End of Days (An Apocalypse Sims 3 Fanfic)
Still debating on whether to beat my muse over the head or not. Here's attempt number 2. _____________________________________________________________ End of Days - Prologue Sunset Valley – The E...
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Sunset Valley - End of Days
Chapter Two - "Unlucky Survivors" Part III
Haruo, when he was stressed, would go to the pool table and shoot pool for hours as he tried to figure out whatever mental conundrum he was working through. I knew not to bother him during those times because he was working through something weighty and probably oppressive that was going through his head.
A round-table discussion was needed as to what our next plans were. For the foreseeable future we were here. We had no idea as to what our next move was. We could sit here for as long as it took for the radiation to subside to levels that we could venture outside in order to effect repairs on the ruined buildings and perhaps create a somewhat livable village out of the ruins.
Haruo asked the entire group of us, “OK, what is the end-game on this? What do we do? Do we try to stay here and make a life of it in radioactive ruins that can potentially wreck us genetically?” he paused ominously, “Or do we take our chances and try to find someplace that hasn’t been affected by the radiation as badly as Sunset Valley. Remember that Sunset Valley, with our military base, was a prime target for a 1MT nuke. It’s going to take a while for it to come down to radiation levels that we can actually establish a town here that won’t be affected by background radiation significantly higher than other places.” I looked over at Haruo. Despite his insecurities at being sure of doing the right thing, his indecisiveness was being replaced by a new determination that his family, what we had here, would survive.
“I don’t like the thought of going out in the radiation. Like what if we grow three heads or something.” Phil asked, a frown on his face. I thought back to my biology classes in high-school.
“I don’t think biology and evolution quite works in that way. If you’re currently only having one head on your body, I doubt you can grow two more in the space of six months.” Bebe commented wryly, giving him a grin.
“I hope not, because do you really want two more of me?” Phil asked.
The rest of the table’s concensus on that was “Oh, hell no…”
“Outside of the immediate effects on our body…” I said, “One of the things that we have to worry about is the effects on us genetically which will manifest maybe generations down the line. Do we really want our families to have genetic defects from exposure to radiation...effects that we could have prevented by just moving out of here? When given the chance, that is…” There were nods around the table.
With Parker only a week away from young adulthood, it was hard for him to not be included in the round-table discussion as to what he wanted, but he knew that as a teen, he wasn’t going to be allowed at the table to discuss weighty matters that for most of us were a topic that we wanted to avoid as well. However, we were the ones that had to make the decisions for the rest of the group. We wanted him to still have hope, to be able to think that there was a future. We were the adults in the room, the ones who had to look at the future with a weighted unbiased outlook even though our ages were separated by mere years rather than decades. The frankly bleak future was not something that we wanted to impart to the youngsters and the teens. We needed them still imbued with hope of tomorrow’s promise that there would be a future, not one that the previous generation had ground under the feet of their biases and internecine hatreds that had finally culminated in a war that brought humanity to its knees.
Out of all of us, Holly and Parker were the only ones who were familiar with what had taken place. How tough it was going to be to survive out there. After all they had survived the nuclear blast, the radiation, the shortages of food. They would be the ones to impart the information and then we would make the decisions based on that information on what path we were going to take. The plumbots would scout ahead marking a path where we would run into the least radiation thanks to their onboard Geiger counters. And we would follow.
We had no timeline as to when we would move, but it had to be such that when our food resources were running low, we would make that move. On top of that we had cattle and chickens. How would we deal with them? There were no guarantees that we could get them out of here let alone bartering for more when we got to where we were intending on going.
“I think we need to keep monitoring the area better than what we’ve been doing…” Bebe said. “I can ask Phil to put together another plumbot and send him out on round-the-clock monitoring missions.”
“If that’s acceptable to you.” Phil added. “I have no problem with making another plumbot.”
“I’d have no objections over that. One stipulation though, however, is that the plumbot contains a video recorder to document the area that he patrols in so that we get a good idea of what the area is like. What the conditions are. Same specs as the previous ones, onboard Geiger counter to tabulate the rems in the area, an audio device to let us know what the sounds are like in that area. We want full telemetry readings and environmental monitoring of the entire area while the plumbot is on patrol. Phil, make it happen.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
The rest of us including Haruo rolled our eyes. We knew Phil was joking with that response and the accompanying military salute. But the truth of the matter is that we looked to my fiancé as the de facto leader of our group. Phil may have been the oldest,
...but of all of us, this apocalypse had hit Haruo the hardest. He hardly ever laughed, he hardly ever smiled, he had a new hardness to his jawline that meant that our survival was always on his mind. He had, without ever expressing so much as wanting it, donned the mantle of leadership.
Haruo glanced my way, And my look back towards him sent him a clear message. I will be by your side and I will support you in any decisions that you make for the benefit of our group. It was a quiet unspoken message of love and support that I wanted to send my fiancé. I’m sure the rest of those at the table saw it too. Haruo and I were for all intents and purposes, sans the formalities of ceremony, husband and wife, father and mother to Sam and that set us apart even from them.
Sunset Valley - End of Days
Chapter Two - "Unlucky Survivors" Part IV
“Well…” Haruo said, “I guess the meeting is adjourned then. Phil, let me know when the plumbot is complete and I’ll let you know what sectors I want it to patrol.”
Phil grinned at him and said, “Yes, sir. Commander…”
“Knock it off...I’m not a military commander…”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
I just rolled my eyes. Phil was always annoying my fiancé; it was just his nature and my husband-to-be just took it. He’d been friends with Phil for many years from the time they were in elementary school all the way through now. There were too many years of friendship between the two of them for there to be any animosities behind the ribbing. Although some days, it felt as though it was taking some restraint to keep from throttling Phil.
“Seriously, I’ll get it done.” Phil grinned as he headed off to the plumbot manufacturing station that we had – the same birthplace that Felix and Farmer had come from.
“The rest of us need to get our martial arts skills up. Secondly, we’re going to have to map out our route and make sure that we are able to hit resupply points along the way, including arming ourselves just in case we meet bandits. Sunset Valley is a write-off as far as equipment, supplies and weapons, we are going to need to locate places where we can get those things.” Haruo emphatically pointed out.
“Why would it be a write-off?” Clarissa asked.
“Radiation would have contaminated the supplies. What supplies we take from here is taken from our bunker – that’s the only supplies we know for sure aren’t contaminated. Radiation has had six months to leach through any protective sealant out in the open and we know ground zero isn’t more than a half-kilometer away from the store, so going down into the blast zone to get supplies is completely out of the question.” Haruo determined that the next choices were to start canning our tomatoes and making preserves out of what we had. We also had grains that we needed to make into travel bread. We would have to stock up...big time in order to get ourselves prepared to move out. “We need to not stick to main roads, but carve our own path. Most of the places that are on main roads will probably have already been picked clean by survivors. We’ll be looking at small towns. Places where we can find things...and that people have moved out of looking for supplies or have become self-sufficient and that we may be able to barter some of our things.”
We knew there was going to be a long road ahead of us. It was certain that we would face dangers that we hadn’t faced before. We knew that survivors would more than likely be hostile to new people moving in on their territory and we may be faced with having to take lives, something that was heretofore anathema. However if met with a choice between certain death and taking lives, I would choose the latter. It may not, pre-apocalypse, make us moral humans, but we have no choice in the matter now. Our lives mean more to us than those of others when it comes down to it.
Felix had laid down gemstones in the shape of a calendar and each day he would remove one, process it and get it ready for sale. And those were the days that we were going to calculate along with the readings that we get from the plumbot that we were going to create showing us the fall-out and how much radiation was still in the air. Then we would make a choice in fifty-two days whether we were going to leave or wait out another set of days.
Frank or FR-4NK was going to be our scout plumbot. The others could do so once we got on the move, but right now they had their own things they needed to be doing, namely harvesting crops and grinding gemstones so that we had ready bartering materials.
We needed Frank to do some radioactivity readings at various locations around Sunset Valley and then to fish and try to get a sample that we could test to see what the background radiation of the contaminated fish would be. This would allow us to determine if it was safe to venture out...and make our way out of Sunset Valley.
River’s Journal – January 6th, 1990 – January 13th, 1990
Our days were filled with martial arts training and making sure that we had enough supplies to make the trip out of here. Felix was busy making polished and cut gems to make sure we had enough money to make the trip and to start over anew when we got there, where-ever we were going. Farmer was busy trying to make certain that we had enough food supplies to last us a while after we closed the door on our bunker and started off on our epic journey.
What we intended to do was to take the best of the ingredients and use it to start our own little garden when we reach the place that we are planning to set down roots in. My mother’s always loved puttering around in the garden. Maybe she’ll have the opportunity to do that again.
By this time, I’d gotten to Master in kung fu. So I squared off against Haruo who had trained me. The last time we squared up, I’d beat him 2-0. This was a rematch. We put our game-faces on. The others were lined up at the board breaking blocks making sure that their hands were toughened to honed weapons. Because we didn’t have any firearms to speak of, we would have to make it so that we were weapons until we could get our hands on firearms. Ideally, we would raid a military base in order to get our hands on automatic weapons, but unfortunately any military base that we saw would be radioactive ruins owing to the rain of nuclear devastation that the Soviets had unleashed on us. On the other hand, we may have access to semi-automatic weapons, one shot per trigger pull if we could find a gun-store. At least one that hadn’t been completely ransacked of all the contents.
We were able to have five more board breaking blocks to allow everybody a chance to start breaking boards to toughen up our hands. This meant that the term iron fist was quite evident. Micro-fractures in the bone would knit making the bone tougher...or at least that’s what it was supposed to do. We knew that other survivors would probably have weapons, firearms, so we were going to have to get some ourselves.
I would be lying if I said that I was confident of the decision that we were going to go out of our bunker, but the fact of the matter was that we needed to make certain that we were out of the radiation contamination zone. And the only way to do that was to make certain that we left the area. With the base and the town having been targeted by two nuclear warheads that had completely decimated the area, it meant that we were in a situation where we had no choice. Sure we were safe in the bunker but we couldn’t stay there. We needed to find a place that would be safe, meaning lower radiation readings from the Geiger counter and no residual radiation from fallout. We would have to exercise caution leaving, but if it meant that we would have a chance to bring back humanity from the brink of extinction, then that was the only choice that we had.
Bebe and Masaharu were also concerned, but they understood that the risks in staying here were exponential in terms of genetic damage. I didn’t have to poll the others. They were prepared to move whenever the radiation died down enough that we could travel without encountering fall-out or radiation plumes. We would have to avoid hot-zones and for that we would need to make sure that we had Geiger counters. This would tell us exactly how much dosage of radiation as well as the background rads that we were taking into our bodies.
But what choice did we really have? We couldn’t stay near a detonation site. We had to move to safer ground. Day after day we had set out plans on how we were going to prepare to abandon our bunker; the safe space that we had when the detonation occurred. And we were going out into the unknown. What would greet us? What perils would we have to endure? How many of us were going to survive the journey to where we would ultimately lay down our belongings and call it home? How were we going to avoid the prevailing winds that would carry radiation our way? And where were we going to find cover to make sure that we weren’t exposed directly. We knew the farther up into the mountains that we went, the less likely we would be exposed. It was the city centers that were targets. Which meant that we would be relying heavily on the radiation readings the plumbots would give us as well as portable wrist-held Geiger counters that Phil had managed to cook up.
Watcher hope, that’s enough to keep us safe.
