Children of the After: The Complete Series: A Young Adult Postapocalyptic Action and Adventure series (3 page)

Instead of the luxury custom apartment their dad had designed, there was a great black void into nothingness. Just beyond where Jack sprawled against what appeared to be the overturned book case, was a great hole where once had been the living room. Had Jack ventured just a few steps further, he would have fallen into its depths. The wall of windows appeared to be missing and everything was dark and dirty. Then it was gone. The image fading from his vision.

Empty blackness returned and with it Jack came into the vault again, but he was bleeding. Something had got him out there in the dark. Looking to the door, Will watched for Jack’s attacker and was forced to witness the destruction to their home again and again as lightning flashed somewhere in the beyond. Nothing was as he remembered it. No longer were their pictures on the wall. No longer was there a home at all. It was gone. All of it.

Will didn’t know whether to be hurt or angry as the doorway was sealed closed once more with a mattress and metal bed frame, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. If it were aliens, monsters, or anything else wasn’t important now. Will knew they weren’t safe. Mom and Dad weren’t here to take care of them. The police weren’t coming like they said they would in an emergency at school when Officer David visited his class. No one was left. Nothing was left. He couldn’t breathe.

It had taken quite some time to get Will calmed down, and hours further until the storm quieted outside. Even then Jack hesitated more than an hour before working up the courage to open the doorway again. But the case remained the same. They couldn’t stay in the vault. Especially now that Will didn’t feel secure and the door was torn off. There was no helping it. They needed to find supplies and possibly a better suited place to stay. He hadn’t expected the impact on Will of seeing their home destroyed. In all honesty he hadn’t even considered that their home
would
be destroyed.

With a dull ringing in one ear and a mild headache, Jack rose from his bunk to see a small sliver of light shining through the doorway beneath the mattress. It was finally morning outside. Rising, he noted Sam’s approach and turned to face her. Will had exhausted himself from crying earlier and had fallen asleep more than an hour before. As such, Jack barely whispered to his sister as she came nearer.

“You should really think about brushing your hair once in a while. I mean really? What will all the boys think at school?” he teased, trying to relieve the tension.

“Ha ha, dork,” she said, striking a pose with her best duck face. “I still got it.”

Smiling at one another, they each spent a moment in self-reflection thinking of the days when school had seemed a nuisance. Jack wished now that he could go and hang out with his friends, or even take an algebra exam. Instead, however, he focused again on his little sister and began whispering anew.

“I think I should look around before Will wakes back up, just in case.”

“Ok, I’ll stay near the door, but I’m not going far. I don’t want Will to wake up and both of us be gone. If he panics and has an attack, there isn’t anything we can do for him. We got lucky earlier.”

“I know, Sam. You did really good with him. He needs you.”

“He needs you too, so be careful out there. OK?”

“I will,” Jack replied, before turning back towards the makeshift door.

Stepping through the hole in the wall, where once stood the only door to their steel home, Jack found himself in a world that was both new and vaguely familiar. Angles and corners were recognizable, but to every surface mold and mildew clung, entwined with rust stains and other filth. Broken glass covered nearly every inch of the floor, and girder beams and piping jutted down from the ceiling and out of the walls where great holes and cracks devastated the structure. Where before had been their kitchen, a great hole had collapsed, taking not only the kitchen, but also half of the living room with it when it fell away. That whole corner of their apartment was obliterated, and missing altogether, Jack was able to look out through the gaping hole in the building. What he saw beyond was even more appalling.

From the thirtieth story of their building, they used to have a nice view of the Chicago skyline, but such was not the case any longer. Out from the great hole in the wall, Jack looked upon a twisted shadow of the city he remembered. Where once stood great buildings of gleaming steel and glass, now remained little more than twisted and gnarled steel skeletons, some leaning into their neighbors for support. Below them, where once communities and neighborhoods had sprawled endlessly like an ocean of rooftops, was a blackened wasteland of burnt ash and charred husks. From his vantage the entire city had been obliterated, and nothing remained but the tortured carcass of a once living and breathing metropolis. The whole scene spoke of death and desolation. There was literally nothing left. At least, not that he could see.

Looking out, he located the ruins of the school he had attended, the school where most of his classmates would have been when he was locked in the vault with his siblings. Now nothing remained of the building but blackened piles of bricks.

Swallowing the lump in his throat, he turned and traced along the side of the wall shared with the vault, wanting to see something different. Anything. Rounding the corner at the end he was surprised to find the hall to their bedrooms more or less intact. There was a wide crack up through the drywall on each side of the hall, and a girder supporting the floor above had collapsed near the end of the hall where their parents’ bedroom was, but otherwise it was fairly clear of debris. Cautiously, he entered the hall.

Carefully testing each step, he worked down the passageway to the first room. Opening the door he found the bathroom almost untouched from the damage. There were two cracked tiles in the shower and the mirror above the sink was cracked as well, but otherwise only a layer of dust showed proof of months of neglect. Smiling to himself he pulled a drawer open upon the vanity and plucked from it a hairbrush for Sam. Though he wanted nothing more in that moment than to brush his teeth, even without water, he did not want to worry Sam by keeping her waiting.

Stepping cautiously back out into the hall he approached Sam’s door next. Here the crack in the wall was its widest, and trying the door he found it jammed. Taking a risk, he pressed his back against the wall opposite the door and gave it one solid kick. The door exploded inwards, coming dislodged in its frame to swing wide and collide with the wall within. Again, Jack was surprised. Inside, not only was Sam’s room almost flawless, but her posters still clung to the walls everywhere, and her most prized possession, her laptop, still sat open in the center of her bed as if she had just left the room. The whole thing was surreal.

Inspecting the room from the hall, he watched as the curtains blew, proving that the glass there was broken as well, before he moved on to the next room. Trying his own bedroom door he found it easy to open and swung the door wide. Here the surprising lack of damage ended, as a large section of his bedroom wall was missing where the window had once been. From the hall he could see the mangled fire escape outside, and an idea occurred to him. Crossing the room cautiously, he paused each time the broken glass crunched beneath his shoes, afraid the sound might be the floor giving way beneath him. Reaching the damaged wall, he leaned out to inspect the damage. Where before had been a row of six solar panels that powered the vault, now only three and a half remained. Even those remaining, however, were badly cracked and damaged. Pieces of glass and a foil-like substance hung here and there from their shattered surfaces, and several wires hung out into the day air, severed from whatever connections no longer existed. Jack could not believe the vault’s power had lasted this long with such extensive damage, but was thankful it had. It looked like the panels were one stiff wind away from crumbling altogether.

Leaving the ruined wall behind he turned back the way he had come, and within seconds he was moving along to the next room. Pushing this door open, he admired the large superhero cutouts that adorned the walls and the brightly colored paint. Smiling in remembrance, Jack recalled the day he painted the room with Mom before Will had been born. She had been so excited, and he had been a proud expecting brother to help. How his role had changed from that time when he was nine until now was amazing. To think that it had been more than seven years already was almost unbelievable.

Like his own room, much of the exterior wall here was missing, revealing a stout steel beam. Broken glass and other debris littered the floor, but even so, Jack carefully picked out a path through the room and collected one of Will’s toys from the floor. It was dusty and dirty, but otherwise no worse for wear, and brushing it off he revealed its shine. It was what his dad called a throwback toy, some sort of transforming robot that had been popular when Dad was a kid that had resurfaced and become popular again decades later. All that mattered was the fact that Will had loved the toy, and Jack could bring it to him to have when he woke up. Turning, Jack left Will’s room with an expectant grin.

At the end of the hall was one more bedroom. Standing between them was the collapsed steel girder from above, but it appeared easy enough to circumvent. The only thing in Jack’s way was himself. The last time they had seen their father was just outside the vault and that thought combined with the fact that he had yet to stumble upon him, led Jack to fear that what remained of him might be in the bedroom beyond the door ahead. The thought was irrational. He knew it was more than unlikely just his imagination and fear, but he couldn’t shake the feeling. But after several moments he decided that there could be something worse than finding his father’s remains, and that would be Will finding them. Or no one ever knowing that their father
was
there. That too, Jack supposed, was a terrible thing. Closure would be better.

Edging his way around the huge steel beam, Jack approached the door to his parents’ room and reached out for the knob. Giving it a quick turn he shoved the door inward but it barely budged, moving only an inch or two before stopping. As he shoved harder it gave way a couple more inches. Finally putting his shoulder to the door, Jack shoved hard with all his weight as the door and whatever lay behind it slid open with a grinding sound.

Peering beyond, it was obvious that there was no reason to go any further. Past the door was a pile of rubble several feet thick that encompassed the whole of the room. Piled in heaps of broken construction materials-- wire, drywall and lumber from the floors above had completely collapsed down upon his parents’ room, obscuring everything beneath. If their father
was
there, they would never know it. Jack doubted there was any chance his parents were alive, especially after the view of the city beyond, but Will could still have hope. He deserved it. And Jack wasn’t about to be the one to take it away from him. Sam either, for that matter. She had said that she believed them dead, but Jack wasn’t certain she really meant it.

Clutching the toy robot tighter, Jack turned and strode back the way he had come, cautiously picking his steps until he rounded the corner into what remained of the living room once again. From there he skirted what furniture remained before looking to the open doorway of the vault. Therein stood his younger sister with a beaming smile on her lips. She had been worried, he could tell, but her fears were now eased. He was glad for her and sad at the same time. Even though she felt better at his return, she would not feel better when he told her they needed to leave.

* * * * *

Samantha watched as Jack walked out of the vault, and witnessed as his expression and demeanor changed within seconds of looking out of the hole where the kitchen had once been. She needed to know what he had seen, so she waited until he left the room before sparing a glance back to assure herself that Will was still asleep, and stepped out into the apartment herself. What she saw there made her physically sick to her stomach. Had it not been more than half a day since she had eaten, she likely would have retched, but instead a knot formed in her stomach as tears fell freely from her eyes for what seemed like the millionth time that day.

Out ahead where once the city’s skyline had been magnificent, especially at sunset, now remained only disfigured and crippled fixtures of wilted and twisted steel that reached to the heavens like the fingers of arthritic hands in prayer. Beneath them, the piles of ash and tinder that were once homes blended with the asphalt roads and parking lots. Like the night before, the day down below was nothing but empty blackness. In the months that they hid away in the vault, the world around them had burned. The scene reminded her of the book report she had done on Hiroshima at the beginning of the school year. She wondered if they were being poisoned by radiation this very moment.

Hearing a sound from somewhere behind her, Sam returned to the vault after wiping away her tears. Finding Will still asleep, she returned to the doorway and waited patiently, listening for any sound that could mean that Jack was returning. She didn’t wait long.

Maybe fifteen minutes after she returned to their shelter, Jack appeared once more, a gaudily colored robot toy in his clutches, and she couldn’t help but smile at his thoughtfulness. Before the event she had doubted that he cared about her or Will at all, he was so busy with track and his friends, but now she had no doubts. Beaming at him, she was again surprised as he pulled out a much needed and all too familiar item from his back pocket that caused the corners of her mouth to rise to the point they actually hurt.

“You know you’re awesome right now, right?”

“Right now?” Jack replied. “I’m always awesome, just you’re too dorky to see it.”

“Whatever, you’re still the hero of my vanity, like for reals,” Sam said, taking on the best valley girl voice she could manage.

“If you say so, dork. But you’re welcome.”

“And I’m pretty. Tell me I’m pretty, Jack. Like you used to when I was little,” she mocked.

“Pretty weird.”

It felt good to joke as Sam began to pull the brush through the insane tangles in her hair. A good wash and conditioning would go a really long ways, but for now this would have to do.

* * * * *

Blinking the sleep from his eyes, Will rolled to his side to find himself in Sam’s bunk, with the open door of the vault straight across from him. As usual, Sam and Jack were whispering just outside the door. Rolling further towards the edge of the bunk, he stopped abruptly when something hard dug into his side. Reaching down he dislodged the hard angular object and pulled it free from his sheet and blanket. His heart leapt into his throat.

Down to every detailed sticker he inspected the robot, his eyes and mouth wide in disbelief. Sam walked in, and then Jack too, but Will barely noticed as he turned the toy over and over in his hands. Bending the robots joints and posing him as if he’d just won a wrestling match with both arms up in the air, Sam’s giggle caught his attention as he looked up from his toy.