How We Died

I Loved My Wife

Mike cranked the dial on his newest installation, a car stereo with lots of bells and whistles and not one or two, but three colors of lights, and the music began to blare, covering the sound of his cackling laughter.

"I told you, Karen, I told you so!" He swerved to avoid a collision with a stalled puddle jumper, some kind of tiny red car, something foreign no doubt.

"I probably should have hit them, it's survival of the fittest now and anyone that owns a car like that doesn't deserve to live. Probably electric or something." Mike pushed his ball cap higher on his head, shifting gears in the large pickup truck he'd had lifted with overly large tires. It was hell on the gas mileage but chicks dig a truck, right?

Which brought him back to his wife, well ex-wife now, Karen. She'd called him crazy, decorated his office with little tin-foil hats and little aluminum pans of Jiffy-Pop the day she'd told him she was leaving.

Well, who was sorry now? Shifting the gears up as he finally came to a clear section of the highway, Mike glared out at the soon to be dying world.

Somebody had launched the missiles. Finally, it had happened and now Mike felt good about all of the internet raving, the warnings, and mostly about how much he was going to be able to tell people "I told you so." Except there wouldn't be any people, would there?

With another shout of enthusiastic laughter, Mike realized all of those that had called him crazy, a fool, a total fucktard, were now about to get what they deserved.

Fuck, it was perfect. Now, if he could just see Karen's face as she scrambled for safety he'd be able to go to his bunker happy.

He'd got the text at 9 am, a message from the secret group he was a part of, a directive really.

"Go to your bunker, now."

Mike didn't really know most of the guys in the group, but the ones he did know he trusted. The secret app that delivered the message, an app known only to members, had gone off and he'd followed instructions, not asking questions at all.

It was as he drove home, having left work without even telling his boss at the ball-bearing factory that he was leaving and not even taking the time to clock out, that he heard the news.

The missiles were coming, and he now had ten more minutes to get home before they started to fall. Somewhere, somewhere in the world, some world leader had finally "had enough of America's shit" and let loose the dogs of war.

Mike sneered as he listened to the news broadcaster, some liberal snowflake with an apologist-complex, blame Mike's beautiful country, not the freedom-hating foreigners, for what was about to come down on them all.

He'd been preparing for this since the 80s, when tensions with the USSR grew too high to bear, and he'd told a much younger Karen that he was going to dig up the backyard.

She'd screamed at him about her stupid roses but he'd ignored her as he built a privacy fence, then started to dig.

He'd dug for a year before he'd started to pour the concrete. A four room bunker, built beneath the houses of his neighbors, though they had no idea that only a few feet beneath their homes he'd plundered their space.

He had all of the latest technology he could afford in the bunker, it was stocked with non-perishable food, enough that it meant he would never have to leave the place, ever. He didn't care what the official line was on how long radiation would last, he knew once he closed the bunker door he wasn't coming back out.

Now in his 50s, Mike was getting his day of vindication. Alright, it had taken nearly 30 years, but he'd been right, and that was all that mattered to Mike.

Pulling into his driveway, the man that spent far too much time crouched over a computer screen, rejecting friends and family to spend his time pouring over sites dedicated to passing along super-shady intel, intel that anybody else would dismiss as crackpot conjecture, but Mike consumed without question, headed not for his house, but straight to his bunker. He didn't even bother to turn his truck off.

Three more minutes.

Walking calmly, Mike pulled aside the plot of astro-turf that hid the entrance to the bunker stairwell. Walking down the steps he turned, pulling the mechanism that settled the fake grass back where it belonged. Over six feet tall, Mike was fit enough, and happy enough, that he bounced down the steps with a jaunty pace, an actual smile on his face.

Turning the wheel of the door, Mike went through the steps needed to fully seal himself off from the rest of the world.

Those sad fucks were going to wish they'd prepared for this part of human life. But, nobody had listened, they'd all known better hadn't they?

Mike felt no sympathy for those left outside, for those that would face the bombs as he walked through the door, closed it, then pressed the mechanism that would make the door inoperable.

"Now, let my new life begin."

Mike had made the bunker one giant Farraday cage so he did not receive the text that his group sent him, and he was buffered from all sounds from outside so did not hear the radio report.

He walked blithely to his storage room and looked at the vast amounts of food and water he'd stored, at the sewer processing facility he'd agonized for three years over. Walking into the bedroom he saw a comfortable, full-sized bed, a television connected to 700 terabytes of videos, television shows, and movies. One wall was covered in books, both reference and instructional, as well as fiction. He also had a few hundred gigs of books stored on a computer.

He had a small power generating station set up, a way to cook his food from a lifetime supply of canned heat, and medicine stored in sealed containers.

"Bring it on." He said with a grin. He was ready for it now. His day of vindication. "Fuck yeah!"

He made a fist, clenching it to his chest in victory.

"I told those nitwits. Now they're all dead." Mike looked at his watch and realized the bombs must have started to fall by now.

He stilled, waiting to see if he heard anything, maybe felt a rumble. Nothing.

"Hmmph. I'm good at what I do." A grin of satisfaction crossed his face but was soon replaced with confusion.

"What the hell?" He asked as the fist he'd clenched in victory now clutched just above his heart.

Pain lanced through his arm, down to his fingertips, and up to his jaw.

In seconds Mike dropped to the ground, dead, his heart stopped totally.

"False alarm, folks. Please, stop panicking. It was all a false alarm." The news broadcaster said from the radio in Mike's still running truck. "Please, everybody, I know this has been terrorizing, but please, calm down out there folks. It's over."

**Story also appears here...https://steemit.com/writing/@smuggly-sparrow/yeah-i-told-you-so-a-short-story