Wasteland

• Britta Meany, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2015

Somewhere, a bell rings.

You make your way across the floor of your self-contained bunker, picking up a pack and emergency supplies as you do. The carpet beneath you is stained and gritty, the result of years upon years of dirty shoes being tracked over it and a lack of people motivated enough to clean it.

The door of your room is heavy, with the leaden core serving as both protection and a hindrance. You check the lock has slid home and begin to hurry across the hall. Your boots obnoxiously squeak on the concrete as you make your way down a slim path between the rows and rows of bunker entrances. There are 200 on this level, the tenth beneath Surface. It’s smelly and damp and can get quite crowded, but at least you aren’t a First Level. The oxygenators groan and struggle to pump lukewarm air from vents into the corridor but you soon become overheated and begin to sweat under your layers of anti-radiation clothing.

An elevator signals the end of the hallway. You hit a small red button in front of you and soon hear the clanking of chains and machinery as the elevator pod makes its way upwards from levels below. Anxiously you push apart the rusted barriers and step inside, pressing yet another button that says SURFACE.

The inside of the elevator pod reeks of sweat and damp, and the air that it brought from the depths is even staler than that on your tenth floor. Slowly, slowly, slowly, the elevator travels upwards and into fresher air until finally you step outside.

Surface. The world above.

You cast your eyes over the view that you are granted only once a year.

A grey and barren wasteland greets you, devoid of plant or animal life. There are no complete buildings here, no houses or shops. The highest point on the horizon is the crumbling skeleton of a warehouse that somehow survived. Rubble litters everywhere to be seen, fragments of lives and cultures that have been destroyed and forgotten.

There are a couple other people from below, with and without the clothing that protects human bodies from as much radiation as possible. Here in the area of what used to be Sydney, Australia, the radiation levels are not severe enough to rule out any chance of short visits on the Surface; but you are told most other people aren’t as lucky.

Something crunches under your feet, and you bend down to pick it up with gloved hands.
It’s a framed picture of a young girl. She smiles shyly from beneath locks of curly blonde hair and appears to be playing with a small animal; perhaps a dog. Her feet are bare in the grass and she is surrounded by trees.

Silently you prop the photo on top of a block of concrete and move on, sifting your way through the sea of lives that humans had created, and ultimately, destroyed.