Year of Writing 36 Untitled Apocalyptic fiction

2/5/12


We wait. The roads have cracked and sprouted green and still we wait. The buildings cough and sigh through broken hinges and still we wait. Some say he will come on a winged beast, large enough to block out the whiteyellow glare of the sun. Some say he will tunnel through the earth and burst through our bunker walls. Some say it is a she, a woman with lights in her fingers, with fire in her hair. They all agree that one day the iron and steel doors above us will be lifted, the chemical fog will dissipate, and we will stumble into the world once more.

I was born here in this steel and rivet cistern, like so many others around me I have known nothing but its cool grey embrace. It was built in the before times, the green times, when people used words like "precaution" and "perhaps." Now everything is in past tense, unless we speak of the deliverer. It is not small, as cisterns go, once, I walked the entire oval of its perimeter - starting at the solid metal plate locking the ladder and got back in about 25 minutes. I got a lot of strange looks that day - we generally stay to our areas of the cistern unless there's an all-call, and that means something serious has happened, which is not very often. Nobody talks about who built our prison, our home - but most of the manuals and literature in here is marked with military insignia; the U and S intertwining around an angry looking bird of some kind. One of the men who controls the ladder told me that birds like that used to be all over the sky. It seems impossible. But then again, so does the sky itself.

Nobody younger than 16 has ever been up the ladder, and even when you reach the age of adulthood, only the rovers go up and out. They rarely come back. When I was younger, it was all I thought about, how incredible it would be to see the world outside, to be freed from the cold artificial brightness of these magnetometer bulbs if only for a short journey. Daydreaming, I would trace outlines of the buildings people told stories about, with their wires and windows, in the dust of the cistern floor. But as time passed, and I got caught up in the daily rhythm of work, eat, sleep - those dreams were shoved to the back of my consciousness. The only things that seemed to matter were the daily rations, the cot behind the generators, and my knife.

The knife was very old. My mother said that before he had gone up, my father told her to give it to me if he didn't come back. That was seven years ago. She thinks that the knife was first owned by my father's grandfather - it has a hilt made of antler and the initials G.G.C. on the blade. I don't know what either means.