After The War

We came out of the bunker, not because we knew it was safe, radiation was still a problem, but because we had simply exhausted the food reserves. For eight years two hundred of us had lived together underground, and when the moment to open the doors came, most of us were frightened. No birds or mammals had survived, and the rivers and seas were as dead as the fields and forests.

The bunkers had only a tiny fraction of the population, so we were greeted by a sea of rotting corpses that had a stench all of its own. The only living things we saw were flies and cockroaches which were living on the cadavers that were strewn across the land. They had adapted like other creatures hadn’t, and were kings of all they surveyed. Neither had predators now and swarmed in unimaginable numbers. Smelling us, they quickly covered our clothes and skin with their black bodies. But we were too hungry to care and just plucked off handfuls, eating them with relish.

I say relish, they were vile, the flies were vilest.

We retreated to the bunker to sleep and plan. To get away from the insects. Many became ill that night through eating the raw creatures, which in turn had lived off putrefied flesh, yet the following day hunger forced us to eat them again.

Eventually we set up a system to gather them, bringing them by the bucket full to hastily built sheds where the women would crush them, sift off the shells and wings, and then go about processing them, first with water, then heat, to make them safe. Some of the women were charged with making them palatable, and prepared them in different ways, but nothing they did could ever disguise the overwhelming foulness.

My job was clearing corpses. I took the rotting flesh to the fledgling roach farms where others were tending and harvesting the insects. Others, less fortunate than me had the job of clearing the dead fish from the rivers for the fly farms.

Every now and then I would visit one of the sheds to pick up Alice and would always notice the fresh blood on her hands from countless tiny bites and scratches. Broken insect husks filled the air like dust and every breath filled lungs with the tiny particles. I could only stand it for minutes – Alice had it all day every day, and it worried me. When I kissed her I could smell them on her breath, taste them on her skin.

Since emerging from the bunker, some of our number has become pregnant. This was always the plan as the human race depends upon our breeding. Alice and I are blessed in this way, and she has just 3 weeks to go.

Last night Victoria was taken to our hospital to give birth and, having some medical knowledge, I was asked to help. This was the fourth birth I had supervised and I have never seen a woman in so much pain. Her screams will haunt me until I die, of that I am sure. Her poor body ripped like no other when it emerged, encased in a membrane, covered in blood and mucus. We had not seen this before, any of us, and quickly went to get a knife to remove the sac that covered the new born. But before that was possible, teeth and claws tore their way through the thin sac. I cannot describe what was within, suffice to say it was black as pitch, and had a face like no human.

We have been eating insects contaminated with radiation, breathing the dust of their bodies, and our bodies are covered in their bites, so I think I understand what has happened to Victoria’s baby.

But I can’t bear to tell Alice.