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

The ten of us circled around his lifeless body. To survive a fake but real whatever-the-hell-happened, only to be killed by a gun? What were the odds?

In the summer of the Year of the Horse, meaning 1954, three individuals did the unthinkable: they ventured onto the streets of Pikesville in search of the truth—and to find food.

The following is all that remains of the ordeal. What you are about to read is real and may not be suitable for those who suffer from nucleomituphobia.

In the fall of the Year of the Rat, meaning 1984, ten individuals did the unthinkable: they ventured onto the streets of Griffin Flat in search of the truth—and to find food.

The following is all that remains of the ordeal. What you are about to read is real and may not be suitable for those who suffer from nucleomituphobia.

“Now we are all sons of bitches,” I said, holding Terrence’s hand.

“That’s a good line,” the director said. “Can I use that? I’ll credit you.”

“Sure, but Kenneth Bainbridge, an American physicist, said that to Robert Oppenheimer after the Trinity test. You should probably credit him.”

The director patted me on the shoulder.

Dylan had been filming but was ordered to stop by the United States Air Force. They took away the camera and confiscated the tape that Dylan had on him.

“Ugh to literally everything about this,” he said. “I say we flood the world and start over.”

“I think we did,” I said.

“That’s a wrap,” Mr. Edman said, wiping his eyes. What would have been his greatest feature was being taken away from him, and all he could do was cry.

I hid my composition notebook in my bag, along with the tapes that belonged to Dylan. I wrapped them in dirty radiated socks. I had a feeling that the soldiers would freak out when they saw the camera. They wouldn’t look. I hoped they wouldn’t look. They would confiscate them and my composition notebook over my dead body. I could just imagine all the black marks. They would have sanitized, classified, redacted, all meaning the same thing—erased. There wouldn’t be anything left. Though it would have been hard for them to put a black mark over the state of Arkansas.

We asked what happened. All they said was, “We can neither confirm nor deny.” We asked them if we all could have a mask. A soldier said, “You don’t need them.”

“Well, give me yours, then, if we don’t need them,” Freddy said.

But the soldier wouldn’t.

Two soldiers took Rodney’s body away. They wrapped it in a white tarp. His hand was sticking out. We didn’t have to ask where they were taking it. We saw. A huge dump truck. It was full of bodies.

“How to dig your own grave in three easy steps,” Max said.

We laughed. We shouldn’t have. But everything was just so surreal.

“Gallows humor indeed,” Mr. Edman said.

We stood in a circle, being doused with water from a truck. It was cold but kind of comforting. It had been a while since we had felt the touch of water on our bodies.

“Undress,” a soldier said.

“What happened?” Terrence asked.

“Classified.”

“Bullshit,” I said, then screamed.

We started to undress. There were no partitions. We left our underwear on.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Texas,” the soldier said.

“Texas? Why did they bring in Texas?” Terrence asked.

“Well, those there are from Oklahoma, and those over there are from Kansas, and those back there are from New Mexico. So we’re not all from Texas.”

“You can’t tell us what happened at all?” I asked. “We are the ones who lived through it.”

“We have a Polaroid of a mushroom cloud,” Max said, and I gave him a death glare.

The soldier kept on doing his job, but the word mushroom did get him to lower his guard a little while a superior of his came and took away my bag

“We nuked ourselves,” the soldier whispered.

“We did what to ourselves?” I asked.

“It was an accident.” That was all he said.

Dylan and the director looked at each other like they were speaking telepathically. Lots of shaking of heads and nodding.

Bombs accidentally being dropped on our soil? Not that it’d be any less tragic to bomb someone else, of course, but it was so much more embarrassing to have done it to ourselves. Now everything that my dad wrote in that letter that was redacted made sense. It was a warning.

“Is the base still in Little Rock?” I asked the soldier.

At first I thought he was confused by my question, but then he shook his head.

Terrence walked through the puddles and mud and hugged me.

I got dizzy. The thought of no one surviving was logical, but it didn’t mean that it was believable. Mom, Dennis, and Dad— gone? Granny, Pops, Ms. Wilcox, all my teachers, and Kevin, Chuck, Kathy, and Dana too? My knees buckled and I slowly dropped to my knees. The soldier grabbed one of my arms and Terrence grabbed the other, but still my butt touched the radiated ground. My eyes closed.

I didn’t remember anything after that.

I came to in the back of an ambulance with an oxygen mask on my face and an IV in my arm. I looked to my left and saw Terrence staring at me. He had an IV in his arm too.

“Fluids,” he said, lifting his arm. “You okay?” he asked.

I nodded, taking off the oxygen mask and laying it beside me. “Is it true?” I asked. “I mean, our parents—are they really dead?”

“Yes,” he whispered, nodding. “There are not a lot of survivors.”

I wanted to cry. I was supposed to cry. But I couldn’t. I was still in shock. I sat up on the gurney and stared at him.

“We’re the only family we’ve got now,” Terrence said, taking my hand, tears running down his cheeks.

When I saw him cry I started to cry.

Freddy, Max, Astrid, Dylan, Mr. Edman, and the bus driver filed into the ambulance and sat beside Terrence and me on the two gurneys.

“Through all the darkness and tribulations, the hopelessness and lack of remorse—the trumpeting sound of the apocalypse that fills throughout the heavens, remember… we as a race will persevere. We will find a way, a way to make things worse. We will persevere,” I said.

“Is that from another one of your comic books?” Astrid asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s kind of comforting.”

I think that was when we all realized that all of us, at least the ones who lived here, probably didn’t have any family left.

“Do we seriously want to survive this? Like, seriously?” Astrid asked, shaking.

It didn’t matter if we wanted to or not. We did, at least for a moment, but we were in a Mad Max wasteland now.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Well, haven’t you seen Planet of the Apes ?” [78] A 1968 science fiction film directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and starring Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Maurice Evans, Kim Hunter, James Whitmore, James Daly, and Linda Harrison. Astronauts wake up from a deep hibernation and discover that it’s no longer 1972 but instead the year 3978—and they haven’t aged a day, well, except for Stewart. She’s dead and decayed due to a crack in her sleep pod. The remaining crew departs the spaceship and wanders around the planet where they crash landed, encountering talking apes and humans being imprisoned. At the end they discover that the strange planet was home all along. Damn y’all to hell! Max said. “Exactly like that.”