Another Nuclear Apocalypse

My family and I are preparing for a farm-country fall fair or something, collecting bushel baskets in the pickup and carrying around armloads of pies. The fair is a big outdoor event, with a number of tents and trucks parked all over a field. Hundreds of people are socializing happily and eating well.

Then news comes over the radio that nuclear war has broken out. The news spreads fast through the crowd and the mood becomes sombre. People stand around their vehicles listening to the reports. After a short time has passed, the voice on the radio starts listing places that have been targeted and we hear with horror that a bomb will explode very near us in only a few minutes. People scramble to collect their children and find shelter, but we are in the middle of a giant field with only tents and trucks around us, and so all anyone can do is huddle on the grass and wait. A man near me asks me to look after his son if he dies.

Presently the bomb explodes. It's very hot and bright and skin burns. Everyone knows to wait for the big wind; it comes after a few seconds, and all the tents and some of the trucks fly away, spinning along the ground.

The man beside me has died. The boy and I get up and go looking for other survivors among flapping bits of tent and overturned vehicles. After walking only a few metres, we see three strange grey machines in a row, each with two green lights for eyes. They are apparently military machines - they see anything moving as the enemy. They fire on us three times. The boy is hit and dies; I crawl back and lie there among all the dead and wounded. My sister finds me there; she is unhurt and is walking through the crowd trying to help where she can. She brings me all the dying children to hold until they die. After a few hours I am surrounded by forlorn little bodies. I get up and limp around looking for more survivors.

There are other machines arriving which also kill everything that moves, this time big truckosaurus-like things that chase people down and chew them up. I have to hide behind concrete barricades and even crawl under heaps of detritus to escape from them.

Relief doesn't come. People go into the forest and start acting all feral. At one point some others and I have to stay up a tree for days to escape cannibals, who eventually kill each other. Some people band together and decide to build a stockaded town. The interior is all broken up into apartments.

Finally, somehow, I get back to Grandma's house in the city. I hide in the basement crawlspace behind the water heater until others from the family arrive - Grandma, Mom, my sister and my cousin. Some semblance of normalcy has returned to society. We take turns keeping watch out the back door, and the front is barricaded. For a while it's winter, with huge drifts of snow in the backyard, but eventually spring comes. I spend some time telling Mom about the horrible things that happened after the bomb. In my mind I keep hearing happy songs about flowers and sunshine, trying to cheer myself up.

I go out walking behind the house and see sculpted cherry trees in blossom. Some of the branches have been packed into a sort of transparent plastic rectangle, making a sign that looks like it's been carved out of blossoms. Petals are falling out the bottom of the sign. There is a drift of petals under the tree, and I am so in need of comfort that I roll in the pile of petals like a dog in garbage.

While stuffing my hair with petals, I hear an ambulance siren very nearby. It sounds like it's going to pass the house but stops before I can see it. The siren changes to music,and I smile because it's one of the happy songs I cheered myself up with during the terrible times. Then that song ends and another of my happy songs comes on. It's too much of a coincidence, and I sprint around the house, trailing petals, to see the source of the music.

There's a van parked beside Grandma's house. It's not an ambulance but has a siren and loudspeakers attached to it. There's a man standing beside the van. It takes me a while to recognize him, but then I see he is one of the bomb survivors/forest people. He was severely traumatised by the, er, trauma, and I had thought he was insane, but he has recovered and now lives in the van. He is very different than he was before the bomb, very nervous, but he is a whole person. I am very happy to see him, and can't stop patting him on the arm and complementing his cool van.