Chapter 4, The Worst Week of My Life This week was the worst week of my life. I broke a promise, betrayed a friend, and buried a family that lived in these mountains even longer than mine. They’d been here so long, I think they came with the mountain when the ice age pushed it here. It all began the day after I got the electricity working. I trudged through the debris of my flooded bunker pushing a shovel in front of me. The once white ceiling tiles now lay in soggy heaps on the floor, mixed with chunks of drywall and insulation. My boots squished into the mushy mess as I shoveled the mess into wheelbarrows, trying to clear a path through the chaos. The water pumps were useless in this watery tomb. The sludge blocked the pumps faster than I could clear them of the pasty mess. As I worked, I couldn't help but remember how my dad had meticulously crafted our bunker to look like a normal home when I was just a kid. Now all that effort was destroyed, and I knew rebuilding would be a daunting task. We had some leftover materials from those early projects, but nowhere near enough to redo all the walls. It was going to be a long and messy process, and in the end, the bunker would probably resemble more of a cave than a home. I finished clearing the hall in front of my room and was ready to start on the hall next to the inner blast doors. My room was still a wet slush filled mess, so I was sleeping in Dad’s office. It was spacious enough that I began to seriously consider making it my permanent residence. After all, being close to the bunker’s security system seemed like a reasonable precaution. I always felt like something was crawling through the halls. I was fairly certain there weren’t any monsters lurking in the shadows, but it gave me some peace of mind to be sleeping at a higher elevation than any possible monsters. I had just started shoveling the debris next to the inner blast doors into the wheel barrel when I heard a clanging sound. I let the cold metal shovel slide from my hands as I pressed my ear against the heavy steel inner blast doors. It couldn’t be coming from inside the garage, it had to be outside the main blast doors. I froze in place for a moment, wondering if it could be Dad. My heart thumped wildly as I took off at a full sprint towards the bunker control room. I had the surveillance monitors set back up in dad’s office, but the cameras outside were still in their protective concrete housing units. My boots echoed off the steel stairs as I charged up to the office. I had tried to extend the cameras before, but the lock-down wouldn’t let me. I flung myself across the room and plopped down in front of the computer, my fingers flying over the keyboard as I entered command after command to extend the camera above the main blast doors. And each time: Access Denied. Frustration surged through me and I felt my fist clench. I shoved back from the desk before I did something stupid, like punching the monitors. My eyes darted around for a solution, when they fell on the intercom microphone. I hadn’t tried to use it before because there hadn’t been anyone to talk with. I jabbed my finger down on the talk button. “Dad?” After a pause, I heard a familiar voice reply in a raspy whisper. “No, Johnny, it’s Tom Miller.” I slumped in my chair. Tom Miller was Mrs. Miller’s husband, and if you remember, Mrs. Miller ran the Gift Shop during the week. “Mr. Miller, have you seen my dad?” "Yes," he answered slowly. "I stopped at the grocery store on my way home from work. I saw your dad, and we talked for a few minutes. He said you two were up here for the weekend to install a new water heater.” My heart started to pound as hope grew inside me. "Do you know where he went?" "No, I'm sorry" he replied. “We didn’t get a chance to install the water heater, he needed something from the hardware store. I’ve been taking cold showers since.” “I might be able to help you with that.” “That would be great, but I can’t open the doors, the bunker went into a lock-down and I don’t have the codes to unlock it.” “There’s not an auto-lock on the escape hatch, its manual.” “How do you know about the hatch?” “Johnny, your father and I were best friends growing up. When I would stay over on weekends, we’d sneak out through the escape hatch and go up on the mountain to drink beer we stole from your grandfather.” “I already tried, something is blocking the hatch.” “I can clear whatever debris is blocking the hatch.” “Okay, I’ll meet you at the hatch.” “Johnny, put on your radiation suit, it’s still bad out here, and… I’m contaminated, and so are my boys. If you want to change your mind about letting us in, I’ll understand.” “Mrs. Miller is practically my mom, and I don’t turn my back on family. I’ll meet you at the hatch, Mr. Miller.” I didn’t get up right away. It had definitely been Mr. Miller's voice I'd heard, but I kept hearing my dad’s voice in my head saying, “Caution, Johnny, are you sure someone didn’t force him to come here?” I went to Dad's desk, and pulled open the bottom drawer with a squeak. I lifted the gunbelt with a holstered 9mm pistol from the drawer. The voice in my head was right, Mr. Miller asking to come in was suspicious. He would have known I wouldn’t even question opening the bunker if Mrs. Miller asked. So, either something was wrong, or Mrs. Miller was…was… I didn’t want to think about that. One of our two decontamination rooms is across the hall from the escape hatch. I pulled down one of the red Hazmat suits from the rack outside the room, and when I was certain everything was fastened correctly, I wrapped the gunbelt around my waist, and pulled the lower door to the escape tunnel open. I stepped inside, and locked the door behind me. If someone up there was forcing Mr. Miller to get me to unlock the bunker, they might get me, but they weren’t getting into the bunker. A spiral staircase circled up to the top platform. I was only a hundred feet beneath the surface at this spot in the bunker. I pulled the door shut behind me and climbed. The hatch at the top wasn’t directly above the stairs, but off to the side over a platform where you could reach up to the hatch to unlock it. I braced myself on the platform as I unlatched six of the seven locks that held the hatch shut, but before I unlocked the last latch, I drew the 9-mm from the holster. Mr. Miller must have heard the last lock because he immediately pulled the hatch open. When he looked down into the tunnel, he was greeted by me pointing the gun at him. Mr. Miller nodded. “Good boy, John, that’s what Steven would have expected from you.” I carefully stuck my head out of the hatch. I don’t know what I expected, but it was far worse than anything I could have imagined. The thick green forest was gone, replaced with a barren wasteland of what was left of once towering trees either leaning to the side, or completely on the ground, and a thick dirty ash covering everything, and the sky a dull gray. Mr. Miller looked really bad. Most of his hair was gone, and sores covered his face. His two boys stood behind him. The youngest, Timothy, was horribly burned from the shoulders up, and his hair gone. The older boy, Tommy, looked fine. I found out later that the boys had been playing hide and seek. Tommy had hidden in the root cellar. The root cellar was 12 feet deep, and separated into sections by thick brick walls. Tommy was hiding at the furthest point away from the entrance, behind three thick brick walls, and crouching on the ground behind a stack of potatoes. Timmy had gone down into the root cellar to look for his brother, but not finding him, was climbing back out of the root cellar when the nuke detonated. His head and shoulders were exposed when the super-heated air of the coming firestorm swept over him. He was knocked back into the root cellar, where his brother pulled him to the back before the firestorm arrived. Mr. Miller had been on his way home when the electromagnetic pulse from the nuclear weapon shut his car down. He knew what was happening and jumped over the embankment. A culvert with a fair amount of water draining down from the melting snow higher on the mountain provided him with enough protection to survive the firestorm, but he was still three miles from home. He ran the distance, but was outside too long as the radioactive fallout came down on him. “Lift Timmy down first,” I said, holstering my firearm. “I’ll carry him, and make sure you lock the hatch behind you.” They lowered Timmy down first, but it became obvious the boy couldn’t stand on his own; Tommy had been supporting him. I took Timmy in my arms and walked down the spiral steps. Tommy followed and once we reached the bottom, insisted I give his brother back. Mr. Miller ushered the boys into the decontamination room. He must have practiced this with my dad before. I could see my dad and Mr. Miller as boys making a great big game of this as my Grandfather barked instructions at them, and telling them how important it was to learn to do this. And Grandpa hadn’t been wrong. Mr. Miller motioned for the boys to place their clothes in a big red bag that would be stored in a lead box for 21 days, and then incinerated. He handed Tommy a bar of soap and instructed him to go through the decon shower and scrub thoroughly to get any radioactive particles off his body. Timmy had to be helped by his dad. I watched nervously from the sidelines, grateful that Mr. Miller knew exactly what to do. Stacks of white sweatshirts, sweatpants, and slip-on shoes were laid out on shelves to wear after decontamination. I went through the decon shower in my hazmat suit, making sure it was fully decontaminated before I checked everyone with a Geiger counter for radiation. Our hospital ward had a surgery room, examination room, pharmacy, a room with ten beds, and the quarantine room. The hospital ward was one of the few bunker rooms that had actually existed when the mine was active; it even still looked like a 1920’s hospital. In the bed closest to the nurse’s desk, actually my desk, was Mrs. Sticky - I’d been a lot younger when I named her. Mrs. Sticky was a medical practice dummy. I called her Mrs. Sticky because dad made me practice giving her shots and an I.V. Every weekend before Dad and I would head home, Mrs. Sticky would have some kind of medical emergency, and I’d have to treat her. Dad would make it fun though. I’d be in my room packing to go home when the loudspeakers would announce, “Code Sticky, Code Sticky, Doctor Johnny to the hospital.” I let Tommy decide which bed he wanted. He picked the bed as far from Mrs. Sticky as he could get. While Mr. Miller was getting his sons in bed and making them as comfortable as he could, I went to the desk piled with all the notebooks of notes I’d made from the first aid classes Dad had given me. I checked the red notebook, and then the black notebook; those were the notebooks I had for radiation sickness and burns. Once I’d refreshed my memory on what I needed, I went into the pharmacy to retrieve the required medicine. Mr. Miller was standing at the door when I finished collecting the medicine. I held the bottles out to him. “I don’t know where Grandpa gets all this stuff, but here. My notes say Timmy can have liquid morphine and potassium iodide, as well as a lot of intravenous fluid due to capillary fluid leakage and tissue swelling, but it’s your decision.” Mr. Miller looked at the bottles, but didn’t take them. “John, I have radiation poisoning and can barely see, but I know how well Steven trained you. He was the best paramedic the Forestry Service Search and Rescue team ever had. He wanted you to go to medical school, but there are no more medical schools. There’s nothing. We were bombed back to the medieval age. John, you are a Doctor now, and likely the only Doctor this mountain will see for many generations, it’s why I came here. Do what you can for my boys.” I wasn’t a doctor, or a medic, or an EMT. I’m 16 and can’t take the course until I’m 18, but dad kept his paramedic instructor credentials current. He can sign off on me going straight to the EMT written exams in two years. I know that with another two years of dad’s intense training, I would have been ready. Everyone in the family had an assigned job in the bunker, mine was to become the bunker’s medic, or even more if I’d decided to go to medical school, but I already knew it was Dad’s dream for me to become a doctor. I was hesitant to treat Timmy, but the world had blown itself up, so if not me, then who would. I didn’t need dad here to tell me Mr. Miller was going to die, and so was Timmy. Timmy needed to be in a pediatric burn ward, but I wasn’t going to just throw my hands up. I’d do my best. I cleaned his wounds, put an IV in through his foot; He was too burned to put it anywhere above the waist. Then I gave him the smallest dose of morphine recommended. I could always increase the morphine if needed to make Timmy more comfortable. And I gave him a low dose of potassium iodide, but we were way beyond that actually doing any good. And that was it, there wasn’t anything else I could do. I left Mr. Miller sitting next to Timmy while I went to put my Hazmat suit back on the rack. Timmy was asleep when I got back, thankfully, and Tommy was lying on his bed with his eyes open. Mr. Miller got up on shaky legs, and went to Tommy. “I’m going to help Johnny fix the water, watch your brother.” I shook my head. “You should rest,” I replied. “John, I don’t have much time left. I can’t leave you and the boys without hot water.” I turned to Tommy. "Tommy, if you need me, there's a blue button on the wall. Just push it and I'll come right away." I pointed to the large button with a hospital symbol on it. I pressed the button to show him what the button did. A loud chiming sound echoed through the halls, followed by a robotic voice saying, "Attention, available medical personnel to the hospital." To make Mr. Miller more comfortable, I wheeled a plush armchair from the game room down the hall to the utility room. It was quite a task to install the new water heater - there were unfamiliar tools and removing the old one proved to be a challenge. Despite multiple interruptions from Mr. Miller dozing off, I managed to successfully install the new heaters with his guidance. Finally, after what felt like hours, we had hot water again. When I got Mr. Miller back to the hospital, he lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. I thought he’d fallen asleep when he said, “John, promise me you’ll take care of my boys,” whispered Mr. Miller. “I promise,” I replied without hesitation. I’d like to say that everyone got well, and we all stayed in the bunker together until the sun came out, the forest grew back, and everything returned to normal, but we all know that wasn’t going to happen. Shortly after midnight, Mr. Miller's labored breathing ceased. Tommy was awake, but only lay on his bed staring at the ceiling. I put Mr. Miller on a gurney and took him to the freezer. It was the only place I could put him for now. We have an incinerator for this sort of thing, but it was locked-down like everything else. Timmy joined his father three hours later, but when I got back from the freezer, Tommy was gone. My instincts told me where he had gone, and I sprinted towards the escape tunnel. The lower door was open when I got there. I poked my head in and looked up; the hatch at the top was standing open. I fumbled with the zipper of my Hazmat suit, trying to get it on as quickly as I could. The lead box lay open on the ground and I could see that the red contaminated items bag had been torn open. Panic set in as I realized Tommy's contaminated clothing was no longer there. With a sense of urgency, I climbed up to the surface and scanned the barren landscape for any sign of him. My heart sank when I saw no trace of him. I searched frantically, but after a while, I knew I had to go back underground before my exposure levels became too dangerous. As I locked the hatch behind me, I prayed that Tommy would return soon. Days passed and my anxiety grew as I waited, sitting in front of the intercom, hoping to hear Tommy's voice. Three days later, his weak and frightened voice finally came through the speaker. My hand instinctively reached for the talk button, but my father's voice echoed in my mind, telling me to wait. Tommy begged for me to open the hatch for ten minutes, then suddenly an unfamiliar man's voice broke through the intercom. “Alright, kid, I know you’re in there, and you’re alone. Open the hatch, or I start hurting your little friend.” My heart pounded as I heard the chilling threat on the intercom. Other voices echoed in the background and I knew I was outnumbered. I reached out to turn off the intercom, knowing that if I opened the hatch, it would be a death sentence for both me and Tommy, but staying put meant abandoning him. Fear and guilt battled within me as I searched for options; there were none. I’ll never know where Tommy went, but he must have run into survivors turned savages. After four sleepless nights, I mustered up the courage to crack open the escape hatch. The eerie silence of the dark wasteland of burned forest greeted me. My heart raced as I searched for any signs of Tommy. In a corner of the old mine office, I found Tommy's lifeless body. I couldn't bear to leave him there, so I dug a shallow grave and laid him to rest. As I stood over his grave, guilt consumed me. I had broken a promise, betrayed a friend, and buried a family that has lived in these mountains even longer than mine. With each passing day, my mind felt like it was unraveling. How much longer would it be before I went insane?