BELLA

Isn't it strange how disconnected I feel?

As if I'm not here. As if this is happening to someone else. As if I'm watching another nuclear war video in Mr. Banner's AP physics class. Watching the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in history class. Not here. Not now.

I've always thought of the end of the world coming at some distant point. Affecting my grandchildren. My grandchildren's grandchildren. Not me.

I wonder, coldly, disconnectedly, where the bomb came from. We knew Iran had been hostile. The media had played up its supposed weapons since 9/11. Yet I had always doubted it. Renee had said haughtily that if they bombed us, they had the right to.

When the nuclear attack warning had been issued after first period, the speculation had immediately exploded into panicked assumptions in locked classrooms. Everyone was shocked. Everyone was horrified.

And now it's happened. We knew it could happened. We knew it was, actually, likely; due to the nuclear weaponry that had infiltrated the black market after the disbanding of the Soviet Union.

We had hoped, though.

When it happened, I saw a flash. A bright, white, flash that sears my eyes with stripes of blazing nothingness. Just half a second. And it's gone. I know what this is. Flash blindness. We all know everything there is about nuclear bombs and the effects. We were prepared.

Except. Not.

I've fallen against the wall. I feel the window of the cafeteria shatter against my weight. The shards of glass pierce into my back. I can't see. All there is is white.

It's over. I'd dead. Right?

I slide farther down the window. I feel a cold wind rush and slap my chilled cheek. A rushing noise fills my ears.

I open my mouth, and let out a slight moan. Slump back farther over the windowsill. All there is is white. White. White that is tightening around me, pressing at my lungs, searing at my eyes.

And all around me, there is silence. None of the chatter of my classmates. No Mr. Banner, walking around, checking if we're okay.

Just a second. That was all it took. Mrs. Cope had been talking on the announcements, my dulled mind remembered. "Please stay in the cafeteria or gym, in the bomb alert position. It may happen any moment now. Stay calm. Stay--"

Then her voice had been cut off by whiteness. By nothing.

And now--in just a second, it's all gone. Everything. Everyone.

I am gone as well.

-

EDWARD

My pants are on fire.

I chuckle. How ironically fucked up.

How can I be laughing at a time like this? I'm in a cafeteria that's prickling with electricity from the recent nuclear attack, the ceiling looks like its just about to crash down, everyone around me is dead. Tanya, my girlfriend, had been perching on the side of the cafeteria table, and now she's sprawled over the top of it in her tight cheerleader outfit and short skirt, her eyes wide open and blank. Somehow I can't think of her as my girlfriend, as a slut, who I'd been cheating on with her best friend Irina. Somehow I can't.

My gaze moves on, stunned and disbelieving, at the rest of my friends. Faces frozen forever in laughing gazes. All dead. God. We really fucked this world up, didn't we?

And my pants are on fire. Sometimes, when Tanya and I had broke apart from our make out sessions from the back of the room in Banner's classroom, I'd heard some of his cautionary rants in the event of a nuclear, which had grown more and more often and real this past year. I remember something about fires getting started as an aftereffect from the disturbances caused by the fission or fusion or whichever it was. I glance around. The air is hazy and yellow. I should get out of here.

The flare of yellow-white that had ignited on the tips of my jeans now spread up, so that I cry out in pain where it touches my skin. It's suddenly real, and as a reflex my hands hurriedly yank the jeans down and step out of them.

I'm in my boxers. My fucking boxers.

Oh, what the hell? No one's going to be seeing me, are they? They're all dead.

Oh, God.

How can this be happening? I can't believe it. All of them, gone. Jasper, my best friend. I don't see his face--had he been at lunch that day? I don't remember. My eyes unconsciously go over the faces, recognizing all the people. People I'd talked to, laughed with. Girls I'd made out with or fucked. People in my classes, whose conversations I'd overheard, and therefore known their names.

I yank my eyes away. No. No.

How come I'm alive? How come the radioactive disturbances didn't kill me too? I don't understand. Is this supposed to be that bolt of lightning that Catholic priest Elizabeth--Mom--kept jabbering with on the phone with was always bringing up? Killing the sinners and bringing the shining white virgins up to Heaven?

Why I have I survived?

I can't stay in here. Not just because of the fact this whole place seems about to go up in flames. Not because of the fact I can barely breath, and the air is frizzling with static.

I can't stay with all these dead people.

I make my way around the table. Tanya, even in death, baring her pierced belly button below the cami/tank top that barely comes down past her boobs. I can see the tattoo on her hip, the one that says Edward. I have a matching one on my bicep. "Tanya" it says. And now the namesake is gone.

Do I care? I don't know.

Now that I've left the table, I move through the cafeteria, quickly now. Not glancing down or side to side. Just staring straight ahead. Keep your head on, Edward. Don't think this shit.

It's fucking weird to have the cafeteria this silent. Don't remember a time when I've been here, and it hasn't been exploding with chatter, laughter, and gossip.

I'm almost at the door, and I'm almost running now. Some guy who had been slumped over the cafeteria table now slips sideways as I pass and drops onto the floor. He has blond hair. Like Jasper. I only see him in my peripheral vision, and then I'm moving on. Shit. Am I crying? No, I can't be crying. Shit shit shit shit no this can't be happening no I never thought this could happen what the fuck who am I how can I have lived my life like this shit shit shit Jasper can't be dead, he's my best friend, everyone's dead, why am I the only one left alive, shit no, God, how can you let this happen, how can this happen, no.

I can't see now. My eyes are blurry. Who the hell cares if I'm crying? Who's going to judge me?

I'd known Jasper for six years. Since I was in seventh grade. We've done everything together, gone on double dates, covered on each other. He knew all about Irina, and didn't let Tanya know. I knew about his addiction to ecstasy and did my best to help him through it. He was always one you could count on to laugh at my lame jokes, but when I needed seriousness, I knew he knew exactly what I was feeling.

How can he be gone? Just in one fucking second?

I'm stumbling. Tripping. I grab hold at the wall next to me. My fingers slide over the cool, smooth tiles. I'm slamming against the wall. I don't feel anything.

And then.

I hear a moan from beside me. A silent, almost-gone groan, but it's there.

I turn.

It's a girl. I think she's in one of my classes. Correction. She was in one of my classes. I'm not going to have any more classes now.

Her long, perhaps waist-length, caramel brown hair has fallen over her face, and she's leaning against a splintered and cracked window. Did it break as she fell against it?

She seems to be unconscious. But she's breathing.

I take her delicate body in my arms, and hook her over my back. She weighs probably a hundred, a hundred and ten points, but I can handle it.

My breath lets out. Somehow, the air seems cleaner, easier to breath, as I make my way out the door to the outside of the school.

I'm not the last person left alive.

The words confuse me as they go through my head. Did the bomb affect just this school? Will authorities be here any minute? Is everywhere else fine, and this school--or, at worst, this district--just the victim of a random brutality, another 9/11?

But.

We know how much the weapons have progressed since the cold war. The U.S., I know, has developed a thermal nucleic bomb that could blow up the Earth's atmosphere and destroy the entire planet. Do other countries have that? I don't know.

But if they--they being Iran? The terrorists hiding somewhere in Sudan? I don't know--were to bomb us, I know they could wipe out our entire country.

I've seen the media. I've seen the threats. And I know the president--the president I voted for. I know he would retaliate. Extinguish the country responsible.

In a matter of seconds, World War III has been started.

And it may already be over.

Because how can you have a fucking world war without a world?

Fucked up that it may have been, I'd rather have the world that we had than none.