The Rosentown Survivor

        I hadn’t been home in a long time. It was impossible for a while. I was going to visit home after my last work trip. Now, work was something I barely thought about. My mind filled with the next place I’m going to get to stuff food rations and water into my backpack, the only semblance of my home I had. They took our clothes after we left the bunker in New York, giving us some cherry red jumpsuits, citing some bullshit about ‘it helps us all keep track of each other.’ After spending four years in a bunker with those bastards, I never wanted to see them again. I’d smelled enough of their vomit and feces to last me a lifetime.

But now, I was home. I was back in my old hometown. I dreamt of the small town surrounded by trees, with only one working traffic light. The town forty minutes away from the nearest coffee shop, and the town that never had a graduating class over sixty-five. I’d never wanted to come home so badly, but here I was. I knew it was going to be different, but this… this was something else. The nuclear fallout left devastation. The park I patroned as a child, now a mess of melted, tangled metal. The colors dissolved off of the rusted metal. Humanity was a molten playground.

I laughed bitterly at the metaphor as soon as my mind spawned it. Witnessing the destruction of life as you know it, painted everything in a more poetic life. I used to never understand poetry. Thought it nothing but ramblings. But out here, now, sleeping with backpacks under your head on top of layers of upturned dirt and fried grass, rambling was the most entertaining thing to do.

I stood in front of the decimated school. The small, copper sculpture of the lion in front of the school, that represented the name of our sports teams, now was a puddle around a pedestal. The school, an unrecognizable maze of cracked stone and crumbled brick. My source of education was wiped off the face of the world. I’d seen a lot of leveled cities and towns, but there was something different about seeing mine. The setting of my first twenty years of life was now a wasteland.

               There were some places I still had to avoid, the Geiger Counter warning me, beeping angrily anytime I got too close to certain buildings. The old video store pissed the handheld lifesaver off big time, the screech of it deterred me from the route I would usually take home from school. My trip down memory lane involved a lot of detours. There was some life still, in certain places. Deer that were far enough from the target to not grow two heads drank from puddles of water that would surely rot their jaws. There was a small rain barrel filled with water. It wasn’t much, but I put tabs in it anyway. Watching the solid form fizzle away. This water would be safe for them to drink. My penance for learning to hunt as a child.

I continued on my way. I didn’t want to scare any animals away. They hadn’t done anything to deserve this. It was all us. Only some pets made it into the bunker, snuck in obviously. But once the doors were sealed, that was it. I thought of my dog a lot, Aggie, I wondered if she was cuddling my parents when it happened. Or had my parents escaped somewhere and she was left in the house alone? She would be dead by now anyway, for sure. Did my parents know? Would I even find them here? I wasn’t sure where else they would go. We had a small shelter, not as impressive as the one I stayed in, but they had to make due right? How were they when the doors sealed? Did they regret not grabbing somethings? Did they even get safely into the bunker? Or were they battering on sealed doors? No matter the screams, the banging, the begging the doors weren’t going to open again until whoever in charge now was sure we were far enough from the strike zone to survive outside.

 I was never sure where the Strikezone was, no one told us. I assumed it had to be somewhere in Canada or more in South America. I never knew enough about radiation to know, or care at that point. There was destruction everywhere, no matter where the actual missile hit. I found myself constantly asking if it was better that or to envy those who fried quickly in the blast. A nihilistic view, but it was hard not to think about it. I finally passed another familiar road. It was one that I’d traveled often on bike, my friend James lived here. I’d ride back and forth in front of his house until I’d been able to taunt him out to a race. It didn’t seem like there were a lot of houses still standing, his certainly wasn’t at least. That, or my feet just couldn’t remember the childhood paths I travelled.

I had to be nearing my house. Still thankful for the lack of bodies. Many had been in my path down the coast, but so far here was pretty clean. Maybe everyone somehow did cram into the miniscule bunker. It seemed like the Titanic in my mind, there weren’t enough lifeboats. The small towns around the U.S were paid little attention with the Nuclear Protection Act passed in 2048. They were given enough to survive under prime conditions, AKA everyone was full of food and water when they entered the bunker, had no possessions and only got hungry once a week and, worst of all, that only half of the town were inside. There were too many broadcasts to count throughout the years, all spewing the same thing, ‘nothing to worry about, this is all just a precaution! The peace talks are going incredibly well!’ Yeah, they went great. So great that no one even knew who took the first shot.

               My feet stilled at a familiar mailbox on the ground. The ugly orange-red that Mom accidentally bought instead of the shiny apple red dad wanted. But the money was already spent. And some the mailbox became a construction cone. It was never hit so perhaps the color served its purpose. But now, it laid on the brown grass with it’s snapped wood stem. I looked up, afraid of what to expect.

               It wasn’t there. There was naught in front of me. A cracked cement driveway that my father had taken an entire weekend to lay one summer was splintered, small pieces of rock in every direction. The only thing that stood where the house once was, was my mothers floral sewing chair. My sister and I used to fight over who got to sit with mom on it. Pushing one another on the weathered arms of the overstuffed chair, lifting small threads of the embroidery with friction.

I cleared my throat. At the state of the rest of the town, this was expected. I nodded to myself, for no particular reason, and began my walk to the bunker. Throughout my childhood, there were many a drill. Practice runs for the end of the world. They were never taken seriously. Most staying home and watching something on their smart TVS. But my mother always made us go, no matter how much grief my father gave her from the couch, she still pushed my sister and I along. Making a game of counting the steps. Playing ISpy with out surroundings. Making us memorize the path.

               I stood before the ramp the lead into the shelter. Pulling the door open, a skeletal hand. A chain of decayed bodies. A pile of them. Through the open doors, there were many more inside. Clothes burned out, faces unrecognizable. Had the alarm sounded too late? Or did no one take it seriously? There were no bodies in the town because there were all here. Trying to fight their way into an already overstuffed safety living quarters, they never had a chance. I couldn’t look at the pile for long. I swallowed a large burning lump in my throat, knowing, just knowing (a child knows) that my parents were somewhere in there. So close to possible salvation. I closed my eyes and let out a sigh, a sigh that I suppose was the only eulogy for Rosentown.

I felt the lightness of my back pack. If no one made it safely inside the bunker, that means that no one opened the thick doors that led to the rations and water. Supplies that would last me indefinitely. I took a step down the ramp, a bone snapping beneath my foot.

The only sound that welcomed me home.