Left Behind

As the fifth drone flew over our house in the past five minutes and left my line of sight, I knew we were in the clear. I gave off a loud whistle to signal Ollie that we were safe and then I carefully slid myself along the attic’s floor to avoid the low-hanging ceiling. I also knew I shouldn’t make any sudden movements that might cause me to come crashing through the roof. The house we were squatting in tonight was made in the late twentieth century due to the pictures hanging on the walls throughout the house as well as the layer of mold and dust that covered the floors and furniture. Ollie despised the people who lived during this time in history because he blames them for how the world ended up. War, famine, and climate change definitely turned our world upside down and he believes the people to blame are the same people who owned houses like the one we are in tonight. I don’t follow that same mindset. Sure these people should have made better judgment calls when they started seeing the early signs of climate change. They should have bought cars that weren’t so demanding in fuel. They should have saved the precious freshwater they had such easy access to instead of drowning their lawns in it. They should have eaten less meat and sprayed fewer chemicals into the world. But, honestly, I don’t blame them as much as Ollie does. They were just clueless. My mother always told me “ignorance is bliss” when she would explain how the earth became how it is today. It took me a while to understand exactly what she meant by that, but I have learned the meaning from firsthand experience now that Ollie and I have lived on our own the past few years.

“Athena, tea is ready,” said Ollie in a low voice behind me, as I slowly climbed down the attic’s ladder.

“Thank you, Oliver,” I said back.

Ollie scowled and turned away to go prepare my plate. He hated when I called him Oliver because he knew I was mocking him for using Union slang, or what used to be referred to as British slang. Our mother was raised in America and our father was raised in England so their vernacular was very different from one another. Mum would always yell “supper is ready” when she made dinner and dad would always yell “tea is ready” when it was his turn to make our dinner. Ollie has favored our father’s speech patterns ever since he died because he blames mum for what happened. I never understood this. Dad’s death was not her fault. She would never have wished that upon him. She loved him more than I have seen anyone love another person. I believe this love she had for him is what kept her so strong when he was alive. As soon as he was gone, mum ended up giving in to the breast cancer that had hold of her and she died not too long after him.

Ollie blames her for dad’s death because we were all visiting America at the time to see her family and to visit a specialist for her care. This was when the bombs started dropping. Central Florida, where my mother’s family lived, was wiped out almost instantly. We were in an airport in Michigan where my mother wanted to visit grandma’s grave before flying off to Florida. Dad had flown to Florida ahead of us to get us settled in a hotel near mum’s specialist. We missed the bombs by a few hours. This was in 2095. Ollie and I were 13 years old. My father died a year later and my mother died a year after that. It was just Ollie and I left. America was now one of the world’s biggest enemies because its president didn’t agree to the demands that the Union presented it with. These demands included drastic lifestyle changes for every American citizen. The president deemed this unconstitutional and refused. This led to what the world referred to as the American War and Ollie and I became stuck on the losing side.

Life in America changed as if overnight. Florida wasn’t the only target that was chosen. New York City and Los Angeles were next. The Union’s goal was to kill as many people as they could in as few bombs as they needed. The Union was a collection of almost every first-world country that was willing to comply with the demands that were needed to save the world. England was one of the founding nations of the Union so people have begun referring to all of England as the Union. This country quickly became the most powerful nation in the world and the leading force behind the alliance. America is not the type of nation to roll over and admit defeat, however. They immediately began their retaliation. Ollie and I were instantly deemed enemies of the state, due to our British nationality, which caused us to have to go into hiding. We even began practicing our American accents on the off-chance that we encountered anyone that would question us. This never happened, however, because there were so many orphans wandering the streets. Most people never even gave us a second glance.

Ollie came over and shook my shoulder, “Athena, why do you look so distracted? What are you thinking about? Did you see something while you were on lookout? Or did you find anything useful in the house?”

“I haven’t even had the time to check the house. We only just got here.”

Ollie’s eyebrows furrowed and he instantly changed his voice to a whisper, “A, you have to be more careful. Check the cabinets for bread and I’ll go check the rooms.”

“No, I want to check them,” I whispered back quickly. I loved finding the secrets of the people who used to live in these abandoned homes. I also remembered the last house we were in when I was looking for food and loads of rats came running out of the cabinet I had opened. I couldn’t eat for two days. I was terrified of rats. They were never as big in northern England as they were in America. I could never get used to them.

“Fine,” he said back to me, as he handed me his knife, “take this and yell if you find anything.”

“I know. I’m only six minutes younger than you, you know.”

“And so much stronger than me,” he added in a patronizing voice while rolling his eyes.

I snatched his knife away and mocked his voice under my breath as I walked away. I walked up to the first of the three rooms and took a deep breath before opening the door slowly. The room was horribly pink. Pink walls. Pink bed. Pink dressers. The only thing that wasn’t pink was the white, fluffy carpet, which was covered in blood. I could almost immediately place what happened in this room because I had seen so many like it in these past years. The family that lived here was horribly affected by the radiation that lingered here from the bombs. The Union had created a bomb unlike any we had seen before. We referred to it as the DNA bomb. It killed everything and everyone upon impact, just like every other bomb. The biggest difference was that the surrounding area, over 300 miles from the impact, was permeated with an almost indetectable radiation. They designed this radiation to cause several symptoms that eventually led to death about a month after contact. I could see what looked like a twelve-year-old girl and her mother who had died right after what we know to be the last symptom of the radiation, which is vomiting up a profuse amount of blood. The reason we gave this bomb its name was due to its radiation having the ability to not kill any other living things besides humans because it targets their DNA. The little girl was wearing pink pajamas and she was clutching what looked like a gold locket in the shape of a heart around her neck. Her mother had died on the pink chair that was in the corner of the room. It looked like they had died around the same time. I knew that these deaths were not recent and I also knew no sane person would hide in this room near these bodies so I moved on to the next room.

I have developed an almost numbness to seeing corpses in these past few years. Ollie is the same way. The first few bodies we saw had us sick for several days. It took us a while to develop this numbness. It was when we had to quickly avoid an American drone by diving into an old Honda and landing directly on top of a corpse that I realized dead bodies don’t phase me anymore. America had such a hard time with Union spies before the bombs dropped that they began developing drones to fly around and scan random people on the streets to identify them. Thousands of Union spies, as well as tourists, were jailed upon identification. Children under the age of 15 were put into institutions and forced into manual labor when they hit the age of 18. Ollie and I ironically referred to these institutions as concentration camps.

I walked up to the second door and opened it a lot quicker than the last one because I now felt much more secure in this home. I had already discovered its story. There wouldn’t be much more to discover now besides whatever hidden contents were in its drawers and cupboards. I immediately regretted opening the door so loudly as I jumped two feet in the air. I had scared a cat that was hiding in there and he had bolted out of the door as soon as I opened it. My squeal caused Ollie to run to me. His eyes were full of alarm and he was carrying a broom.

“Oh, my hero,” I said sarcastically. “You’ve come to save me again by sweeping the enemy away in a blaze of glory.”

“Why did you yell, idiot?” he asked in a tone that told me he was not in a good mood.

I told him about the cat and his eyes promptly changed to concern. I knew this sympathy was not directed towards me. My brother had a soft spot for animals.

“Where did it run to?” he asked while he shook my shoulders hectically. I pointed in the direction and he shot after it.

After I checked the rest of the room, I discovered that there wasn’t anything of interest and I moved on to the last room. As I approached the door, I heard a squeak of the floorboards from the other side. My heart started racing and I began imagining all sorts of things that could be behind that door. Before I could even decide whether or not to open it, the door handle started to turn on its own. Before I could hide or run or even move, an American soldier was standing directly in front of me with a gun pointed squarely at my chest and a drone flying right above him.