Writing For G.O.T

The End of the World -- #26 Black & White

1559 words.


"It is not the end of the world."

Sometimes, Holly wished Jennie would just shut up and not invite trouble. As they said, what you thought happened to you.

"No? Maybe you should take a look outside the window." Jennie leaned against the wall, terrified. Her skin was itching and peeling off already under the effects of the winds that brought second-degree radiation.

Holly lifted the heavy curtain. Something was happening. Really happening. Much worse than earlier when her father had just been to war. There was that thick gray smoke, again, and she could see the glow of the flames possibly coming from the City Center.

She turned to Jennie. “A fire? The city’s on fire! Oh, my God!”

“If you were listening to news instead of worrying about manicures and beauty, you’d know what’s happening.”

“Is this the final nuclear attack they were talking about? You think?”

“I don’t know what it is... Get your backpack. Pack up a few things you might most urgently need.” Jennie wished if only they could have their old life back, but wishing did nothing to alleviate fears, and she still had to do what she had to do. So, she continued, “If the fire spreads towards us, which is likely, we may have to evacuate.”

Holly put her laptop and phone in the backpack. There was no internet or even continuous electricity anymore, but holding them gave her comfort as if nothing much had changed. Clothes…of course, she’d need clothes. She put a few frilly items. She might as well look good.

“Okay,” Jennie yelled over her shoulder to Holly, as she was putting together her items. “Pack up sturdier things, too. Like cottons and wools, and don’t forget extra boots.”

“Sleeping bags, Mom, we need sleeping bags.” Holly pulled her sleeping bag out of the closet, but Jennie didn’t have a sleeping bag, so Hollie folded a thick quilt and squeezed it into a plastic bag for her mother.

“These are too bulky to carry,” said Jennie. ”I am going to store a few things in the metal shed. If this is what I fear it is, there’ll be squatters and scavengers inside the house.”

“So awful! Maybe we should lock up everything.”

“Good idea! Although locks won’t keep people in need and ready to do anything just to survive.”

“Maybe we can hide them under the manure on the side of the house.”

“No,” said Jennie, “not under the manure, too smelly, but we can hide a few things in some places in the yard.” Then, momentarily, she stopped to say, “Food! We’ll need food. We’ll take the sardine cans with us. They’re small and nutritious, and we’ll hide whatever else in the yard.”

“I hate sardines, Mom!”

“Where the world is going, you’ll be lucky to find what you hate.”

“I hate it when you lecture!”

“You hate this, you hate that…You’d better mind what you call a lecture. What is coming is ominous. Even our very lives might end up being liabilities.” Jennie frowned, thinking maybe she talked too much.

“You mean it will be too stupid to live? If so, why are we doing what we are doing?”

Could she come up with a good answer to Holly’s intelligent question? “Hope, my dear child! There is always that thing called hope.” She shook her head as if negating what she had just uttered.

“Don’t call me a child, Mom. I’m fourteen. Not a child.”

“You’ll always be my child, Holly, my love.”

At that moment, someone knocked at the front door.

“Open up! Police!”

Jenny slid her bag under the bed, whispering at Holly to hide hers; then, she opened the door. Indeed, there were two policemen.

“Ma’am! Why are you still here? Haven’t you heard the warning sirens? You people are making everything so much more the harder.”

“Good Day, to you, too, Sir!” answered Jennie mockingly. “Yes, we did, but what good will that do!”

“Ma’am! Please,” said the other policeman, speaking so speedily that some of his words mangled into the others. “I am Steve and my partner’s Bob. Let me explain. We are responsible for public safety. Please, you’ll have to evacuate. Everyone in town is to go to the Hermit’s Park at the south end. In an hour or so, maybe earlier, we’ll transport you to safer ground. The fires are the result of a very small bomb to set the target, to bypass the effects of the electronic blocking shield over us. The enemy usually sends a much bigger nuclear one afterward. That’s what they’ve been doing.”

“Come as you are,” ordered Bob. “Carrying anything will make the vehicles heavier.”

“Let me find my nine-year old son, first, officers. We’ll be at the park in record time.”

“All right!” said Steve. “But, hurry! Otherwise, you’ll be toast. Let’s go Bob. We still have the apartment complexes to do.”

Jennie closed the door after them.

Holly gave Jennie an incredulous look. “Mom! You don’t have a nine-year old son.”

“I had to tell them that. Don’t you understand? Plus, we’re better off if we left on our own.”

“Mom! We can’t go anywhere on foot!”

“Nowhere is safe anymore, Honeybun! You want to board the buses from the last century with the others with nowhere to go? What if something hits on top of us and bakes us like in an oven? Besides, I don’t think you’d appreciate the situations in a bus, and being squeezed together with other distraught people like sardines.”

“What’s with you and the sardines? Ugh! Gross!”

“You said it. Gross!”

“Classic mom-comment!” Holly murmured to herself.

Jennie knew that Holly thought her mother was just couldn’t stop ordering her around.

“I heard that!” Jennie turned her back to her, trying to erase the grin off her face.

But the ground was frozen and it was difficult to dig in and hide what they thought they could to come back to later. They did all they could while from the highway, came the rumble of the old buses carrying people away.

Jennie and Hollie’s home had been in an affluent neighborhood--that is, affluent once upon a time. They had a large backyard and a small stable with units to house two or three horses, but no more than that. Jennie had sold the horses and the house was about to be confiscated by the town due to the delinquency of payments of taxes, right at the time when the wars began. After Holly’s father had joined the forces and was never heard from again, only Jennie’s salary was there, which was not enough to keep up the place. She had lost her job right after her dad left, anyhow. Who wanted to hire teachers with the threat of a nuclear world hanging over them!


Holly thought all that about her parents inside the stable, and she tried to keep herself from sobbing. Mom is doing all she can, she thought. I must act better.

Her mother was busy at the moment, her back turned to her. She unzipped her snorkel and took out something the size of a small pillow, her childhood Raggedy-Ann doll, and stuck it under the straw that was rotting. The doll was special because it used to be her grandmother’s.


Jennie, on the other hand, had turned her back to Holly, looking busy with stashing clothing and food into small boxes and hiding them under the straw-covered floor in the next unit. With the corner of her eye, she had caught Hollie stashing the doll, and she had smiled inwardly, congratulating herself. It hadn’t been easy for her to keep a stern façade and do what she was about to do for her daughter’s welfare that would save both of them any further pain.


Snow clouds had replaced the fiery skies, capping the City Center’s devastation inside a white shroud, and the wind blew so hard that the branches twirled around the tree trunks before they broke off.

The second bomb, the nuclear one, hadn’t materialized…not yet, but the nuclear winter was on, fiercely advancing.

Jennie and Hollie were still in their yard, trying to ward off the cold and not daring to go inside the house, in case other officials or the soldiers came and discovered them. Instead, they huddled together inside a stable unit in their snorkels under the thick quilts they had carried out from the house. Snow on the house, the steps leading to the front door, and around the yard had turned into ice. Icicles hung overhead in the stable, too.

Jennie opened her eyes to the dark of the night that the snow everywhere had given just a tad of illumination. “God, please, forgive me for this,” she whispered and said a prayer. Then, she pushed away from the mounds of quilts covering herself. She had done that to Holly hours ago. The thin girl was already semi-frozen. The sleeping pill she had ground and mixed into her evening meal had to have done the job.

Jennie dug up Raggedy Ann and placed it in Hollie’s arms. Then she stripped off most of her own clothes. Her teeth chattering, she took Hollie in her arms and leaned into the stable wall.

The end would come soon, and freezing to death was the least painful way to go.

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Prompt: "It is not the end of the world."
"No? Maybe you should take a look outside the window."