Class of Armageddon

What Happened

I hate it when I'm right. I guessed meteors would destroy the world and that is damn near what happened. Of course, Jess was partially right, too.

Apparently, it really is easy to miss a giant rock hurtling through space. It's not a movie myth. When we discovered James-Simpson (after the two astronomers who discovered it), we only had a few months until impact. All we could think to do was blow it up. It sort of worked. Instead of one giant rock, it was several fairly large pieces. They hit us over the next few days.

Scientists said the dust in the air would eventual fall back to Earth with no long term effects. Except for the destroyed parts of the world, we were pretty lucky.

If it wasn't for the second rock. It was much larger than the first it was hiding behind. There was still a bunch of debris from the first still in space, and we decided to use them to our advantage. We sent rockets out to the pieces and attached them, then hurled them at Armageddon Rock (no one remembers what it was originally called because no one used its real name). The rockets were equipped with nuclear bombs for extra damage. Due to our haste, many of them were faulty and duds. The reward was similar to the first, with more disastrous results.

When the pieces of Armageddon fell, it was almost two weeks before they stopped. Some had the nuclear rockets still attached. Some of those went off.

The two months before they hit, everyone was building shelters. Priority was given to hospitals and crop farms for large underground areas with access to electricity. They weren't as state of the art as their above ground counterparts, but many of those were going to be destroyed.

After we were hit, the giant government bunkers were closed up by the showers, either the doors were blocked by debris or the tunnels had collapsed. We lost our entire national government.

It was strange how the world became close to the movies. The roads were so screwed up that very few people drove. Not to mention that gas was impossible to get. We relied less and less on money and more on trade. Of course, alcohol was available everywhere; the quality sucked, but it was there. Settlements popped up all over the place, but there were plenty of caravans moving and trading from one town to the next.

There were plenty of wanderers, too. Wanderers like myself.

It's been ten years since the disaster, making it a year 10PA, or Post Apocalyptia. We graduated high school five years before the event, or year 5BTA, Before the Apocalypse. Jess, Marty, and I graduated college a year before, and I can only assume that Jacob and Sarah did the same. I never really kept in touch with them. I did hear they were engaged before it happened.

In the ten years I've been wandering, delivering news and doing odd jobs for food and supplies, and a little bit of money, which adds up over the years, I've learned the whereabouts of everyone except Marty. Fifteen years after graduation, I decided to have a reunion.