Before the End

“I locked them out; I opened the airlock; I sentenced them to death. Is that what you wanted to hear?” His eyes were tired and red, hair matted, and body scarred with dozens of wounds. Cortell tightened his grip on the bars of the rusted iron cell. “What choice did I have? What would you have done? Tell me. Tell me!”

His words fell on deaf ears. The group of five other survivors huddled together. Hushed whispers bounced off the walls, their words indiscernible from the rustling leaves outside. One by one they left the room.

“Cowards! All of you. Spineless cowards. You’d have done the same. You think you’re better than me?” Cortell dropped to his knees, too weak to stand. He saw the door shut and he was alone once again. He sat with his knees pulled up to this chest and began a small rocking motion, sobbing through eyes too dry for tears.

The five gathered outside and looked up to the sky. The fires continued to burn in the low atmosphere and the smoke swirled like a vortex. There were screams from the forest that lay ahead. To their left, the coastal waters rose to becoming walls of aggressive water until they were too tall to stay up, releasing a violent flood through the marshland—though they weren't marshlands before the fall. The ground, to their right, had shifted apart, a jagged cavern that wouldn’t allow sunlight to penetrate the depths.

The dome had shielded them from the harsh elements, however it would not hold much longer. The five knew this. Cortell knew this. The air was limited as it was and once the dome was pierced, they’d all be doomed to choke on air that still contained fallout from the week before—when the bombs dropped and a catastrophe in one region infiltrated the rest of the globe in hours.

The five walked in a single file line, the one in front stopping in front of a metal rod that was staked into the ground. He flipped a cover and pressed a switch. A panel on the ground slid open and the depressurization blew dust upwards. They descended into the bunker, the panel closing behind the last one.

Cortell was now in the corner of the cell, resigned to meet his fate, the same as he had dealt to the others before. He kept so many out of range when the dome was activated. The calculations were precise; there wasn’t room for more. The bodies that lined the outer edge of the dome were too many to count. Indiscriminate death. It was the same fate for those outside the dome, the inevitable conclusion.

He accepted that he, too, would expire in the cell once the integrity of the dome failed. That was until a familiar voice whispered his name in the hollow of the room.

“Cortell, let’s go.”

He dismissed it as madness, a trick of the mind being persecuted for what it made him do to the others. He buried his face into his palms and began to sob, believing that death had come to personally escort him to hell. Something hit him in the shoulder and he flinched. When he opened his eyes to take a look, it was a small canteen, one with his initials, a reminder of the last time liquid had passed his lips.

“Come on, what are you waiting for, move!” a hoarse voice urged Cortell.

He couldn’t trust his eyes, he looked twice to make sure she was real. His hand blindly reached for the container. When his fingertips made contact, he tapped it twice to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating. With the flask in hand, he held onto the wall and stood up on trembling legs and approached the cage door.

“How?” he asked, extending his hand beyond the bars and interlocking his fingers with hers.

“No time to explain,” she jiggled a makeshift rod into the locking mechanism and the door unlatched. Cortell limped out, his arm around her shoulders as she helped him maintain balance. The two exited the building and a bicycle made out of a hodge-podge of parts was laying on the ground.

She lifted the handlebar and propped it up onto its tires. “Sit.” she commanded. Cortell looked confused, not sure how he’d manage to operate it in his condition. She crossed her leg over the bar in front of him and put her foot on the pedal. He instinctively held onto her waist. With a starting boost from her leg, the two were off, a squeaky chain made the rounds on the gears and the two rode beyond the underground bunker where the five retreated.

The sky above them flashed an angry red, the nuclear storm around them was taunting them, looking for a way in. Cortell’s lips were dry and when he tried to speak, he sounded a hoarse as her. Even though he was behind her, he wasn’t loud enough for her to hear.

She maneuvered the cycle past wreckage of panicked residents attempts to flee. The streets were littered with personal belongings, dead animals like birds and squirrels—the sight and smell no longer bothered her. She had already emptied the contents of her stomach several times, so the cramps no longer bothered her.

The two came to an entrance to an alley and within that alley was their key to survival. They left the bike on the sidewalk and Cortell leaned on her once more. The pair trudged their way to a large garbage bin that had been overflowing.

“Wait here,” she said. She began to search for something inside the lid of the bin. It wasn’t there. “Shit!” she croaked. She went around to the other side of the bin, flipped the other lid up and started patting the underside.

“Found it!” She emerged with a dirty plastic card which she wiped clean on her pant leg. She took Cortell and the two made their way to a door and she swiped the key twice. The light on the keypad flickered. The power grid had been down since the initial incident. Only a trickle of electricity remained in the capacitors and now that was gone.

“Damnit. Stay here.” she told him. He nodded. She made her way to a panel on the side of the building and reached into her pocket for a knife. The tip found the recessed slot in the screw and she began to remove each one until the cover was off. It was the manual bypass for the diesel generator. She pulled her sleeve over her fingers and wedged the knife in between contact points and with a series of sparks, the generator rumbled to life.

She returned to Cortell. She swiped the badge again, and a green led lit up and a click was heard. The door was unlatched and she pulled the door open and the two entered. The area was still dark. The emergency generator only powered the exits signs and the doors. It was enough for their purposes.

Outside a thunderous crash was heard and the ground shook with so much force they nearly fell to the ground.

“The dome—” Cortell said.

“Go, go, go!” she said, taking his hand and leading the way to a rod in the ground that looked similar to the one that the five used earlier. She flipped the cover and pushed a button. A more localized and subdued rumble occurred when a panel in the floor slid open. The depressurization pushing air upwards felt warm, but sterile.

She held his hand while he descended the steps and as soon as she was inside she tapped another button on the wall and the cover above her closed. Another chamber closed around them and new air was pumped in, it was dense, pressurized. Their ribs felt squeezed. Once cleared, they entered the atrium of the bunker.

Cortell collapsed. “It’s no use. We’re all going to die.The planet is dead. Where are we going to go?” His breathing was labored, likely from the sterile air pressure.

“It’s okay, it take a little getting used to.” she said, helping him up to sit upright.

“This bunker, how?”

“Just rest for now. We’re safe. Now that the dome is compromised, there’s no going back.”

The two remained seated on the floor. There was no furniture, scant rations, but at the moment that didn’t matter. They were together. Her head resting on his shoulder, his hand in hers for comfort.

The ground above them shook enough to rock them back and forth a few times. She estimated the building they entered had collapsed from the impact of the debris and destabilization caused by the hot nuclear wind.

Cortell looked into her eyes, “We never planned for this. It’s beyond any doomsday scenario.” He squeezed her palm inside his. It was the closest he’d been to another person’s pulse. To feel it against his palm make his eyes reveal the slimmest hope.

“We’ll wait it out. We have to.” she whispered.

“Are there others? There were five at the station. I didn’t even know about this place. How did you—”

“My momma was a caregiver of the owner of the factory above. He was a cold war guy, when a nuke could drop any moment. When he died, a man showed up with a copy of the will and a keycard.”

“I was trying to figure out where you were taking us. I’d have never guessed.” he turned to her, looked her in they eyes, “Thank you… for coming to get me.”

“I wasn’t going to spend the rest of whenever by myself.”

His finger traced the swirls of her fingerprint on her fingertips. It was something he did when they first met years ago. It calmed him down to close his eyes and feel every soft ridge, curve, and swirl. It made her purr and was a precursor for sex. This touch wasn’t for that, the intimacy in the moment went deeper, to their core.

“You know, anyone else would have done the same. We would have ran out of air in three days if you had let them in. We’d all be dead.” she said.

“I’m not sure about that Ro. The five that locked me up back there seemed to think there was another way.”

“They were fools would would have signed their own death sentence just to feel good for the moment.” Rowena said, assuring Cortell that there was no other way. People had to die or else they’d all share the same fate. “Right now, we have a chance. That’s more than anyone could ask for. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

The two sat in silence holding each other as the ground shook several more times until there was nothing left to fall or crash into the earth, like waiting for the kernels of popcorn to stop popping in the microwave.

The light in the bunker was faint by design. Low power consumption was the key to longevity if everything else held up, like the ventilation into an untapped water table. There was enough air and natural freshwater to sustain them. But, food remained an unknown variable. In the corner was an old chest that contained hundreds of packets of dried powder. The writing on the labels had faded over the decades, begging the question of whether it was still viable. No radio, no periscope. They had no way of knowing when it was safe to come out.

Hours had passed and hunger set in. Cortell opened the top of a packet and shook some of the powder into his palm. He took a sniff and shook his head. “Doesn’t smell like anything to me.”

Rowena leaned in and assessed the contents with her nose. “I don’t know, but if I can’t smell it, it can’t be that bad can it?”

Cortell licked a fingertip and dipped into the powder. He brought the finger to the tip of his tongue and tasted it. It melted right away and it seemed like a banana or something with banana flavor. The two shared the single packet, reasoning that if there’s something wrong with it, they’ll both find out.

They fell asleep on the bare concrete floor shortly after. It seems that the bunker was only stocked with the barest of necessities and nothing of comfort or any mechanism to tell time or know which day or how many days they were underground. When they woke, the biological need for the body to expel waste reared it’s ugly head preceded by a rumble of both tummies.

It was at that moment, with everything they’ve been through so far, that they broke down laughing while holding their bellies in pain. For all the old man's paranoia about dying above ground, he failed to account for one basic human need: waste management.