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She didn't know a whole lot about the building manager before the bombs dropped. She had seen him working around the building, fixing blown bulbs and mopping the stairways and halls. She knew his face and sometimes said hello when it looked like he had noticed her. She only learned his name after the small group of them stumbled into the bomb shelter in the basement and he sealed the door behind them.
Mickey.
Eva wished she had paid more attention to the news leading up to that fateful day. Maybe she might have been better prepared but it all seemed to go to Hell so suddenly, so quickly, and she wasn't even certain who the enemy was. She had no idea who had dropped the bombs on New York and destroyed her whole world. Terrorists... domestic or foreign? Or was it some huge accident. Some terrible tragedy. Except, if that was the case then why did the soldiers come only for the young girl? Why did they experiment on the girl? Why did they seal them into this basement that had become a tomb. Or was that just how it seemed to Josh? Josh who had gone out there with an ulterior motive to find a way out for him and his brother.
All she had left was Sam, but he was not made for this. She cared for him. Had she ever loved him? She had considered marrying him but he was too gentle, too soft, and the others were revealing their true natures. Predators looking for any weakness.
Or were they?
They were all sick. Radiation sickness affecting all of them at different rates. Josh was the worst but he had been outside the basement before the soldiers sealed them in. He had been caught while trying to find the missing girl, while trying to figure out who had done this to them. Except he admitted he hadn't gone out there for the kid. Didn't he? They had done something to him before he managed to get back to the basement. He had breathed in the outside air, growing sick quickly afterward, his hair falling out in clumps, and maybe it was affecting his brain too. Maybe he had been a nice person before all of this happened, though she wasn't sure because she had only ever seen him in passing before. In the lobby, or by the elevator.
Was he a good person?
He killed two of the soldiers. Maybe that's why they welded shut the door. Maybe that's why they sealed them into that tomb.
She could barely remember the girl but her mother was a sad state. Scared. Letting herself be abused because she feared for her life. They were all scared except some hid their fear behind growing anger and perversion. Or was it their real face now revealed?
Mickey was a good person. Even with the radiation sickness he stayed a good person but as the days, weeks. Was it weeks? It could have been just days but it felt like weeks. As time went by the others grew paranoid, believing he was hiding things from them. This was his domain, where he worked and... Did Mickey live there too? There was a photo of a pretty woman with brassy blonde hair and a happy smile. She meant something to him but Eva thinks she died long before the bombs dropped. Perhaps she'd been his wife.
Eva wondered why she had never asked, or maybe she had but could no longer remember asking. Had they talked much at all?
So much was cloudy in her mind. Desolate, like the road stretching before her, running between the broken backs of buildings. She stumbled over debris. There was no one out here. No soldiers. No children being experimented upon. No news-stands, or taxi cabs, or crowds of people walking with purpose to whatever destination they held in life. Where were all the bodies of over eight million people? Were they just shadows like the ones in Hiroshima? Or were they the dust beneath her feet.
Silence. No birds. No traffic, just her heavy breaths. There was just her and her thoughts. Her memories... or nightmares.
They tortured Mickey. The others. The really sick ones. They tied him up in a chair and tortured him to give the code to another room. A safe room, or perhaps it was his room. His home. It had no supplies within it anyway. No caches of food being withheld from the rest of them. They tortured him for nothing.
He saved her.
Mickey told her of the only way to get out of the basement, through the toilet's septic tank and down into the sewer. He could have gone almost any time. He could have pulled on the suit they had taken off that dead soldier. He could have lowered himself into that disgusting mess and pushed his way out of the hell they were in. Yet, she could see it in his eyes at the end. He had stayed to comfort Sam, not wanting him to die alone. Perhaps he knew there was nothing out here for him. Perhaps the lovely lady in the photos was long gone and now all he wanted was to be with her.
Soldiers stopped her.
They appeared out of nowhere and she was hustled along into a detox shower. A little late for that. Too late for showers and for little blue pills and white tablets. They knew it. Sad faces staring at her through an observation window. They wore hazmat suits when they came to feed her, to change her, to make her comfortable in her final hours.
She couldn't talk. Shock at first, but now it was the radiation ravaging her throat. All her beautiful hair was gone.
"We found a letter in your pocket."
Sam? Had Sam written her a letter and pushed it into her pocket for her to find?
"Do you want me to read it to you?"
She nodded.
"Liz,
You were the very best of me and I miss you every single day. I will be with you soon, my darling.
With all my love,
Mickey."
She stared hard at the woman in the hazmat suit, reading compassion on her kind face.
"Did you want me to read it again, Liz?"
Liz.
Was that her name?
She thought her name was Eva... and her boyfriend, her lover was Sam.
Maybe her mind was as broken as the world outside. Maybe she was Liz and she only imagined he was Sam. Her Sam. His features seemed to be fading in and out between two men. Both thin and ravaged by hunger and sickness. One older, one younger. Both of them kind people who had tried to protect and save her from the worst of humanity inside a tomb of concrete.
Mickey. Sam. Mickey and Sam. Mickey or Sam. She wasn't sure anymore, and somehow it didn't seem to matter.
As her eyes closed she saw a face turning toward her, framed in a fiery background. Acceptance written across his features. Compassion too.
They were all gone.
Even her.
END