The Bizarre Adventures of Doctor Who

On Midsomer's Nightmare Pt. 5

The frigid cold, it worse than outside, the air's hurting their lungs, but Cyrus pushed them through the long hallway with different tubing on the walls, some small, some large, leading into different areas of the plant, and painted in a soft grey light. On one of the pipes, there's Cyrillic etching on it, which Boris translated as water leading from a reservoir into the reactors.

"How long do you think it'll remain radioactive?" Lila genuinely asked him how long the reactors and in extension, the Ruins would've remained radioactive, to which Boris muttered numbers to himself before giving her an estimate.

He hedged at least (maybe longer depending of the impact in affected areas) almost five hundred years or more before there's any chance the radioactive isotopes would've lessened or outright depleted.

By then, the mutated creatures that roamed the area would've evolved beyond what they know them as now, still abominations, but perhaps lessened by the breeding of the strongest survivors.

For humans, maybe not so much, but Boris isn't going to doom and gloom the group with a belief of what'll happen once they're all dead.

He's pragmatic and knew that there's a small chance that humans might've survived that long, but whether they'll have two hearts, three heads, who knows, the future's so far out, they can't even begin to think about the future when they're barely surviving the present.

As it stands, they're beating the odds than those before them, when those before them didn't know anything about their new world, their deaths and knowledge passed onto their children and their children's children.

Boris didn't survive this long to have his mind cluttered with fears that haven't affected him personally. Unless it's got teeth, claws, a taste for human, he's unconcerned for the most part.

Vodka, well, he's hoping for a brighter future than their grim present. He yearned that they're not wasting their time, that there'll be a sense of normalcy in the distant future, maybe not like what they considered as normal now, but at least a chance they won't fade away from memory like the etched shadows on building walls from the unfortunate souls caught in the bombs, having become nothing more than background noises.

He's heard of humanity coming back from a plague that nearly killed an entire country, an illness that swallowed children whole defeated by the tenacity of people working together finding a cure, there's potential they'll have their second wind in life, a deserving chance, maybe others don't see it as such, but Vodka didn't come this far to despair.

May he drink and sing, yes, but Vodka isn't about to give up like many before him did. Neither his grandfather, his father gave up, it won't change with him.

Stupidly optimistic on his part, but Vodka valued it over the doom that weighed heavy on people, now.

Artyom, the quietest of the bunch, his story, he only said this once, but he came from a different part of the Ruins, towards the border, where he and his camp made their home in a subway line.

He went with his original group looking for supplies all the time, doing everything they're capable finding supplies, and it's as much a living like other camps, but this all changed when he and his group went on another trip.

Through the darkness of the tunnels, out of the manhole, on the street, they're out in the open. Only thing they heard's the wail of the cold air that passed by.

Going through routes and straggling for possible supply cache, they lucked out, finding supplies buried underneath debris, likely stowed by another camp, but they couldn't negotiate trade.