After the War--The Journals

In which one door slams shut and we open a new one

Last Day-Day 1 -- 9 am

My name is Samantha Yates. I am 50 years old. I am a single, white female. I am a writer. This is all I know for certain. Yesterday was March 26th, 2005. Today is Easter Sunday. But far more importantly, today is Day 1.

Yesterday, I had bills that were too long unpaid. Yesterday I had an ex-boyfriend whom I loved dearly and had we ever gotten back together, most likely would have killed me. Yesterday I had 3 children, 3 grandchildren and 2 sons-in-law. Yesterday I literally had $2.23 to my name, an unregistered car that had no insurance, a noisy muffler and out-of-date plates. Yesterday I worried that my cable, phone and more importantly, my internet were due to be disconnected. Yesterday I scrounged spare nickels and dimes from under seat cushions to buy a pack of cigarettes.

Yesterday I went to look at a house that I was to write a real estate ad for to pick up a measly 20 bucks. At 7 p.m. I was sitting at the kitchen table and studiously taking inane notes about what the ‘oh so very refined, dahling’ lady of the house thought were good selling points to her castle. And it was. Is. A castle I mean. For a mere million eight anyone with more credit than brains could acquire this 8 bedroom, 5 bath, fully loaded, exquisitely decorated honest to goodness castle complete with indoor pool, 3 foot thick Vermont granite stone walls, and a moat! Of course, you also got the five fenced acres, the four fireplaces, the library and a dungeon beneath the basement floor. Who could have imagined that someone who’d spent her life daydreaming about medieval castles would have her life to thank for one, even if it was located halfway up Bromley Mountain, in Manchester, Vermont?


Today all of that is gone, unimportant or not known. Today we start fresh. Today is the beginning. Yesterday was the end. Yesterday, from what we have been able to gather, all those terrorists who had been threatening to wipe us off the face of the planet did a damn good job of it.

As I said, we were sitting at her kitchen table when the sky to the southeast turned white. It lit up her gardens as if it were noon. Then all the lights went out. Grabbing my lighter from my pocket, I lit the mauve candles on the kitchen table. She was sitting there, elegant, not a hair out of place coiffure, staring blankly out the window and not saying a word. It was if she was frozen in place, elegantly manicured hand pressed to the lace at her throat just staring out the window.

I want to try to recreae the conversations from last night. It seems awfully important to me to do so...

“Mrs. Prescott? Ma’am?” Nothing. She sat there, barely breathing. I truly do not think she even heard me.

“Martha? Martha, honey? Where are you?” Her husband’s voice came from the library, following a bobbling stream of light from a flashlight. “In here, in the kitchen!” I shouted. My eyes were once again looking out the kitchen windows at the sky boiling over Boston, maybe?

John Prescott, white-haired, teeth clamped around a cherry-wood pipe, came into the kitchen and stopped. His pipe dropped and bounced on the imported ceramic tile floor as his jaw dropped open. In one hand he held a mag-light, in the other a portable battery-operated radio.

“Oh my God. Oh my God. Sweet Mother of God. Oh shit!” He just stood there, but his words shocked Martha out of her stupor.

“John. Don’t swear, dear. You know I can’t abide that sort of language.”

He looked over at his wife, shook his head, and then walked over to the counter and put the radio down. He never took his eyes off the sky. He reached down and turned the radio on. Static. He fiddled with the knob. More static, then voices.

“This is WMAN radio, back on the air. We just got the generator up, folks. From what we’ve been able to find out, that blast we are all watching is Boston. Ham radio guy out of Poughkeepsie, NY said he saw the same thing, only it was NYC. We’ll try and stay on the air, but I don’t know for how long……….” Silence was replaced by static.

“Don’t you think, maybe, we should get deeper into the house or something?” I was trying to remember anything and everything I’d ever read on nuclear war, fall out, radio-activity…..but my mind wasn’t working right. Boston is gone. My son….My brother….My ex too probably.

I was startled from my brain-fog by a pounding on the front door. Mr. Prescott went to open the door and let in a small crowd of folks. “Martha, honey? We’ve got company!”

Those must have been the magic words. Suddenly, galvanized into action, she was in the entry foyer taking coats and making small talk. John disappeared into the depths of the house with several men and I followed the women back to the kitchen. A bomb has gone off and she was worried that she couldn’t get the coffeepot or the microwave to work.

Of course they wouldn’t work. Something about bombs going off in the lower atmosphere disrupting magnetic beams or something. I was pretty sure nothing electronic was going to work for a very long time. I guess the car was no longer a problem. It wasn’t going to start and there wouldn’t be anyone with any way of checking anything anyway.

The men came back to the kitchen and John said, “We need to get downstairs, NOW! No, Martha, don’t worry about anything. NOW! Brad, please help Martha and the ladies downstairs.”

John opened up a cabinet and removed several bottles of pills. “I think I might, err, she might….” His voice dropped to nothing. “We’d better get down below.”

I grabbed my new (thankfully) notebook, my cigarettes and my pen off the table and followed him downstairs.

That's it, I think...what I wanted to remember. The little details seem vital. Details may be what keeps me sane.

Day 1 8pm

It has been 24 hours since the war began, and, I think, ended. We now total 13 of us down in the dungeon of the castle. Upstairs, the front door is bolted and the alarm system is on, run by the generator. Mr. P thinks we have about another day or so till the gasoline runs out. There’s more in the cars, but I don’t know if we should go outside. We don’t know what all has been bombed and how much radioactivity there is. The generator is also running the electricity down here and we have some light, a small fridge and a camping porta-potty.

The Lucky 13 (as we call ourselves) I need to write this down. I am so terrible with names. Maybe this will help me keep them straight. What do we have anymore except our names?

1. Me….

2. John Prescott-60 something, rich, well—he was. Leader type, patient.

3. Martha Prescott-60’s, pretty in an elegantly faded way….looks different without her makeup.

4. Lanie Bridges. Neighbor across the street. Blond. 40’s, kids were at her ex-husband’s for the holiday in northern N.J. John gave her some of his wife’s pills and she’s finally asleep. Her crying was getting on everyone’s nerves. I mean, hello? We ALL have lost kids or someone. Just because she is err was(?) a senator doesn’t mean she’s any better than anyone else. New world order is in effect!

5. Brittany. Lanie’s personal assistant. Walking talking palm pilot. Keeps talking about her boyfriend in D.C. Wonder if Washington is still there.

6. Brad White. 40’s,a doctor! Acts very preoccupied, keeps muttering about the stock market. Married to
7. Cyndy (yes, with 2 y’s) who’s a scientist over at the MeKendrick Institute. She’s working on her 2nd doctorate in molecular pseudo-synthetic synthesis, whatever that is. She made a foraging run upstairs (we are limiting them to once a day, 5 minutes inside and no one goes outside more than once, period.) today. In five minutes she grabbed some science books from the library, foil, John’s smokes from the freezer (thank goodness he’s sharing), all the fruit from the fridge, a can opener and some phone wire that she yanked out of the wall.

8. Trevor, their nine year old son. Smart as a whip, brought his game boy and spare batteries and games…he and Cyndy are trying to rig up a Geiger counter with the stuff she brought from upstairs and some gypsum (?) that they dug out of a wall down here.

9. Duncan McAllister, 50-ish, a writer (!) visiting from Scotland. He writes fantasy and historical romances under the name Bridie McAllister!!! Too funny…I finished one of his-her books last week! He’s got the Scots thing going and he could read a phone book out loud and I’d drool. God, it is nice to know that in spite of bombs and mayhem and the end of the world that my hormones still work. I can think of worse folk to be marooned with.

10. Danny. Duncan’s Golden Retriever. Big old shaggy well trained beast who has decided that he is my protector! He also makes a good pillow. Lanie said we shouldn’t be feeding a dog when we didn’t know if we’d have food for the people. I didn’t say it out loud, but I thought that Danny was worth more than Lanie and her palm pilot buddy. (And I do think they are buddies…wonder what her constituents would make of that?-but then I don’t guess it matters anymore)

11. Tony Biacci, 22. He was delivering pizza to the Whites. Scared little boy acting like a big man. Can’t he see we are all scared?

12. Lilac Thornton. 87. A spitfire. Tiny, blue-veined blue-haired, blue-blooded. I like her.
13. Frederick P Thornton IV, Lilac’s husband. 89, frail, full head of silver hair, ready smile and still worships the ground Lilac walks on. They are the neighbors on the other side of the castle. There was some joking about the Prescotts being the lord and lady of the castle, but they don’t hold a candle to the Thorntons!




Well, that’s the cast of characters in our portion of the apocalyptic survivors’ tale. While I’ve been busy writing, John and Brad have figured out we have enough food to last us about two years. John had to formally apologize earlier to Martha for all the hard times he gave her for her habit of stock-piling. I’m awfully glad she did!

Cyndy says she will try out the new Geiger counter in the morning. She also said that this place being built with such thick walls is a pure blessing. A million, eight? Right now, it is priceless.

We are all drifting off to sleep. The dungeon is not too big, maybe 20 by 15 feet. We aren’t exactly on top of each other, but it is pretty close in here. I’m in the corner tucked beyond the fridge. Danny is lying against the wall and I’m using him for a pillow. Duncan is down a little. Lanie and Brittany are in one of the other two corners and the Thorntons and Prescotts are sharing some camp cots. Brad, Cyndy and Trevor are on air-mattresses smack in the middle.

As Brad reaches over to turn off the light I see him glance around at what is now, for lack of a better word, the new nuclear family.

We have survived the 1st day of the new world.