Entry – 2 part I

7th May 2355

I woke up pretty early in the morning owing to Husky’s howling. It was odd since the number of break-ins after the war were zero. What else can be expected when all of the population in the world has been obliterated. I was able to save a few and the civilization was not all lost. I went to the door cam to check and the sight was not soothing. A storm was brewing in the horizon and a storm could never be a good sign.

The last storm was a few months ago in erstwhile New Minnesota and it wreaked havoc for two whole weeks. We don’t have rainy storms anymore, there’s no humidity outside, for obvious reasons. The atmosphere had become very dense during the later part of the war. The results were disastrous. Humans, animals, plants, insects all started dying. There were massive piles of dead bodies, rotting away and no one to burn or bury those bodies. Governments were busy establishing their dwindling superiority.

The colder regions were the worst affected. Smog killed thousands every night till there were no more living left to die. The dead froze by the morning. All living entities would have choked or nuked to death if they had not been moved to an artificial environment. Some of us had seen this situation coming and had already built a huge underground vault in the then non-operational Cortez gold mine, artificially supplemented with plant life.

However, this vault was still restricted in size and only a few hundred could be settled. Although, there was something none of the brilliant minds could anticipate, these storms. Now, that the air was denser, all sorts of heavier particles floated around causing immeasurable damage to both living and man made. The storms just accelerated this damage exponentially.

I remember being outside the vault during one such storm, a hundred and fifty years ago maybe. I had planned a field trip to study the current environment for future reference. I had been searching for potential areas for a settlement for a long time but the radiation levels were still too high. It was during one of those runs, I was taking readings on my Geiger counter, when I saw the approaching storm from the corner of my eye. I packed up and ran inside a derelict high rise to save myself and my supplies. My next strategy was to hide in the basement which proved to be one of the best decisions in my life. These storms don’t just carry dust particles, they carry chips from stones and metal objects, whatever can float in the dense combination of smog and acid vapours.

The next morning, after the storm had died down, I thought to come out of hiding and finish the remainder of my task. The sight on ground shook me to my very core. Everything above the basement was ripped apart except the core steel frame with chunks of concrete that could not be ripped away. The rest of the area was ravaged in a similar manner and that was not the end. New crevices had formed and my Geiger counter spiked whenever I approached one of them.
I knew that day, our Earth was just one step away from the biblical end of days. Thankfully the war was over by that time as no one else was left to continue it. I returned back to the vault as soon as I could, the oxygen supply was running low.

To be continued…