Silence in D6

by Pollardinator

The diary of a Russian soldier before and during the nuclear war of 2013. With the world outside ready for all-out war Major Videnski finds his unit posted to the top secret bunker D6. But as cabin fever and fascism take hold and the bodies begin to pile up,the major is forced to endure a horrific experience with the bunker descending into insanity as the surface is turned to ash.

14. 5th July 2013

5th July 2013

They did it.

The bastards actually did it.

They unleashed nuclear fire upon the world, and it burnt like hell. I was in the communications room with Dakker and some of the radio staff when the news came crackling through in the morning. When the man on the other end, sobbing like an infant in his last minutes on Earth, just kept repeating one word, which seemed to echo in the silence of the radio room.

Armageddon.

I remember the stillness and quiet across the whole base, how the corridors were filled with soldiers, trained killers, crouched on the concrete, tears in their eyes. As I came into the command centre the room was dark, the only light the huge main screen, the entire command staff, Delov, Antonov, even the Spetnatz commander, watching in horror the scene unfolding.

It was a news bulletin, out on the streets of Moscow far above us, the reporter running down the street in a vast crowd, men, women and children, stampeding on as air raid sirens howled into the morning light. It was sheer madness, people slamming into each other, cars just ploughing into the crowd, their drivers smashing their heads on horns in complete unbridled anger and sorrow.

The camera was shaking as people shoved past, and the reporter was screaming into his microphone, his voice almost lost in the terrified shouts of the crowd around him.

"Get to the Metro!" he kept shouting, over and over, tears streaming down his face. He kept running, and up ahead we could see the towering form of the Metro entrance, its marble edifice seeming to be tantalisingly close to the screaming crowd.

And people were getting inside, soldiers opening the huge iron doors to them, the mob running inside. But then, as the cameraman and reporter came closer, a shout roared overhead, along with a single gunshot. The hope in the reporter's eyes died.

Up ahead the doors were closing, and yet the crowd still hurried forward, roars of anger at the soldiers seeming to block their path.

It was when I saw those soldiers raise their rifles to the crowd that I looked away, trying to ignore the roar of gunfire, and the dying screams of the people being slaughtered.

I forced myself to look, to see the reporter take a bullet to the head and fall to the concrete to be trampled, the camera fall to the ground and point upwards, to the rockets beginning to descend downwards in a plume of smoke.

"Shut it off." Antonov said softly, and then started to bellow at the technicians." Shut it down! Turn it off!"

Captain Delov glanced at me as we watched Antonov fall to his knees, face crumpled up in pain and sorrow, tears flowing down his face.

It was only later that I would realise why this man, this person who up until then we had all written off as a sociopathic robot, had suddenly shown such emotion. The name of the reporter on the news, which had flashed briefly at the bottom of the screen.

Alexei Antonov. The colonel's son.

We've had a few messages over the radio network, mainly from Central Command, telling us that 'we gave them hell', to hold position and maintain lockdown and that 'help is coming'.

Absolute bullshit.

We could be the only people left in Moscow at the moment, according to the scattered news reports before the bombs hit, it seems that over a thousand warheads have been fired at us, mostly American, but British, French and Israeli as well. The whole world. Wiped out in an instant.

And for what?

The only thing which stops me pulling the revolver from my holster and blowing my brains all over this fucking diary is the thought of Katerina. She wouldn't have wanted me to go down that route. She always said suicide was a sin, that if I do that we will never be together in paradise.

All I know is that, if there is a God up there, he stopped listening a long time ago.

Of course, a lot of the men don't have something to hold onto, no rock to keep them chained to this world. As I write this in the gloom of my office, I can hear the muffled cracks of single pistol shots echoing in the darkness, the last sound many of those men out there will ever hear, as they condemn themselves to oblivion.