The Wastelands

• Anthony Mollica, Grade 6, St Paul's School
• Short Story
• 2016

Excellence Award in the 'Word Zone 2016' competition

2 years after the war: The land was ripped up and radiation was all over the place. We had to make refuge so we put together a platform and launched it into the sky 3 km above the ground. This island will float for only 10 years before the hover balls run out of fuel so we had to climb down the long ladder and find fuel. The hover balls run on plutonium so we have to move fast and probably find a radiation suit so we can stay in the wasteland for longer. We found the city bank, but it was surrounded by mutated zombies and we had no weapons so we had to run back to the island and climb the ladder quickly. We only got one bar of plutonium that will only fuel the hover balls for one more month. At the top of the island, we got out the plutonium and put it into the furnace to melt it into a liquid so we could put it into the hover balls.
8 years after the war: We found a radiation suit and multiple guns to fight off the mutated zombies at the city bank. We need to do this fast, we only have 2 years left of fuel in the hover balls. We surround the city bank with 100 troops, we fired at the zombies heads all at once so we could kill as many of them at once with as little bullets as possible. As we entered the bank, we realised we still need the code, so we had to search the zombies for the manager’s key card with the password for the computer that has the code for the vault. When we typed in the password for the computer, there was another password and it said manager's name, so we looked at the key card, there was about 50 different passwords. (20 minutes later). The vault opened and we move into the room, there was 1000 plutonium bars in the vault, and a lot of gold, we didn't need the gold so we only took 500 bars out of 2000 bars!!
So we rushed back to the island and put everything on a hover ball with a platform on it to put it in on the island because we couldn't carry all that up the ladder. When we reached the top, we melted all of the plutonium bars and put them into all the hover balls so that will last us about another 50 years.
25 years after the war: Now we have gotten rid of most of the radiation and we now live on the ground and the hover balls are used for transportation. We have met other humans, the life has started to come back some trees have started to grow and many people have made farms to supply the community and raise money to buy a mine to get more resources. The island is now a last resort for mankind, but we still believe in mankind. The end