Dawn Of Light

• Bryce Tollard-williams, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2018

I shudder as I walk through the dark tunnel that had been locked for years. The place seems quiet. I remembered life before we had to go underground. A time when we would laugh and live and see the sun. Now we hide like rats from the surface. Sometimes people go up there for supplies, for food, fuel and other necessities but few come back.

My Geiger counter urges me to leave this place as I continue through the dark and cold abyss. Sometimes I’m reminded of the day we all got the message and the alarm to seek shelter; that an attack was imminent. I was one of the lucky ones. I was already in the station by the time they closed the doors. Now the different groups here are at war over food and water.

As I reached the end of the tunnel I put on my gas mask and stared up the stairs above ground. The doors were barricaded by almost anything people could get their hands on to keep them shut from the inside. I grabbed my crowbar and started pulling away at the makeshift barricade. I saw a crack in the doors, all I could see was light. Opening the door I looked up. It was a beautiful sight after all this time to finally be above ground. But I had to be quick. I grabbed my bag and started moving throughout the abandoned city. The stories we had been told of the things above ground had stopped me from returning to the surface but I was ready.

”Icarus Icarus! Are you in position yet?” crackled my radio.
”I'm nearly there, Kleiner, but there's a lot of snow so it's hard to move to the Cathedral!”
The Cathedral was the only safe place above ground but quite recently radio contact had been lost from them. Kleiner was one of the few people that knew their way aboveground and had lived to tell the tale. Our mission was to make it to the Cathedral and find out what happened. The local leaders feared the worst but we had to find out what had happened. I pulled out the old photo of the Cathedral given to me by Kleiner before we left. Then we could watch the place from both sides.

It looked beautiful but it made me think, could we ever build something like this again? I crossed the road quickly and went down the alley between a flower shop and a cafe. These places reminded me of what life used to be like, the smell of coffee and breakfast and then the attack. Is this what happened to the Cathedral? Did they have warning before they were attacked? was it raiders? Or the creatures?

It wasn't long before I saw the fire, it looked as destructive as Death as it obliterated the Cathedral. As I stared into the fire I thought of the human race. We have destroyed so much, what had we really created?