The New Beginning
He sat there in the dark room drawing another vertical line adjacent to yesterday’s. Yesterday’s line was next to the one from the day before, and so on for the past four hundred and ten days. He tossed the piece of lead across the room; it made a ping against the steel walls. It had been four hundred ande leven days since the regime announced the imminent destruction of planet Earth.
It was the year 2043 when they made a worldwide proclamation about the meteor and how there was no feasible way it would missthe planet, our planet. That had been a crazy day; there had been few crazy days for Jakeand Alyssa since then. Everyone on Earth was distributed a pill, a tiny, harmless-looking, yellow pill. Swallowing it was the easiest way to end life.
“You just fall asleep and don’t wake up,” the pharmacists would say as they passed them out. It was supposed to be a better way to go than suffering all of the things that were set to transpire post meteor. The news predicted everything from radiation poisoning and tidal waves to catastrophic weather andworse. Sitting down at the table Alyssa placedone bowl of cold beans in front of herself andanother one in front of Jake. It was scarcely enough for two. They were starving.
She had adjusted well enough to living underground with limited resources in the old bomb shelter. Her twelfth birthday had been weeks ago if Jake had been counting correctly. He let her have the last Twinkie. They had no real cake. She thought about how wonderful it was that there was a sweet that never expired. It wasn't the best of times in that stagnant shelter, but they got by, until now that is. They were out of food now and they were dangerously low on their water supply. Jake still kept the two yellow pills on a shelf near the ceiling of their makeshift home, just in case.They’d be lucky to have enough water to swallow them down with as it was.
He had to make a choice, the hardest decision he had made since dragging his baby sister below ground. If he said to take the pill, she would listen. They would go to sleep and their struggle would finally come to a halt. If he chose to go up… well there was no way to know what would happen.
“We’re about out of supplies. I have to go up. The Earth has to be there; we’re still living and breathing underground.”
“Maybe the destruction wasn’t that bad.” He told Alyssa as he watched her eyes begin toslowly fill with tears. Of course she was scared. What little girl wouldn’t be? Jake wrapped an arm around her shoulders. They walked up the steps together and Jake unlatched and shoved the metal door. With a groan and a crack it gave way, swinging open. Jake looked around. Everything looked well…the same mostly. They were deep in the woods, after all. Who knew what the citieslooked like now? But here it was as if nothing had happened.
“There was no meteor, no earthquakes, no tsunami. The atmosphere is still perfectly intact as far as I can tell." he told his sister, disbelief heavy in his words, but he forced a smile in her direction.
“Nothing happened?" she whispered, covering her mouth, “Where are the people?"
“There are no people Lis, they took the pill."Jake replied “Everyone died for nothing." Both were silent a moment.
Alyssa came out letting the screen door slambehind her. She set a bowl of water down onthe porch as four scruffy kittens ran around herfeet eager to drink. Her blond hair was pulledback in a neat braid and her face was clean. She hardly resembled the girl she was just a short time ago living underground. Eight weeks had gone by since they had stepped out oftheir storm shelter and back into the sunlight. Jake still boiled all their water before they drank, but so far neither had not gotten sick from it or any of the fish or vegetables they ate.Jake always tried new foods first. Sometimes he would make Alyssa wait days before she was allowed to have it, but they were no longer starving. They were finally getting a sort of routine life together.
They were the last two people on Earth, and so far it wasn’t that bad. They had acquired what little items they had by scouringabandoned
homes they had passed by as they searched the area surrounding their little underground shelter. Jake decided early on that they wouldnot drift too far from it. One could never know when they may need to hide out again. This time if the world were going to end there would be no forewarning. There was no one to report these sorts of things anymore.They moved everything that they did not store in the shelter into this home, their new home: a small white house they stumbled upon while they were outcollecting berries one day. Jake had checked it out. There were no bodies inside like the otherhomes.
The two walked east toward the bay. It was Monday, that meant fishing day. The bay was quite a distance from their home, so fishing day had become somewhat of an adventure. Alyssa liked to make picnic lunches for her and Jake to share . They had been walking for hours when the sky began to rumble overhead.
Startled, Alyssa shouted “Look!" pointing upward, in time for Jake to catch a glimpse of the large airplane soaring across the sky.
