After

[5]

Covella sat in the front room of the truck, doing a couple of simple card tricks with a tattered deck of playing cards.
"Where did you learn to do all this stuff?" Riley asked. "Doesn't seem that useful for, you know, surviving and stuff."

Covella's lip twitched into a thin smile. "My uh, my mother taught me and my-" she cleared her throat. "He taught me. It was as a base for some of the bigger illusions."

The soldier raised an eyebrow. "Illusions?"
She shrugged. Covella held up a playing card, and quickly flicked her wrist. The card disappeared, and her hunting knife was now grasped in her hand. Riley nodded.
"Cool."

Cheshire burst into the room. "Hey guys, guess what!"
The others turned to him.
He pointed out the large window above them. "The acid stopped."

Riley shot to his feet and rushed to the window, throwing open the shutters. Sure enough, whilst the black clouds still hung overhead, the acidic rain had stopped falling, leaving the ground around them wet, and dripping with the sickly green liquid. The landscape had changed drastically from when they started their journey. The desert sand had changed into red and yellowed grass, and gnarled black trees surrounded the road, their greyish leaves rustling in the wind. The bush around em was dark, and the sounds of animals echoes through the branches. Eventually, a large shape appears on the horizon.

"Ladies and gentlemen." Nick said from the drivers cabin over the speaker. "Welcome to Sydney."

As the truck approached, a giant metal dome came into view, it's surface shimmering with a holographic blue light. Jake pulled the truck to a stop at a tunnel leading into the dome. The road was blocked by a large gate, and two soldiers stood either side of the truck.
"I'll handle this." Nick muttered, leaning out the window.

"Identification." The soldier said to him, adjusting a large pulse rifle on his back. Nick held out his military I.D card.
He the man nodded. "Got any other passengers in there with you?"

Nick nodded, glancing back over his shoulder. "Yes sir. Two ex-military like myself, and two teenagers we rescued. Both of which are harmless..."
He raised an eyebrow as he looked through the small window on the door, watching Cheshire try and input the wrong code, and somehow end up electrocuting himself.
"Well... Mostly harmless."

The soldier nodded. "One final question sir. Please state your generation, and how long you've spent out of the vault."

Nick sighed. "First generation. We've been out of the vault a little over a year now."

The officer nodded. "Ok, thank you." He made a signal to someone ahead of them, and the gates slowly slid open. "Welcome to the Safe Haven sir."
Nick rolled up the window and Jake started the truck, entering the protective dome.

"So, what is Sydney?" Covella asked.

Riley smirked. "It was one of Australia's major cities, before the bombs dropped. It was one of the only two cities in the country to be protected by the shields we just went through. There and Canberra. The capital."

Cheshire leant against the window, staring intently down the tunnel. "So... What's it like?"

Riley shrugged. "We don't know. We didn't even know if the shields had held up until now. We were on a mission on the other side of the country. Only just managed to get back here now."
Nile clambered down the ladder, and Chris walked through the door, his electronic eyes glowing in the dim light of the truck.

"Hey, there's light out there." Cheshire muttered. Covella stood up, going and joining him by the window.

"But that's impossible. No sunlight could make it through that dome... Right?"
Almost in an answer to her question, the truck emerged from the tunnel, the room getting flooded with light. The group looked up to see harsh, high powered, yellow lights built into the walls of the dome, covering the surrounding land in an almost natural light. All around them, farms stretched out in all directions, water being sprayed from sprinkler systems onto the dozens of different crops that were being grown.