Hinterland (The Aftermath #2)

Chapter Nine

Weaponry. Control panels. Floodlights. Masks. Suits. Why on earth was all of this here? My heart continued to race and my head throbbed from the painful light. Maybe even more than that. Fear, confusion.

The room wasn't very large. Or maybe it was, but it was packed tight with so many supplies that just the nine of us seemed like a crowd.

On one side of the wall was a large array of different weaponry. After sifting through it, I was disappointed that none of the guns came with ammo, or were smashed to bits. On the other side of the room were a bunch of screens and panels. One of them showed a display of a digital square box. It read, Generator: On. 21% power. Approximately 446.4 hours of power time left.

Another that really caught my eye read in flashing red, Aboveground microSievert level (PH): 12, then, Critically high. Unchanged for 37,239 days. My heart sped up, faster and faster until I could barely breathe.

"What's it mean?" I yelled. "What? Are we going to die?"

"I don't think so," Zenon said. "I think it's old technology." He walked over to the flashing screen and tapped it. Nothing happened, and he looked below the screen, where there was an empty outlet. Beside it was an unplugged keyboard and a small, yellow box with its own screen. A 'Geiger', as it was printed on the yellow. I picked the Geiger up and flipped it over, finding a tiny switch. After flicking it on, the screen read the same thing as the larger one did. 12 µSv. Critically high.

"What's a microSievert?" I thought aloud.

"Sounds dangerous," Zenon replied.

I nodded and moved on to the next item I found. A strange-looking mask, dark greenish in colour with tinted lenses and a long tube connected to the mouthpiece. It looked like something that would be used to protect the user from something in the air. Maybe the 'microSieverts', whatever those were.

"Hey, take a look at this." Zenon handed me a shiny wad of paper. The ink on the front was smeared, but even the font the words were written in made my blood run cold.

Use of Bomb Shelter

and What to Do During Emergencies

Bomb shelter! I did a quick sweep of the room, and realized that this was what it was. This room was a bomb shelter. But why would there be bomb shelters if there were no bombs?

Or maybe there were bombs.

Perhaps that was why the Earth was so... ruined. It made so much more sense, anyhow, because I doubted that just the sun could do so much damage. It explained the nuclear poisoning I'd seen written down on paper, and probably also microSieverts if I knew what that meant. Maybe it's say it in the booklet. Flipping through, I scanned the pages for anything about the topic. Sure enough, there was a whole chapter labelled 'Radiation and Nuclear Poisoning.'

After skimming through, I found out that microSieverts, or µSv, was the measurement of radiation. And that 4 µSv PH was as high as it should go. I looked down at the Geiger, which told me it was currently 12 µSv PH. Three times as much as it should've been. I started to panic, but forced myself not to. It hadn't changed for over thirty-thousand days. Almost forty-thousand. Then why weren't we dying?

I read on, learning that 5 µSv was known as critically high. I still couldn't understand. We should be dead, then.

Forty-thousand days. After some quick math, I figured that would be about a hundred years. Enough time to adapt... and for animals to mutate.

It almost made too much sense.

"That's it," I said. "That's why we're alive. We've adapted over the years."