SHELTERED…

For some time now, the international situation had been going from bad to worse, and then it went from worse to even worse and worse still… The root cause being, of course, the States conflating perceived national interests with the well-being and lives of people.

Nuclear deterrence was pushed to the limits, and now those limits were fracturing. In the United States, at the beginning of October, DEFCON 3 made way for DEFCON 2 for all forces, not just for USSTRATCOM. In the UK, the Prime Minister issued a Strategic Forces at Immediate Readiness order. Beneath the seas, the silent boats, loaded for total destruction, have moved into position, their crews in full combat readiness. All await the launch orders, hoping, of course, that they'll never come… but every crewman and crewwoman on both sides is dripping with sweat and not just from the heat.

All NATO allies with nuclear capability are on the same war footing. NATO has issued an EMERGCON “General Alert” message to all member states.

On land, the Ministry of Information in the UK, the State Department in the United States and allied equivalents have been rapidly preparing their respective populations for the seemingly unavoidable Armageddon. On the other side as well. All it would take to set things off is either a deliberate act of war on one side or both or a miscommunication of some sort.

On both sides, in all countries, there is an acute feeling that the decades-old feared apocalypse, MADness, is on the horizon; only at higher echelons do they know that the said horizon is actually much closer than people think, and so long-prepared contingency plans are put into action.

A key element of the respective contingency plans is, naturally, who to keep alive, for afters…

This, of course, is a work of fiction. Or just about.

We had expected chaos, pandemonium, fear and trepidation. In our minds, it couldn’t be otherwise… We had been preparing for that chaos. We’d had multiple preparation sessions, been fed multiple forewarnings and even – for some of us at least – been the subject matter of lengthy and, may I add, tedious drills: Drills that involved handling a hundred or so, no, more than a hundred. Indeed, those figures initially provided to us went up to 300 or 400 individuals…

But, as it happened, when the whatever hit the proverbial fan – “res in peius ruere” – as I said at the time, well no, shortly before that time to be truthful, at our last preparatory meeting in fact, the people there who didn’t know me looked at me strangely. Those who did know me knew that lapsing into Latin quotes was a habit of mine and so ignored me. I was used to that though, being ignored that is – anyway, when the time came, there were just over a hundred or so people, just enough to fill the four buses that took us to the middle of nowhere, fully awake but only partially conscious, in a nightmare, in the prevailing darkness of a mid-autumn night, in disagreeable cold and, to make matters worse, with a strong unseasonal wind whipping us, drenching us with the remnants of the night’s downpour.

So, there were just over a hundred or so frightened and bewildered people, men, women, children then, gathered with their scant emergency-defined belongings in a cloggy, muddy yard on a dismal morning. Whilst we stood there, waiting for what’s next, those of us who cared about such things got a last glimpse of our sun desperately trying to break through a thick bank of rain clouds… something it had done with not too much difficulty until now (even in this part of the world, famous for its wet summers!)… the impending end of the world, as defined and executed by us on our planet, apparently not affecting cosmic movements in the slightest…

But then, we had always been rather humancentric within the grand scheme of things… even when we consider galactic creators… an entity to whom many present, and possibly those afar if they were aware of the coming doom, had recommended themselves… as I did. Might help. Never know, might help… “fata viam invenient...” as they say…

It was indeed a strange sensation the one that came over us at that point, or at least over me. I can only suppose that the others were equally affected if they were so inclined to give our predicament some thought… It would be feeble to say that the circumstances made us feel irrelevant, small, disconnected.

Obfuscating our intimate thoughts was an overwhelming sense of unreality. This couldn’t be true. This wasn’t happening. Surely, we’ll wake up. Surely, somebody with sense and pluck will step in and reverse the process. Surely, things, the world, history, humanity, us, my family, me… can’t come to an end… not like this, not now… And yet it was…

In spite, or perhaps because of the awesomeness of the situation, nobody shared their views on matters not immediately and practically at hand... Nobody sought to discuss the frailty of being. Of the uncertainty of continuing. Of the paradox of the Human Condition. Of the shame of being selected “survivors”. At least not here and then. Not the time for existentialistic conversation. Perhaps in a few brain cells like mine was there a whirlwind of questions and doubt… but from what I saw and heard, it seemed that clockwork minds and motions had come over most of the crowd.

They were doing as planned, as told… Momentous was the moment? Obviously, and of course, yet our brains were unable to grasp and even less master the complete dimension of the happening. Even my brain cells faltered since the whirlwind of questions and doubt remained unsolved. Perhaps there were no answers to be found. Like the others, I did what the drills had told us to do… gesture after gesture, process following process, one damn thing at a time… walking, doing, chasing the whirlwind away (quite easily done, mind you) and forcing myself to think only so far as thoughts were immediately necessary… “Nimia inquisitio effectum impedit”… Not waking up, really waking up, I mean, but doing…

The discussions around me were “mind the step, dear”; “hold this for me, please”, “I’ve got a hole in my shoe…”; “I hope I switched the heater off before we left”; “oh what weather!” and such like. Not exactly epoch-defining quotes you’ll admit but there you are, the Romans weren’t probably saying anything really different when Alaric’s barbarians were at the gates of the city.

And so, before the gathered crowd and, of course, before me, not particularly inviting but not particularly forbidding either for that matter, were two large metal gates, painted black, set in concrete. A sign nearby, shaking noisily in the wind, said “Ministry of Defence Property – No Entry”, a command that was about to be revoked in actual fact.

It had come to this, then. In a matter of minutes, we would be requested, ordered, invited, told to defy the interdiction and go through those gates, to an undefined future, down to an underground unknown, whilst the rest of the nation, indeed the world, would be engulfed in the throes of a cataclysm…

And yet, it was a very strange atmosphere outside those gates. On one hand, we were all crushed and numbed by the portentousness of the situation. After all, our world and perhaps many of our loved ones were condemned to disappear in the most tragic and painful of conditions, and such tragedy could be seen on some peoples’ faces… while on the other, there was, well how to describe it… a nearly festive ambiance…

Simon shouted out “there’s a strict no smoking rule in the shelter, those who have cigarettes quickly finish them here or discard them...” some people obeyed the injunction and gave themselves a few last puffs while a few other seized the moment to take selfies of themselves and others before they coursed down the hatch so to speak, “down through the gates of Hell” as they put it quite aptly I thought... although I wanted to tell them that I very much doubted that Instagram would be up for very long but refrained from doing so… if harmless idiots want to be harmless idiots… But then I also thought that it was a fitting “last post” (so to speak, pun intended) for a dying Narcissistic world… “amat imaginem, perit”… Well, hopefully, those people won’t die but will, perhaps, feel very stupid.

Moving swiftly forward, Simon Rowlings, our boss, who had occupied a very senior governmental function and who was in charge of the whole operation, undid a padlock for which he had the key and wrenched the two doors open. Standing back, he told the crowd to descend “quickly and in an orderly manner”.

Which the crowd did… shuffling quickly down to they knew not what with their sparse belongings. They did so quickly, a wobbling, coughing, muttering crowd, with the foretold cataclysm about to break out above us and everywhere else. The only thing that we really could be sure of was that this time, it was serious… Some might have prayed for it to be yet another drill, but deep down (literally), we had known that it wouldn’t be.