The mountains don’t quite show the desolation of the city below. I guess you could say I was lucky I was on a work experience course in the radio station at the time of the bomb. Hearing your family die over the phone from radiation poisoning isn’t exactly pleasant though.
I’ve never seen people willing to walk into something so deadly. Most of the people at the radio station ran straight back to the city, hoping to save their families, even if they knew the inevitable had occurred. A lot of them just left in the night after 3 days and urged me to go with them, in hope of finding something; anything. They never returned though and I never heard anything of them ever again. The last guy left apart from myself shot himself in the head in the bathroom. There was a cut in his neck though… I don’t really want to think about it. The smell was so bad after a while that I had to move the body somewhere. I thought that only happened in movies.
The first couple weeks were the hardest by a long way. I’m not going to lie in saying I cried a lot. Knowing a family member has died is a harrowing feeling, something most people experience, yet can’t explain. Knowing all of my family had died in that moment or in the weeks following in the most traumatising way possible is something I’m surprised I even lived through. In a way, I should have relished the supply levels during that time though, as we had plenty to go around during that time. Now I’m lucky if I can salvage a tin of something. Same with the internet, except much faster. Any and all infrastructure was down within a week if I was lucky, so I spent a lot of that first week just downloading anything and everything onto as many devices as I could.
The radio is unusually good company on the other hand. Just talking all of my feelings into that microphone seems to be therapeutic in a way, which helps my sanity after not seeing another human in about 700 days. At the start, I would just do brief radio checks and see if anyone responded; surely someone else must have a radio set up and be talking into it like I was. There must have been people who survived and needed help.
In a way I still hold that hope. Being the last man on this planet is such an infinitely sad prospect. Knowing that if I die, humanity dies. All knowledge ever found, all technology ever created… just, wasted. I couldn’t bear with that. After a while it became an addiction. I would talk about what I did that day, perform ridiculous stand-up comedy routines, sing terribly, swear repeatedly and play music I had saved. Never really got any responses though. Well, I never got any responses. I say really because I would occasionally get weird signals coming through and in my isolation I had some sort of hope that it was someone. At this point I just put it down to disturbances at the frequency or whatever.
I went on a very brief excursion to the nearest shop, which I had completely raided at this point, in hope of finding something more. I couldn’t go to any in the city, because the radiation would probably kill me, although I may have just said ‘fuck it’ at that point and done it anyway. It’s not like I had anything to live for. There were 6 cans of ravioli left and a few bottles of water. I hate ravioli. But if it’s there, I was going to take it. Most of the shelves were empty and whatever was left was out of date though.
I went on a ‘bunker raid’ as I called it after that, where I went to the ‘crazy people’s bunkers’ and just took whatever I could find. Once every few months I would stumble across a new one, but they would run out not too long after. Nothing. I found a half opened can of beans in the dumpster. They didn’t smell too bad, so it would have to do.
These supplies lasted me two weeks with severe rationing. I desperately searched for more supplies outside the city, but I never found anything. I had raided the entirety of every shop, bunker and dumpster in the area outside the city. I guess I never planned being alone and somehow staying alive for this amount of time. In the UK, they have this funny protocol where if submarine pilots came to the surface after a nuclear war to find it destroyed, they should tune to Radio 4 to see if anyone was alive or if there was a broadcast. Probably the only time I’d actually want to be in a submarine. I had tuned to that signal through a long range radio numerous times and never got anything, but it was fun, in a way.
So I tuned my broadcast to that, played some of my favourite songs and said ‘if anyone is out there, I would like them to know they were not alone and that should stay strong. You’re certainly stronger than me for staying alive all this time’. I put the lid of the laptop down and turned the broadcast off. I then got my phone out and dialled my mother’s number. Tears started streaming down my face while I said to the empty call ‘I’ll be with you soon’ and hung up.
Finally, I walked my way towards the door of the radio station and went in the direction of the city.
I've been looking around /r/writingprompts for a while now, although I have never gotten around to actually writing anything until now. My grammar and punctuation probably sucks, but I gave it a shot. If you so desire to give me advice, then I would be happy to receive it. Honestly, I'd be thankful if you even bothered to read it.
Thanks for reading it I guess.