captivity. The idea is to find the bodies of the temporarily deceased and bury them in air tight coffins before they have the chance to wake back up. We have spies everywhere, following particularly violent people around to collect their handiwork. We also get a lot of help surveying the wastelands from the enclave, who fortunately shared our view of the situation.
It's not enjoyable, playing the part of the grim reaper, but it must be doe by someone. Every day I grow more and more fond of what President Eden said to me when we first met, "We must live, so others can die.".
But please, don't take this as an invitation to try and cheat death. If you are 'killed' we will find you, and make sure you stay that way. So enjoy the time you have while you are 'alive'. Take the time to appreciate what you have…and try not to think about what awaits you upon your 'death'. And if you still don't believe my tale, then the next chance you get why don't you go down to a nearby graveyard and put your ear against the ground. You just might hear the screaming.