Chapter summary: Boom. Boom-boom-BOOM! Our story starts ...
... after the world ends.
April 21, 2011.
Judgment Day.
It happened.
I don't know how it happened, but suddenly there were reports, everywhere of nuclear attacks and counterstrikes.
I heard that the USA was the first to launch: a massive strike against Russia, China, North Korea and Germany.
Yes: Germany. I guess the old software was never updated.
I couldn't believe it, but I guess something happened somewhere at the top military ... whatever software and it told all the silos in Minnesota and Montana and Arkansas and Greenland of all places to launch, to launch everything, and hit everywhere.
And I guess that's how it happened.
All I know is there was panic everywhere, and the sky was lit up with hot flashes of white that blinded every poor fool who just happened to be looking toward the horizon in that general direction, and then the blackness: the black ash and soot.
And then nothing.
Just panic, and the distant, muted, boom-boom-boom of another strike and then the aftershock of the explosion expanding so fast that it went supersonic, and a bright flash as the whole quarter of the sky lit up with the explosion of where a city used to be and now there was nothing there, I bet: just rubble and ash and death.
Cars were useless: they wouldn't start, and then, the roads and highways were strewn with broken-down cars and debris and ... bodies.
Death was everywhere, and in this pitch black, you couldn't see it until you tripped over it or your car ran over it, making you lose control, and making you watch yourself swerve off the road into a ditch if you were lucky (I was), or headlong into a tree, your head smashed through the windshield, your body already piece-parted for ...
For the carrion to feed on.
I know what Hell looked like: pitch black, black as tar. I know what it smelled like: it smelled sweet, like charred flesh, and rotten, sulfury, like spoilt eggs, and chemically, like tires and wires and wood and steel burning in the nuclear fires that didn't go out.
It was a miracle, a miracle, that I made it back to Middletown High School, and crowded my way into the shelter along with the rest of the mass of humanity who were smart enough to look for shelter and remembered that high schools where supposed to have fallout shelters.
It was a miracle Middletown wasn't a pile of rubble and melted glass. I guess Middletown, Connecticut was just too small a ... 'city' to be considered a target.
But here we were, all stuffed together, me, a whole bunch of high school kids, and maybe their parents, maybe teachers, maybe some other people, like me, who were lucky enough to make it to the shelter.
And no power.
I thought of my husband, Vic (short for 'Richard,' ... don't ask), during this time. He ...
We've been married a year. He was a man of few thoughts and even fewer words. He was in the Army, but that wasn't his passion. Don't get me wrong! He was a patriot, and he loved his country more than anybody else in the world, as far as I knew, and that's why he served, but he wanted to take me, and our little daughter growing in my womb, and buy a farm in the country, I mean the country-country of Connecticut, and raise chickens, and rabbits, and whatever, and have a vegetable garden, and live off the land.
Vic.
I shook my head.
He didn't grow up in the country. He grew up in town, went to school, joined the Army, and managed not to shoot himself nor his troops, and I found that pretty damn amazing, given how clumsy the big lug of a man I fell in love with and married was.
He'd been shipped off to Afghanistan when the strike hit, so I was on my own, driving my car, trying to get to shelter, and bam! thub-thub-thub I was off the road, in a ditch, and couldn't move my car to save my life.
And that's what I had to do. I had to save my life, and the life of the child in my womb, for Vic, when he came back from Afghanistan with his troops, to find me and rescue me, and ...
Who was I fooling? I asked myself.
Tears started to fall from my eyes, and I was glad for the darkness, for a change, so nobody else could see me being weak.
I can't be weak now.
The weak gave up and died. I had to be strong, because nobody else would be strong for me now.
I sniffled and angrily wiped the tears away, blaming hormones, and ... well, the catastrophe of the world's end for my weepy eyes.
A hand unerringly sought my hand and put something soft in it. A hanky, I felt.
I wiped my eyes and blew my nose.
"Thank you," I whispered into the darkness to the person seated next to me on the hard, cold concrete floor.
I blew my nose again and wondered if I should give the hanky back, now messy with my ... well, mess, knowing I shouldn't, but knowing I should, given that everything was precious now, since nothing was certain anymore.
"What's your name?" I asked quietly, conversationally.
We were going to be next to each other for a long time. It made sense to be nice with everybody.
From beyond my neighbor, a boy's voice spoke: "It's Alicia," he said.
I didn't know what to make of that. Was this her boyfriend? Was I being intrusive?
He explained: "She doesn't speak. She never has."
"Oh," I said.
Somehow, knowing this didn't help the situation. I felt more uncomfortable now around this silent stranger who gave me her hanky. I felt around for her hand, grasping it.
Her hand was freezing.
"You poor thing!" I exclaimed, and I pulled her hand up to my mouth, and blew on it. "Are your parents here?" I asked solicitously. "Did you find them?"
And I didn't ask: did they make it?
The boy piped up again for her. "She doesn't have any. She was living with her aunt or something, I don't know," he said, matter-of-factly. He didn't know. It sounded like he didn't really care.
"Oh," I said, again, feeling more embarrassed. I put my arm around her shoulder and pulled her into my side. She was small. Maybe junior high, that would put her at ... twelve? thirteen? fourteen?
That would put her right at an age where she didn't deserve this. She didn't deserve any of this.
I thought less of my own situation and worries as I comforted her.
"It's okay," I whispered to her, then amended quickly: "It's gonna be okay. We're going to make it through this."
A sharp, bitter bark of laughter burst from beyond Alicia. "How?" the boy asked, and added: "ICYMI it's the fucking nuclear apocalypse out there."
My brow furrowed. "'ICYMI'?" I asked perplexed, but angered by his tone and by his cynicism.
"Jesus Christ," he said in a very annoyed tone: "ICYMI: 'in case you missed it.' All you grown-ups are so stupid!"
"Hey!" Another, older, voice piped up in the darkness, a teacher maybe, and scolded the boy to silence.
I had about seven things to say to the young man, but I bit my lip and said none of them.
You don't ... talk to your elders that way. Or, that's how I grew up, anyway.
But it wasn't the boy talking, or it was, but he was a scared child, alone? Did he have his parents to lean on? And the 'fucking nuclear apocalypse' did actually just happen out there, and because I was one of the 'grown-ups' to him, it was all probably my fault, in his mind.
I pulled Alicia into my side more tightly, sheltering her from the hell outside and the cynicism inside ... that is: the hell inside, too, and I thought to her, but did not say, ...
We are going to make it, because ...
And I didn't know the 'because.' I just knew we were going to make it, because the baby in my womb, my husband out somewhere on the other side of the world in the shit, and little Alicia at my side.
People were depending on me to be strong, and if my mother taught me anything, it was to be strong for the people who needed her strength, so they could do what they had to do.
Growing up in rural, dirt-poor Tennessee, you had to do what you had to do, so you had to be strong, all the time.
Me, about to be a mother, in a few short months, now knew this in my very being. We were going to make it, because we had to, and I was going to see this through, and I was never going to give up on the people who needed me.
"My name's Caroline," I whispered to the girl. "Caroline O'Connor."
Caroline O'Connor, née Shinowski. But the girl didn't need to know my maiden name. Middletown was 'little Italy,' and they looked at Irish as barely tolerable, but a Polish girl? A 'dumb Polack,' ... which none of us were, by the way.
She didn't need to know my family history.
But I felt her head snap at my name, anyway. Did she know a 'Caroline'? Was it her mother's name? I wondered.
I pulled her more tightly into my side, showing solidarity, friendship, ... love.
Her arm snaked between the smooth cinderblock wall of the shelter and my back, and she pulled me into her, too, and rested her head on my shoulder. My hand came up, instinctively, protectively, to her cheek.
She was so, so cold.
"God!" I whispered at the unfairness of it all. We hadn't eaten. I didn't know when we would. Where would water come from? Was it day or night? Would we know that ever again, or would the radioactive soot keep us in the black until we all died?
I held onto this girl slumped in the shelter and my other hand rested on my little baby girl in my womb.
What would I do for these girls to make it through this?
What could I do?
I didn't know. But I knew I would do whatever it took.
I fell asleep, wondering and worrying. A woman lost in this fucking nuclear apocalypse.
A/N: This first chapter of this little story from little `phfina is written at the request of one of my readers. The next chapter gets really interesting,
... or at least bloody, anyway.
What? Did you think Skynet was going to just let everybody hang out, all cozy, in their bomb shelters? But it does take her a couple of weeks to troll outside the major cities: Middletown, population under 50 thousand, isn't exactly the bustling epicenter of the East Coast, don't you know!
p.s.: I picked Middletown, CT not because Joss Whedon is a Wesleyan alum, but I bet you didn't know that, didja! ;)