Amy Brashear - The Incredible True Story of the Making of the Eve of Destruction

“Insane how it spread this far,” Dylan said, still filming the outside.

“This is going to cost us a hell of a lot of money,” the director replied.

Griffin Flat was the next exit.

“The first thing I’m going to do is get out of these awful clothes and into something—” Freddy stared out the window. “Clean,” he said, finishing his thought.

We got off the interstate and turned right at the stop sign, and around the sharp corner that nearly knocked Dylan out of the bus again. The bus driver had to dodge abandoned cars as he swerved onto Sixth Street.

There was smoke everywhere. The crew had set fire to a couple of old buildings on Sixth Street, and the blaze had spread. There was glass everywhere from broken windows. Citizens of Pikesville, aka Griffin Flat, were walking around in a daze with shaved bald heads, prosthetic latex scar tissue, and burn marks affixed to their faces, plastered with coats of artificial mud and dressed in tattered clothes and coughing up movie blood and their oatmeal-coated guts due to their faking radiation sickness.

Dylan kept filming, but the director looked a little sick. “Like I said, this is going to cost us a hell of a lot of money.”

Hours after the atomic bomb falls on Pikesville, rescue squads are dispatched to scour the area for stragglers to get them to shelters. Danger is imminent. The deadly cloud of radioactive particles, invisible to the naked eye, will soon blanket the town.

The road to the fairgrounds was blocked. A huge sign, written in capital letters—the end is here—was crudely spray-painted with an x.

“What’s going on?” I asked, sitting up straight.

“I think the explosion was worse than we thought,” Dylan said, shutting the bus door with one hand and then grabbing the handle to help him up. He went back to his seat.

“Bet it looks great on film, though,” the director said. “I bet Popeye got great footage.”

Popeye was the other camera guy. Not his real name. They called him that because he smelled like spinach. He was the one who got all the footage from Main Street.

While the director talked Oscar nominations and award speeches, I was wondering when and how and, more importantly, who was going to rebuild our town.

I bet Mayor Hershott was angry. But I also bet he already had a plan. He always had plans. They just were never really executed well.

The bus driver put the bus in park and pulled the lever to open the door. He was the first one off the bus. The director followed him, along with Dylan and Freddy. Terrence helped Owen off, then Max, Tyson, and me. But I turned around and grabbed the screwdriver from the ignition. Protection. Just in case. I hid it in my coat pocket and ran to catch up with the group. The smell was intoxicating. And that wasn’t a good thing.

The gate that used to be there was gone, like it had disintegrated. Same went for the fence and the golf carts, and the trailers.

“What the hell happened?” Freddy asked the director, who was just as dumbfounded.

The explosion took out everything.

We did a walk-through. Nothing was there. We spent most of the time going, “That was there, and that was there, and that was there.” Even the Ferris wheel was now gone too. The shell of a minivan was left standing, though. It was Kitty’s and Raymond’s van. They made it back here. But where were they?

“Kitty? Raymond?” I yelled.

We searched all over, but there wasn’t a soul here. The director looked for a place to sit, but there was no place to sit except the ground. And no one wanted to sit on the ground.

I held the screwdriver out in front of me for protection.

“Is anyone here? Anyone at all?” Tyson yelled.

No one responded. It was strange. I thought I saw a cockroach as big as my head—but on further thinking about it, it probably was just a shadow—but anyway, I wasn’t paying attention, and I tripped on debris and almost face-planted.

I screamed and nearly fainted. Max grabbed a stick, and we all ran over to where they were.

Max pointed.

I screamed.

Freddy too.

The bus driver passed out.

Terrence and Tyson threw up.

Dylan filmed it all.

“Is that—a body?” I asked. “Was that a person?”

Max nudged it with a stick, and then he walked over to it. It was hard and made a hollow noise. A human being wouldn’t make that noise.

The director bent over and touched the crusted black thing with his hand. “I think it’s a mannequin.”

Everyone took a deep breath and laughed.

These explosions that Skeet built had done more damage than anyone thought.

We got back on the bus. I handed the screwdriver to the bus driver, and he started the engine. There was nothing left for us here. Freddy was crying. He lost all those video games and his console in the explosion. But I didn’t know who was more distraught, him or Terrence.

We went back to Sixth Street.

The director ran up to a few people who were out, trying to ask them what happened. Where Skeet was. Where the rest of his cast was at. But they just stared at him. Black eyes. Like all the life was sucked out. Or a gag order had been put in place.

“Ma’am,” the director called, “can you tell me if you’ve seen any of my crew?”

She looked up at him and burst into tears and ran down the sidewalk.

“Well, that can’t be good.”

Dylan was filming all of this.

“Wait!” the director yelled, and we stopped dead in our tracks. “How stupid are we? Filming has to be going on. We better get out of the shot.”

He moved across the street and we followed. Stood underneath an awning waiting to hear “cut.” But “cut” never came.

“It was supposed to be a long sequence,” the director said.

Dewayne’s store was just down the way. Next to Dane’s Ice Cream Shoppe. The windows were broken out and trashed. Comic books were torn, wet, or burned. I dug through the pile and found one that was in okay condition. I stuffed it in my bag.

Terrence came out from the café and passed out candy bars. One for each of us.

We ate and went searching for more. This time we found Cokes, which we drank with our second candy bar. And a pair of sunglasses for Owen. We waited for a while until Max said we could go to school, and according to the clock above the cash register, school was in session, but closer inspection revealed the clock had died at exactly 10:05. There had to be a logical explanation. We climbed onto the bus and went to school.

There would be no miracle. An atomic bomb had hit the city. A blast wave had crumbled buildings and buried its citizens. A dark mushroom cloud had spread over the sky. Much of the country had been devastated by massive atomic attacks. The small town of Pikesville had not escaped unharmed.

Being at school when we didn’t have to be at school was a new experience. Unique. And I could tell Terrence especially didn’t like it. But then we saw light—specifically candlelight coming from the chemistry classroom—that told us there had to be other people here too. As in alive and possibly able to tell us what the hell had happened while we were on the mountain.

Terrence and I went down the hall while the rest of them went searching for food in the cafeteria.

We found Rodney in a fetal position underneath the lab table where he and Max, just days before, had been doing science experiments. (Or Max had been, and Rodney had been on the verge of burning the school down with a spark from the Bunsen burner.) Rodney was shaking. He had a cut on his forehead, and both arms were bloody.