Heat blaring from the sun onto a lonely tractor in the middle of an open field. Hanish Johnson stepped off the tractor. He was a stout man with short, honey-toned hair. A beard to match. He adjusted his dark blue plaid shirt and brushed his hands down his blue jeans. He put his hand over his eyes to look up at the sun. “No birds,” he stated, clearing his throat. He glared at his house, and an empty sound rang out. “It’s about 10 a.m. now,” he started walking towards the house. There wasn’t a thing following him, but he started to pick up his pace as if there was. He grabbed the rickety hinges of his wooden door and slammed it shut.

“Honey,” a heavenly voice rang out. “Is that you?”

Hanish looked over to a slim woman figure on the couch. She was dead staring at the TV.

“Who else the fuck would it be?” Hanish said in a harsh tone.

“You shouldn’t use such foul language,” the voice said. The woman turned to face him. Her face was pale and her eyes sunk in. It was the face of a woman who had been weathered over the years, but she was as young as he was.

“Ah, I am sorry Alesha, darling,” he said, rubbing his neck and bowing to her. She moaned and smiled. He approached her, placing his hand on her frail shoulder. He leaned down to kiss her forehead. It was cold. He peered back, and her eyes were bloodshot and dazed. Her head snapped back as if it wasn’t attached to her spine. Her mouth was swollen and sewn shut. He shot back, and his eyes watered. He forgot. He looked to the home that was once bright and lively, but it was now dull and dimly lighted. His wife, who had once been lively, was laying in his arms. She was void of life and was a hollow woman now. Her dress was tattered, and she smelt of rot. It was foul. He felt his breath catch. He laid her down on the couch and wiped the tears from his eyes. He opened his eyes to see an empty couch. She was never there. She hadn’t been in a long while.

He took a deep breath and walked into the room in the far left of him. In the middle of the room was a bed that was rickety and almost falling apart. He sat down and grabbed a gun from out from under the pillow that lay in the center of the bed. He placed it in his lap and stared at his door.

Two years before

Alesha, who was sitting at the table, held a ladle in her hand, and she was chewing on a carrot she held in her other hand. She was staring at the TV watching a woman talking about a homemade broccoli cheddar soup on the TV.

“My love, you’re going to go blind staring at the TV,” Hanish said as he was sitting on the floor fixing the coffee table next to the television.

“Oh, hush up.” She smiled at him, and they both started laughing. Their laughter quickly died as the TV started to flash—it was a news outbreak.

A man holding a piece of paper stared at them through the TV. His voice was deep, and his hair was a dusty gray toupee. “We interrupt this television program with an emergency press conference from the President of the United States.”

Hanish and Alesha both looked at each other and then moved themselves in front of the TV. The screen turned to an older man with faded black hair, and his face stuck in a half turn.

President Ronald Vance. He wasn’t a smart man. Hanish had known that the election was a joke in the state—so many promises were broken. He was going to make farm life easier for Americans, but it had only gotten worse. Hanish didn’t trust the man at all. He had broken all the trust Americans had by saying on TV that Americans needed to take over the Middle East. Hanish knew then that a war was going to start. It was only three months into Vance’s presidency that it happened. The first attack was at a military base in Texas, and then it had just escalated from there.

Soon, in the first year, the death toll was 100,000 Americans. Hanish didn’t know how many people were left. He looked up to the mantle for a moment. A picture of a young man in a gold frame. The man mirrored Hanish, but his hair was shaved. This was his brother, Leon. Leon had only been 26 when the war broke out, and he was drafted. It took three weeks before Hanish and his family got the news his brother had been killed. Hanish had lost over 50 family members, close and far, since.

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My fellow Americans, it’s with a heavy heart that I have to inform you that…” Vance cleared his throat, looking down at the ground, taking a deep breath before looking back to the camera with almost tears in his eyes.

“We advise people to evacuate major cities as we speak and…” A noise caught his eye. “Get him out of here,” Vance whispered to the bodyguard standing to his left. The man peered off-screen, and sounds of a struggle were going on. Blood splattered onto Vance’s face, and he looked up in horror off-screen. The cameraman was knocked down in a loud bang, and a blurry image of a man flashed across the screen as the president was knocked to the floor. In the background, the sounds of screams broke out. The camera went black.

“What’s going on?” Her eyes swelled with tears. Hanish grabbed her tightly to him. The screen flashed back to the original man on the TV. He touched his ear, his eyes wide, looking to the TV.

“We advise people to flee for your lives. If you have a shelter, get to it now!”

“We prepared for this, my dear. We will be okay.” He looked to the window. The smoke was off in the distance. There was a stillness in the air. It was enough to make you choke. Hanish didn’t know if they would be truly okay. It was true he had prepared for the end of the world, but was he prepared for this? He grabbed his wife’s fragile hand, directing her to the basement door. He opened it and down the stairs they went. Before them was a steel door with a pin pad attached to it. Hanish placed his hand on the pad, lifting his fingers, and he typed in a code: 0407. The code was their anniversary.

He remembered her back then on that day. She had more rose color to her lips, and her hair was slightly shorter back then. She smiled so brightly, coming down the aisle to him. She wore a low-cut gown and a veil that was a shoulder length. She was gripping for dear life to her bouquet. He was so focused on her and how beautiful she looked on that day. He could feel time stop in that moment. He grabbed Alesha close to him as they entered their bunker. Food in cans lined the wall, and there were supplies stacked to the roof. She ran her hand over a can of powdered eggs. “Hanish,” she whispered.

Present Day

He never expected that all this would happen. For years, they had been safe, but when Leon died, he knew he had to make a change. So what did he do? He went to the store, stocking up on all prepper supplies he could. He found bread, unprocessed rice, and powdered eggs. He paced back and forth. He left a $20 bill on the counter with the other money he had left in the last 6 months. He went out to the parking lot. He looked around for people or those creatures. He seemed in the clear.

He makes sure to test his farm land every day for any changes in the ground. He couldn’t risk radiation poisoning. When the wave hit, he found his way to the local army base just to find it abandoned. He felt like he and Alesha might be the only people left. He hoped it was just them.

He drove down the road, looking left and right for a sign. He saw the base in the distance. Its gate seemed broken; his curiosity got to him. He pulled up far from the base. He got out of his car and slowly walked up to the building.

He walked past the guard area. The container essentially was empty. There were signs that not long ago, there had been someone there but not in a while. A half-eaten snack cake on the counter in front of a camera that had a cracked screen. The chair was broken and dried blood stained the leather and polyester. Hanish ran his finger along the metal bars and leaned over to click the keyboard in front of the camera, but nothing happened. The computer was dead. Where was the person who managed this station? He wondered as he looked around. He held his gun in front of him and walked through the broken gate doors when he saw a person hunched over a window in one of the buildings. He slowly approached the body and poked it. A moan rang from the body, but it might have just been air leaving the body. He remembered Aleaha telling him that she used to be a nurse, that death took 20 minutes.

For that was the last moment of breath before the body would start decaying. He pushed the body over, and it was a young woman. No older than 19, she had piercing blue eyes, and they were glaring at him, bloodshot and empty. This woman was gone. He looked at her name tag on her suit. It read “Harrison.”

He grabbed onto her and pulled her from the window, and laid her on the ground. Her body was purple and black. Her left leg was missing, and bone was snapped from it. “What happened here?” Hanish asked himself. He looked into the building, and it looked empty. He grabbed the frame and lunged himself in. “Anyone here?” he spoke, but the only response came from the echo from the room. There was an eerie feeling coming from the room. He could feel the memory of why this base was empty. Something truly terrifying happened here. He reached into his back pocket and put his gun back, his pistol.