Trevor's was in his throat and killed him quick. Maddie had a lump on her leg, but the one that killed her must have been in her brain. She had the most terrible headaches, and then she had seizures, and then she died.
We thought we were so prepared, in our bomb-proof shelters, with our months' supplies of food.
The ones killed by the bombs were the lucky ones.
Jodie had one cut out of her chest and thought she'd beaten it, but there's another growing inside her belly. Dan is covered in black lumps but its the ones on the inside that are killing him.
The supplies ran out in months.
We eat contaminated food grown in contaminated soil. We drink contaminated water. We breathe contaminated air.
Steph and Ian both cough blood, and Ian's is killing him faster but we know it'll kill them both. We don't know where Ben's cancer is, but he's wasting away the same as the rest of us.
We gnash our teeth bitterly over the folks across the border, whose tv signals sometimes just about reach our devices, when the weather's right. They were actually prepared, they have enough filters and tablets and underground spaces to keep themselves alive and healthy for years.
Chess split his femur open one day and the inside was full of cancer. The hospitals are full to overflowing with the dying, and nothing to do for them except ease their pain.
The drugs are contaminated too, but who cares?
Even the animals have cancer. We see birds limping along the ground when the fleshy growths have grown too big to let them fly. We see stick-thin feral dogs with their lumps on their faces, crowding an eye closed, pulling at the corner of a mouth.
And me?
My cancer is in my belly. I don't know which of my organs it started in. Scans are expensive, and they don't save you from the inevitable.
The pain comes and goes. Sometimes so bad I can do nothing but lay there moaning. Sometimes just an ache.
I eat and eat as much as I can get my hands on, but my limbs are withering day on day while my belly grows and grows.
The cancer is always hungry.
It's a beer gut, it's a pregnancy, it's monstrous. I struggle to lift its weight on my wasted legs.
I think about Alien all the time. There is a monster growing inside of me. I have stretch marks on my distended belly. I can feel it trying to burst out through my skin and my abdominal wall.
But if it were an alien baby, at least something would go on when it killed me. Something would live, even if it was a monster.
When I die, the cancer will die with me, consumed by its own unthinking hubris. A dead end. Self-defeating. My bloated body will be another monument to absolute futility.
Humanity was a cancer all along. Greedy and fast-growing and ultimately doomed.
We have consumed ourselves, and now we die a pointless death.
a small piece I wrote about the nuclear apocalypse, TW for destruction, sickness, suicide and death
The sky was on fire, hot and all encompassing. It all happened so fast, nobody could make heads or tails of what had happened. Just this morning I was seeing to the daily chores, washing, mopping, tidying; but now it seemed like it was all so futile. Is this was angels looked like? Were they supposed to burn your eyes and leave you weak at the knees? I had to wonder why anything godly would have to feel so painful.
The fire in the sky burned out as quickly as it came and just when I had felt relief, then came the rain. It was black and sludge like, staining my skin as I ran back inside. We must have been out of the immediate blast zone, only my windows were broken. I scrambled to wash the horrible liquid off of my body, throwing my clothes to the floor and cranking the faucet on. It thankfully still worked.
I clawed at my brain for any knowledge I could remember about what to do in this situation; how close to the blast did you have to be to be in serious danger from fallout? Was the rain I just got caught in a death sentence? I didn’t want to know. Maybe it was better not knowing.
The neighbors had a transistor radio, mine had been at the shop, it had been busted for ages. Static filled our ears as we huddled around the radio, desperate for any information. Nothing. Another channel on the radio yielded much the same, then another and another. All dead air. What about the rest of the country? Surely not everyone could’ve been hit, they had to be out there.
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Days passed and I had taken shelter with the neighbors, living alone wasn’t safe. We decided to go into the country, pool our resources and hope to God that his wretched angels hadn’t gotten to there too. We took one car, thankfully there was a spare battery in the basement, and loaded in only the essentials. I took the gun you had left behind all those years ago, praying that I need not use it.
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There were still people in the countryside, we had found plenty of them, some friendly and some not. We only stopped moving when we found a town that was plenty friendly, far in the mountains. It had survived the blasts and even had its own spring.
The five of us moved into an abandoned old house in town, fixing it up best we could. We each worked shifts helping the community as well, I even got to be of use fixing the town clock tower. The only thing this town didn’t have was an abundance of medicine and that became an issue when my former neighbors, now turned housemates, started getting sick one by one.
They may have had it the worst but it was clear the rest of the town was also suffering. A trip up to the spring told us why; it had been turned black by the dust storms that had now become commonplace. All of us had been contaminated.
I screamed that night for the first time since the sky caught on fire. It was hopeless, at least for this country. We didn’t go far enough inland, we lived too close to the blast areas, we didn’t know weather patterns. There was nothing we could’ve done. Maybe somewhere out there was bunkers, with its inhabitants safe and warm and well; or maybe there were areas where the weather didn’t carry the poisonous dust and all they had to contend with was the lack of sunlight. There was no telling, at least not for me.
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The gun was heavy in my hand as I sat in the forest. The animals chirped and chittered around me, at least they seemed fine. To them, nothing had changed besides a few weather patterns. At least something would inherit the earth once we were long gone.
The air was peaceful, the sky barely covered by dark clouds today. If I pretended, everything was normal again. I wasn’t sick, I hadn’t lost everything and I was just on a nice hike. The thought comforted me as I raised the gun to my temple. As I pulled the trigger my last thought was of how scared I was to meet the angels once again.
