Shelter at the End of the World

Elspeth had run when the first warnings came, before the evacuation orders. Long before the bombs, long before the world was turned upside-down.

She’d been on the continent, which meant she hadn’t had to try her luck on the ferries or the Chunnel. The shelter survived intact, and well-stocked, which was the best that could be said about it.

Somehow, the well in the shelter had run dry. Elspeth figured she had a month of clean water stored away, if she was careful.

She wasn’t supposed to be alone. Her family and friends never showed up. For a while, she’d tried to convince herself that they’d found another shelter. Not likely, though. Her family had kept this shelter in the Italian Alps for generations. Most others had either been filled in and built over or forgotten to time.

She wondered how many of the ultra-rich made it to their “survival condos.” Costing as much as three million pounds each, they were not for the average person, and hidden away in distant, remote places. This shelter, though, built inside a cave, was on a chunk of otherwise unusable land in the Bergamo Alps that had passed down through the generations of her father’s family.

In the early days of the conflict, there had still been some shortwave radio. No one knew who launched the first, or whether it was intentional. The consensus, though, was that everyone followed their worst-case scenario through to the bitter end. The policy of MAD, or “Mutually Assured Destruction” had resulted in its inevitable end. Mad, indeed.

Every nuclear weapon in humanity’s arsenal had been launched against someone else. The first targets were military, followed quickly by major population centers. The last transmission she’d picked up was from Siberia, where they said the glow of nuclear weapons carpeting huge swaths of Asia lit up the night sky like the sun had landed just beyond the horizon.

She looked in the mirror. The face that stared back was her but wasn’t. Her mother’s wide eyes, the blue of her father’s, in a face that was not as heart-shaped as her mother’s or sister’s. Her skin was always on the verge of tan, but just beige enough to wash out her blue eyes and mousy hair. Her father’s olive skin and dark hair made his blue eyes stand out. Her mother and sister had pale, freckled skin with flaming orange hair and bright green eyes.

Her hair was filthy. She’d have to use water to wash it or cut it off to save water. “What should I do, mom? You always knew.”

Unsure how long she’d been standing there, she wiped her eyes and nodded with a sniffle. “Right. Let’s get this over with.”

Her back to the mirror, she began. The clippers buzzed and echoed through her skull. She ran a hand over her head, the feeling alien. The movement of air through the shelter touched her scalp and she felt more naked than she ever had.

Turning back to face the mirror, she didn’t recognize herself. More than before, she saw her mother and father in her face, and fell to her knees weeping for the loss. At the same time, a voice in the back of her mind scolded her for feeling sorry for herself.

“Pull yourself together, Els,” she said, mimicking her sister’s voice. “You’re the big sister, act like it.”

Elspeth chuckled in spite of herself. “If this goes on much longer, I may really lose it,” she said to no one in particular.

After a meal of freeze-dried curry rehydrated in a carefully measured amount of water, she went to the back of the shelter, where a low rumble vibrated the heavy steel door.

The box of nitrile gloves near the door was empty. Not the first thing I thought would run out, she thought. She unsealed the door and swung it open, the low rumble opening into the chugging of one of the diesel generators.

She’d been lucky with the generators. If the exhaust had been blocked at the outside, they would’ve died long ago, or flooded the room with diesel fumes and carbon monoxide. Instead, they kept on.

She didn’t have a way to tell how much fuel she had, but she rapped on the 4,000-liter fuel tank to gauge how low the levels were. The flow meter showed that she was using around half a liter per hour, and the tank sounded about half-full. As long as she didn’t put any additional strain on the generator, the fuel could last the better part of a year.

Along the far wall were enough cases of oil to last probably twice as long as the fuel. She started up the second generator, switched the power source switch to that one, and shut down the first. The oil on the now-silent generator was a little low, easily remedied.

After the daily switch-over and maintenance check, Elspeth went back into the main shelter and shut the heavy steel door. Somehow, she’d gotten oil on her hands again. Should’ve stocked up more on gloves, she thought.

She wiped them the best she could on a rag, and then prepared two washcloths for her “bath.” One she soaked and rubbed with the soap, the other she left sitting in the bowl of clean water.

She washed her body with the soapy cloth, including her now-bare scalp, then followed up with the other to remove the soap and the grime that stuck to it. The bowl of water was then used to wash the cloths before rinsing them in a second bowl of clean water. Two liters to wash herself, and the washcloths was as efficient as she could get.

Without anything else to occupy herself, she picked up the box the gloves had come in. She’d been out for six days…or was it seven? The box originally held one hundred gloves: fifty days’ worth. It was one of four in the case. She’d been down here for at least two hundred days, probably more.

“Okay, mom,” she said, “I’m losing it in here. Should I risk it?”

She waited for an answer that she knew wouldn’t come. “Dad would say, ‘Whatever you feel comfortable with.’ Megs would say, ‘Stop being a baby and go for it,’ but what would you say, mom?”

Elspeth dressed in her cleanest clothes and sat with her back against the exterior door. The steel felt cold against her bare scalp as she wondered what she would find out there.

The exterior sensors, including the outside Geiger counter had stopped working when the first bombs fell nearby, shaking the shelter in a quake. The levels in the shelter remained in the low normal range for a concrete bunker.

Elspeth took a deep breath and stood. “No risk, no reward,” she said. She took the Geiger counter in hand and opened the huge blast door.

The counter tick increased, but not to a level that was immediately dangerous. She looked up from the counter to the sunlight pouring in the door. Sunlight that shouldn’t be there, in the north-facing door hidden in a small mountain cut. Sunlight accompanied by a slight breeze of clean, heady air.

Elspeth stepped outside the door of the shelter to see that hers was one of hundreds dotted across a wide plain of grayish grass. The sky was a deeper blue than she’d ever seen, and along with the sun, two small moons danced in the sky. As she walked on the plain, away from the shelter, she looked back to see that, like the others, it was still surrounded by part of the mountain as though it had been carved out by a giant melon baller.

“Thank you,” she said toward the sky, “whoever and whatever you are, for saving us from ourselves.”

She sat down heavily; the gray-green grass soft beneath her. She watched as one of the moons moved down the sky to set, across a horizon in a place no person belonged, and wept for the loss of Earth.