Sorrow Read online

  ENDLESS

  PART ONE: SORROW

  By Glen Johnson

  -Sinuous Mind Books-

  Published by Sinuous Mind Books

  Sinuous Mind Books

  Copyright © Glen Johnson 2019

  Cover design by Sinuous Mind Books

  Glen Johnson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead or undead is entirely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form without Sinuous Mind Books or Glen Johnson’s prior consent. Except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles.

  Typeset: Caecilia LT Std/Italic

  For –

  Curt Clark

  Lover of chicken and mayo sandwiches and grumpy cats (and hater of birds).

  Apocalypse is the eye of a needle, through which we pass into a different world.

  George Zebrowski

  Please note that I am an English author, so I use English spelling throughout. You will see doubled letters (cancelled), ou’s (colour), ‘re’ (centre) ce’s (licence), ise’s (realise), yse’s (paralyse) as well as a few other slight variations from American spelling.

  The locations in this book are a fusion of real and imagined, but the events and characters are merely a fabrication of my overactive imagination.

  Glen Johnson

  ENDLESS

  Twelve years have passed since the fires of World War III abated. The clouds of ash have settled. The world as we know it is gone, most of civilization was wiped out by the weapons of war, disease, and then starvation. Nothing grows in the barren soil, and the trees slowly give up and collapse into the ash. The world is a windswept, sterile wasteland, populated by nomadic wanders who scavenge what they can to survive, settling in makeshift villages as they migrate during the seasons.

  A few read the signs and had the money to hide away below ground, oblivious to the happenings above. As billions died, they continued with their lives inside their metal bunkers, unbeknown to the hardships and struggles going on above.

  However, nothing lasts forever, and those who survived the end of the world have to, at some point, emerge back to the surface and rejoin the struggle for survival.

  The Underground Bunker

  1

  The ever-present droning of the last remaining engine sounded like it was struggling – rattling and chugging. The lights flicker constantly, and a few times it felt like the air scrubbers were hardly working – giving the air a moist, humid feel. Lately, he woke with the stirring of a headache – a bad sign. He’d run out of new filters. He’d been removing and cleaning the old one for two months. He could feel the difference. There was a manual Kearny air pump, but he didn’t have the strength to stand for hours turning it, and one small filter hardly had an effect on the large bunker.

  Isaac Baptiste stretched his lithe, six-foot body and rolled over. He was pale and lethargic – he hasn’t seen sunlight for almost twelve years, and he ran out of vitamins last year, and canned and dried fruit five months ago. He tried to keep himself fit with the small gym, but he simply didn’t have the energy since the air started to become stagnant.

  He absentmindedly reached for his wife. Eleven years later and he still instinctively went to touch her each morning – to caress her slender shoulder. That is until the memory came pouring back like a stab to the heart.

  Each morning he has to relive the sorrow.

  He sat up and leaned against the cold metal wall. He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. Most days he slept, trying to hide inside a dream, filled with memories and images of the past, rather than live in the bleak present.

  In his dreams, he was outside, on the surface, strolling through the long grass, with his family at his side, and the warm sun on his face, and sweet, fresh air filling his lungs – a peaceful world. A perfect world. A dream.

  Then he woke up in the stuffy, subterranean bunker, where lately; his breathing was a struggle.

  He stares across the sleeping chamber to where his five-year-old daughter’s bed used to rest – now long gone. However, the colourful felt-tip drawings still litter the dull metal walls – he couldn’t bring himself to wipe them away. They were all that was left of Jessica – his small princess.

  Well, strictly speaking, that wasn’t true. His wife and daughter’s bodies were still present, wrapped in plastic and encased in airtight containers inside the storeroom. There was no way he could leave the bunker and bury them, or had the facilities to cremate them, so they had to remain – a constant reminder.

  When they died, they took a huge chunk of his heart with them.

  A few times he stood over their makeshift coffins and considered opening them up. Just seeing them one more time. He knew he would regret it the moment he did.

  They were folded into the containers because they were slightly too small – he had to wait for the rigor mortis to leave the muscles first.

  No coffins were stored because death wasn’t something they even considered – everything they had was built for the purpose of prolonging their lives, death wasn’t part of the equation.

  There was no closure. No funeral to move on from. One minute they were his whole-life – just the three of them against the world. The next they were packed away like unused clothes in the attic – or more appropriately, the basement.

  He made shrines out of their coffins – piling up Jessica’s toys to cover the ugly plastic container and clothes and blankets over his wife’s.

  On a number of occasions, when the pain and loneliness became too much, he found himself standing in front of them, contemplating joining them. Tears streaking his face and sobs racking his body. He never had the courage to end it – the fear of the unknown was even worse than the loneliness and guilt.

  He was never a big believer in the afterlife. Now he hoped he was wrong. He had to believe that one day he would see them again. He needed to believe they were together in heaven, waiting for him.

  A few times he had dragged his mattress in and slept next to them. A macabre scene.

  Most of the time he would simply sit and talk with his wife as if she was there in the room – alive – not cocooned in a makeshift plastic coffin. He also read stories to his daughter. In his memory, he could hear her laughter and questions. In reality, there was only silence and pain.

  He struggled to twist and place his bare feet on the cold floor. The heating was the first thing to break. It wasn’t cold enough to see his breath, due to being underground where the temperature was constant, regardless of the weather above.

  “Morning Nat and Jess,” he muttered – a morning ritual, said more out of habit than feeling now after so many long years.

  He reached for a mini iPad that was connected via Bluetooth to the bunkers sound system and pressed play. The Prodigy’s – The Fat of the Land album was paused from when he went to bed. The song: Funky Shit started to play loudly over the hidden speakers.

  He didn’t like the quiet and stillness of the bunker, with only his footfalls shuffling around. Whenever he was awake, and sometimes while he slept, he had music bouncing off the metal walls.

  The sound system was connected to a four-terabit hard drive and held thousands of albums. It could be months before he heard the same song playing again.

  The loud music vibrated in his chest.

  He wasn’t sure what month it was; he’d given up keeping track after his daughter died, and then his wife from a broken heart. All he had to do was check his computer, bu
t he never bothered turning it on any more. It was full of photos and videos from a better time – a lost era.

  They’d been in the bunker for just over nine months when Jessica started coughing. It started as something simple. At first, it was more of an annoyance, with her waking up at night and not being able to sleep.

  They were both unprepared for illness. He was a partner at a big-city investment bank, and Natasha was a lawyer for a large firm that specialized in medical malpractice. Any problems due to health and they would visit the family doctor.

  They had to make do with the six medical books they had purchased, and the medical information they had downloaded onto their computers – mostly to do with survival and not everyday sickness. Every symptom Jessica had, that they entered, came back with more questions, as if the company that created the medical program was more concerned about being sued, and refused to give a definite answer.

  They couldn’t just tap a question into Google, or ask Alexa or Siri, there was no longer any Internet that was one of the first things to go when the war started.

  They watched as Jessica got worse, and the mild cough turned into a hacking one with spots of blood in her phlegm. It only took a week before she was at the point of no return, and all they could do was make her last few days as comfortable as possible.

  Natasha wanted to open the bunker, to go and look for help. They spent hours arguing about whether it was safe.

  They took it hard, knowing there was nothing they could do apart from watch. A parent should never outlive their child.

  The medicine they had was useless. They even tried antibiotics. All it achieved was giving Jessica a rash over most of her body, and severe diarrhoea that accelerated her weak state.

  Natasha blamed Isaac for being unprepared – he designed the bunker and stocked it with provisions – he was the supposed expert.

  Isaac blamed Natasha; she was a lawyer in a firm that sued doctors; surely, she had to know something.

  They only had each other to blame and vent towards.

  Jessica’s body lay in state in the workshop, flat out on the long work bench. Natasha refused to allow him to place her in the plastic container. Isaac allowed her to mourn. Besides, he had tried, and even two days later rigor mortis still prevented him from moving his daughter’s stiff limbs.

  Natasha withdrew into herself and refused to eat – curled up in a catatonic state on their daughter’s bed. She didn’t even have the strength to cry anymore, or visit her daughter’s body. It didn’t take long after she’d stopped drinking water. After four days, her organs started to shut down. Isaac didn’t think to store any intravenous solutions in their provisions. Without an intravenous drip, it was impossible to keep her hydrated.

  Once again, he felt useless for not being able to do anything – he’d watched the two most important people in his world die before his eyes, and he was powerless to help.

  Now Isaac was all alone in a bunker full of memories.

  When he entered the bunker, he had hope – hope they would survive. They had money and a plan to get them through as a family. Millions of other people the world over had perished in the first few weeks of fighting from the hundreds of atomic blasts and weapons of war. Then tens of millions more from the radiation storms. He wished he’d gone quickly along with the others aboveground. All he’d done was prolong his suffering.

  “Naive,” he muttered as he stood to go to the toilet. He rocked slightly, due to feeling lightheaded.

  The air’s so thin and musty; he thought.

  He knew he had two choices – give up and suffocate when either the machines or air-scrubbers finally failed, or leave the bunker and try to survive aboveground, in the post-apocalyptic world that he hasn’t set foot on for almost twelve years.

  2

  Subconsciously, he already made up his mind. For the last few days, he’d been collecting items together to take with him when he resurfaced. The workshop’s sides were covered in a collection of things he wasn’t sure about. Weight was a big issue. Apart from using the small gym, and walking around the bunker, he hadn’t done any real walking or exercise in over a decade – there is only so much he can carry.

  Isaac walked back to the kitchen. He pressed the button to turn on the small tank to draw up water from the natural freshwater spring far below the ground, which he then heated up to make coffee. He had to drink it black without sugar – he was running out of the basics. Now he was down to cheap freeze-dried coffee.

  The power was generated from two turbines below the bunker, which was placed in the flow of the underground spring.

  The food supplies were dangerously low. If it wasn’t for everything else going wrong, he probably only had enough food to last another two months at most.

  When they entered the bunker, they had a strict regime for food consumption each day, for the three of them. The food would last about ten years. However, after he found himself alone, the plan went out the window. He ate what he liked when he liked. And due to his depression, he ate even more.

  He wandered over and stood in front of the main computer screen, embedded in the living quarter’s metal wall. It stated the temperature aboveground was:

  However, that was it. The electronic equipment aboveground no longer registered radiation. It worked for the first four years then simply stopped overnight.

  Has the radiation dispensed? he wondered.

  To be fair the radiation indicator never registered any contamination, but the small icon vanished? It was there for a while, and then one day he noticed it missing. He was an investment banker, not an electrician, or I.T specialist – he had no idea what was wrong with it. Just like the rest of the bunker – like an aged, dying beast, it was slowly shutting down a section at a time. He had all the books and manuals for everything, but it might as well have been written in a different language for all the good it did him.

  Friday, he mused.

  Days blurred together and meant nothing belowground.

  The screen stated it was, July 5th 2031.

  When he purchased the bunker and had it shipped and buried in a piece of land his father left to him, he went for the best they could afford. They had cashed in all their shares and investments, liquidating all their resources to cash to buy what they needed.

  The music was on a random playlist, playing anything in the system’s database. Mumford & Sons – Sigh No More album kicked in, playing Little Lion Man.

  Isaac started to sing along. He knew every song in the database by heart. He walked back to the workshop where all the gear was spread out.

  “It’s not your fault but mine. And it was your heart on the line. I really fucked it up this time. Didn’t I my dear…” He spun around to the upbeat rhythm, spilling his coffee. The fast movement made his head spin, reminding him that the bunker was slowly breaking down.

  He leaned on the counter. He felt lightheaded.

  His mind flashed back to his father.

  Isaac’s father was a survivalist, and he grew up with it constantly drilled into him. His mother died when he was young. His father withdrew into himself and took Isaac – their only child – and hid in the hills. His father said the world could end at any moment – there were so many ways it could happen. He made Isaac repeat what he said, over and over, until he’d memorized his father’s paranoid ramblings. Even today he could recall every word.

  His voice became robotic, like a dull monologue.

  “Global warming, which would spiral out of control due to mankind’s influence, causing rising meltwater to cover most of the low-lying areas on the planet.”

  He could envision his father nodding his agreement as he oiled a gun. “What cities would be affected in Asia,” his father would ask as a test.

  “Low lying megacities, such as Bangkok, Jakarta, Shanghai, and Tokyo would be submerged,” Isaac would answer. He was homeschooled, but unlike the normal curriculum, he studied mostly subject referring to survival.

  His father woul
d simply make a grunting sound to state he wished water would swallow up those heathen cities now.

  “Continue,” his father would say.

  “The Yellowstone supervolcano could erupt. It’s the largest volcano on earth. So, experts state, it is rising at a rate of three inches a year. When it erupts, over two-thirds of America would become a toxic wasteland. The ash would cover the ground to over ten-foot in height for thousands of miles. The whole of earth’s atmosphere would be shrouded in thick ash that would block out the sun for months, maybe even years – everything green would die.”

  “Amen,” his father would mutter.

  “Continue.”

  “A sun flare – a coronal mass ejection, or CME, could send a wave larger than earth soaring through our solar system. On contact with us, the electromagnetic pulse would render all electrical devices useless. All utilities, such as water, power, and gas, along with all telecommunications will stop working. There would be no operational satellites or computers, and no working vehicles. Earth would be sent back to the middle ages.”

  “Apart from…?”

  Isaac would always roll his eyes, as he tried to remember the name.

  “Apart from any electrical device inside a… a… a-a f-faraday cage.”

  His father would make a tutting sound whenever his son stuttered.

  “Continue.”

  “A meteor on a mass extinction level, such is believed to have happened to the dinosaurs, could cause the same effects as the Yellowstone volcano eruption, but on a global scale.”

  “Those big lizards didn’t see it coming, but we will, won’t we son?”