Aftermath

AFTERMATH

“Not with a bang, but with a whimper” is one of those overdone expressions but the ending of the world wasn’t one of the situations that phrase usually entails.

It wasn’t exactly a “bang” either, more of a “shooup”, the kinda sound you make when you purse your lips and suck in. No, not like when you slurp soup, but when you suck air in.

OK, actually from my vantage point I really couldn’t hear anything, but I sure could see it going down.

Now of course I can’t see much of anything. There’s mostly dirty looking clouds scudding around the world everywhere. Oh yeah, every so often there’s a clearing southwest of where Hawaii should be, but that doesn’t last long and it dirties up again within an hour or so.

Nothing pretty about it either, although the clouds created by all the bombs hitting at first were striking, then the clouds just kinda merged together as more and more bombs went off, until the entire world was covered, then for the next couple of nights I could see pricks of light sometimes through the clouds.

Most people had figured, as had the experts, an atomic war would be short, but I could see the Hellfire explosions 246 miles below every so often for about two weeks.

Finally, I guess there was no one alive to push any more launch buttons and the flashes stopped, leaving the dirty clouds to swirl their mad paths around the world.

How long we would last here on the ISS in orbit was measured in several months. Oh, we had food and oxy for a lot longer, but it was the limited supply of water we had which was a surprise. Normally we recycled waste water but the recycler had gone down the day before the war started, and we had no replacements for it. When we had drunk the last liter, we’d be dead within a week, dehydrated.

There were only four of us up here, all guys, so even if we could stay alive forever we couldn’t keep humanity going, not that I wanted to myself.

We tried all the radio frequencies and heard a few random radio signals, but after three days those ended. That was three weeks ago and we hadn’t heard anything since.

Time, our time, humanities and our personal time, was running out.

I figured I’d keep a blog of the final weeks. Who knows maybe someone WOULD survive down there and in a few thousand years we’d be back throwing people up into orbit again. They’d find my blog and could read how civilization ended.

I’m sure that SOMEWHERE, someone, probably some government officials, would have prepared as safe bolthole, but then, imagine a world populated only by politicians. Probably best it ends now.

At any rate, the best I can figure is the whole thing started when a meteor streaked in from space, grazing Earth’s atmosphere from east to west and landing smack dab in the middle of Moscow. It was a natural disaster, of course, but since it appeared to come from somewhere over Alaska, some Russian defense minister decided it was a bomb from the USA and pushed his buttons. The USA responded quickly with it’s own missiles and within 45 minutes every nuclear power on Earth was playing “OK, watch me kill all those infidels/Muslims/Americans/people I’ve hated for generations (pick your favorite enemy and put in the right name) game.”

You can’t say humanity wasn’t warned from the beginning when the USA dropped the first small A-bomb on the Japanese to end World War II. But humanity isn’t very good at learning obvious lessons.

So that’s how it started and how it’s ending. It’s been four weeks now and I think the dust is starting to clear a bit, but I’m sure the entire surface of Earth is a hellish jungle of twisted and puddled metal and radiation laced dust, dirt, and water that nothing is going to live through.

So...goodbye to whomever reads this. I’m going to take a short walk out the lock without a suit on. It should be over within a minute or less.

* * * *

A long time later a small lizard came up from the deep home cave warren the tribe lived in and poked his head out into the fresh air. Flicking his tongue out he smelt it. It tasted good.

The sky was blue, the plants were green and lush, the sun was warm and bright and the air was thick with flies and other bugs just waiting to be eaten. He thought, I wonder why the hive master said you’d die out here? Seems fine to me. I’m going to move my family here. I’m tired of living in the dark and eating mushrooms, I want to try some meat!

At that he snapped at one of the flying bugs that came too close and swallowed it. Tasty! This is going to be good for us. This world is going to be perfect for us.



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