After The Fall

Prologue

Nobody knows who was responsible for the attack. Whether it was Russia, Germany, Korea, The Middle East, The United States, a rogue terror organisation, a supremacist organisation, or even aliens. But what did it matter? One attack was all it took to condemn the future of the human race. I couldn't tell you why it happened, nobody could. All we knew was that it did, and my life was never the same, humanity was never the same, the world was never the same.

They tried to comfort us as best they could, the people who took us away, the armed soldiers in hazmat suits who came for us and "rescued" us, who gave us clothes, food, water, and shelter for a short while. There were so many of us, children, teenagers and adults, all cramped onto the city school buses. I thought they were taking us home, until the buses sped away from the city, until they led us deep into the mountains and down into the earth.

I can't remember where they took us exactly. I only remember the surrounding canopy of hills, the sound of water, the scuffling of hundreds of feet and an elevator that seemed to go down forever, into the very core of the earth, into what would become my home for years to come. Except it was cold down there, not at all warm like the way home used to always be in Chicago winters. Mother always left the heating going, even in the springtime. It was a bunker, one of the older kids had said, like out of the Hollywood movies.

Except there was no luxury, there were no camera crews, there was no director to scream "cut" when it all became too much. There were more soldiers down there, all dressed in the same military uniform and all with the same no-nonsense look about them.

There were more children than anyone else. We were scared, alone, some of us pried from our families and the soldiers never really comforted us after we entered the bunker. Instead, we were just objects, statistics, smaller soldiers in an even larger scheme, each with a serial number tattooed into our skin like a brand.

They didn't try to remember our names or our faces, they only needed our number, our tag. S4-00871CH was my identification, tattooed in black ink across my inner forearm along with a very small barcode beneath it. The tattoo laser hurt, more than the soldiers said it would. It felt like being bitten by a hundred bull ants all at once. If mum found out I had a tattoo, she would have been furious. She said I couldn't ever get a tattoo, not even when I turned twenty-one. She said tattoos were just a way of imperfecting a perfectly beautiful body. It was easy for her to say, I don't remember my mother being anything other than beautiful.

One of the older kids who had a tattoo similar looking to mine told me it meant "sector four" and "Chicago." The rest of the numbers never made any sense, and I was too afraid to ask what they meant. Did it mean I was one of eight-hundred-and-seventy-one people brought into the bunker? Or just one of eight-hundred-and-seventy-one children?

The soldiers in the bunker were nothing like the men who first took us away. They were all clones, passive, emotionless and robotic. They reminded me of my dad, at least what I remembered of him. He wasn't much of a talker, mainly because he was never around. I can't remember the last time he told me that he loved me, that he was proud of me or that he missed me when he was gone. I didn't expect these strange men to love me like my family would, but I had nothing and no one. I was desperate for anything, even a conversation.

The soldiers were always so disinterested, never enough time to step away from anything other than their duty, never enough time to stop and talk, never enough time to care. All they did was march around, weapons on their holsters, barking orders whenever they did talk to us like we were the peasants and they were royalty. Yeah, just like my dad.

There were officers above the grunts, Commanding Officer's, as they liked to be called. Each sector was assigned its own commanding officer for which the officer was responsible for. I thought they might have been nicer than the guards, but superiority in the food chain existed there too.