War Never Changes

• Ray Mcallister, Grade 6
• Short Story
• 2015

BANG! CRASH! BOOM!The sound of artillery shells raining down on our bunker frightens the small children and causes the walls to shake. The announcer calls in and says,
“Left passage struck. Air passages blocked no major damage.”
People are sitting on their beds trying to be jolly but it’s no use. We’ve been down here for about an hour and the bombs haven’t stopped.
We’re at war with the people who live in the Shire, a large city that was made entirely from slaves of the outside. Now were fighting back, we’re sick of building the houses, hotels, mines, orchards, parliaments and all other buildings.
The problem is that we also built them: The Ant Hill. It’s basically a huge military base buried inside of a hill, practically impossible to get into and even more impossible to capture. All the entrances to the main cavern, so to speak, have five centimetre thick doors so that no-one can get in without a special card. These cards are registered to one person’s fingerprints, but don’t think you can just cut off their fingers; they also register their pulse to see if they’re alive.
Back to the present. We’ve been sitting around taking turns to get some water, which by the way is agonizingly slow, because we’ve cut off the generators so they’re only running on gravity. The generators were cut off to conserve power for the control room, so that they can operate the air defenses but sadly they’re getting heavily attacked. Already two have been wiped out. Another bomb rocks the walls and a searing heat comes from the door. It starts to glow… A hole appears in the door and molten metal and smoke that burns the skin and hurts the nose floods in.

The reinforcement door closes and everyone starts panicking. The radio calls in and says,
“EVERYONE RETREAT THROUGH EMERGENCY EXITS. THE BUNKER IS COMPROMISED.”
Everyone runs for the glowing red lights that mark the emergency exits. Two guards, both heavily covered in their armour stand by the doors, they call me forward and inject my arm with a tracker. Then they hand me a bag and shove me out…
I run full pelt towards the ladder that will lead me to the surface. Only a handful of people are behind me and no one else is coming. I ascend the ladder as fast as I can. It’s rusty and slippery through misuse.
When I reach the surface I look around and find a burning wasteland… I look inside my bag and find two bottles of water and some long life bread. The people that were behind me are only just coming out.
There’s a plane wreck or what’s left of a plane wreck, heck there’s just scraps of metal lying around, easily a five kilometre crater.
We walk towards it and find, a message that says we blew everything up. Our city was destroyed in a reactor explosion and so is yours!