Not Your Typical Dystopian Love Story

I got the wrong ideas about love at a ripe young age, devouring books about strong, independent women and the men who rightfully adored them. I was indoctrinated with the idea that you would know it was love if he was brooding and willingly to sacrifice his mortal soul for you. If he wasn’t, then it must not be love after all.

My name’s Sydney Waller. I had the good fortune to be popular enough with the boys, but according to all my friends and family I have always had unrealistically high expectations for men. Considering my only real deal breakers in a relationship were open communication and a guy who would do literally anything to win my favor, I don’t think that can be true.

Just kidding! I haven’t fallen that far down the rabbit hole of delusion yet, but in all honesty it took me a long time to understand that the boys in books are nothing like the boys in reality. As I slowly passed all the important age mile markers of youth- 16, 18, 21- without meeting a boy who could hold a candle to Mr. Darcy or Jamie Fraser, I lowered the bar with a certain amount of resignation.

I was willing to settle for an honest connection. Forget about astrological compatibility or a chin chiseled by the gods, all I wanted was that little spark between two souls. The boys I attracted were usually pretty good about sparking on day one, but tended to fizzle out after a few weeks, leaving me haunted by a vague sense of disappointment.

Turns out I’d only been told half the story. It’s a shame that it took till after the end of the world for me to grasp the whole concept, but better late than never, right?

As you can imagine, experiencing earthquakes while listening to the sound of thunder crash above your bunker can really alter your perspective on life. Now, instead of crying over shirtless men wearing kilts, I cry over dented cans of lima beans, lamenting the fact that I wasted my life searching for a kind of love that no human being can give. Not even myself.

Forgiveness. Kindness. Endless acceptance of my shortcomings and insecurities. In a perfect world a man could give me those things, but not in reality. The reality of life is that we’re all broken, and we’ve been fooled into thinking that there’s one person out there who can put us back together with their unconditional love.

What we all failed to realize- what I failed to realize- was that in our obsessive search to find a partner who would give us that kind of love, we forgot to give that kind of love back.

Taking responsibility for my actions was a bitter pill to swallow at first, but painfully, I began to forgive myself. And as I forgave, I healed, and with the healing came a need to make amends. So a plan began to form in my mind.

The emergency broadcast system in my town had informed us to remain below ground for at least two years after the last bomb fell, but it only took nine months of complete isolation for me to decide that I’d rather die under the open sky than imprisoned with my towers of pickled vegetables. I also had some rather pressing business up-top, and I wasn’t about to let something as insignificant as deathly radiation keep me from accomplishing it.

In truth, old me wouldn’t have been interested in braving death unless the payoff was finding a young Mel Gibson in the wasteland dressed in tight leather pants, but new me was after something else entirely. What new me wanted was to have a chance at redemption. For that purpose I planned on making the almost 200 mile trek from Dallas to Abilene to find my sister Lauren.

My sister and I hadn’t seen each other for at least six months before the bombs fell, unless you counted viewing each other’s stories and liking each other’s posts on social media, which neither of us did. It was my fault, really. Lauren had weathered the responsibility of raising me long before my parents’ deaths, and she felt she had a right to question me about the way I was conducting myself in my relationships. In retrospect I understand it’s because she cared, but at the time I didn’t see it that way.

The last time we met face to face was at a coffee shop, and we weren’t five minutes into our java before she brought the conversation around to our age-old quarrel. She said my expectations of men were unrealistically high, and I countered that her’s were depressingly low. She chided me for recklessly jumping from guy to guy, and I spat that at least I was living my life while she was stuck married to boring old Phil who’s most interesting hobby was talking about the rise and fall of the farming industry.

She walked out the door without another word, and I went home to wallow in a Nora Roberts film with a slice of chocolate cake.

The worst of it was, she was right and I was wrong. Maybe not about Phil being boring, but about everything else. Before I could bring myself to apologize the bomb sirens cried, and I was stuck underground like a caged animal to have my quarter life crisis.

At least I lived long enough to experience a quarter life resolution, and it only took me a month to form a game plan, gather my supplies, and steel myself for what I might meet when I went above ground. Would there be nothing left except dust? Would man eating zombies and larger than life cockroaches be running rampant through the streets, hell bent on annihilating what remained of the human race?

I woke up at 6:00 a.m. on the dot, according to my atomic clock. Butterflies boxed in my stomach as I climbed the ladder towards the exit hatch. I stood beneath the manhole for several minutes, trying to gather my courage. After sucking in at least one hundred shaky breaths, I forced my arm to move. My hand was on the latch. With a heave the door was opened. Then, after my eyes managed to assimilate to the astoundingly sharp glare of the sun, I climbed into the street, where I stopped short.

I was unable to do anything more than stare around me in confusion.

This was no wasteland, this was paradise! The concrete jungle of suburbia had been overtaken by nature, and all I could do was wander around in a haze.

Vociferous, chattering animals were the new orchestra of the city. The once perfectly manicured houses had crumbled, the rubble obscured by vines and bushes. Riots of flowers overran their planters and trailed across the hoods of still shining cars. I spied deer peacefully chewing through my neighbor Mrs. Halsey’s prize winning vegetable patch, and listened to a flock of parakeets cry shrilly from inside a bus sized satellite that had flattened the neighborhood 7/11.

It was the distant, thunderous roar that eventually brought me back to my senses. I hastily turned tail and hid in my bunker for an entire day, re-plotting my route to keep well away from the Dallas Zoo.

When I re-emerged the next morning and began my hike westward through the green streets, I added man eating zoo animals to my mental list of potential threats. And since neither my zombie nor cockroach theories had yet been disproven, my pistol was firmly in hand. On the bright side, I had at last found a reason to be grateful for boyfriend #15, who’d insisted on going to the shooting range for our first, second, then third and final date.

As the trees began to rise into a forest around me, I found myself wondering if maybe, instead of a leather-panted Mel Gibson, I would find a George of the Jungle somewhere in this glorious mess. Call me crazy, but I still held onto a small piece of that unjaded twelve year old who went gaga over the sweet, ab-tastic Brendan Fraser.

I didn’t find him of course, but I didn’t find zombies or giant roaches either. Instead I found a band of unnaturally chill urban farmers living off of highway 45. As they smoked and I politely kept my distance, they did their best to explain why the whole world wasn’t one giant ball of dust.

From what I could gather, there was a plot to stop climate change by terraforming the planet. Nobody really knows who was involved, or how they convinced the entire world that there was a threat of nuclear annihilation, but the short of it is, someone fired first. Only this missile wasn’t aimed for the Earth, but at the atmosphere itself. Afraid that we had entered a new age of chemical warfare, the world governments turned on the sirens and sent their countries underground. The initial explosion cut off power worldwide and satellites began dropping from the sky, making the Earth shudder as if it had at last met its destruction. The raining debris flattened most cities and the aftershocks got the rest, but the accelerated regrowth of nature had been astounding.

The story was well-worthy of the title “Conspiracy Theory”, but I couldn’t deny the truth in front of my own eyes. As Jeff Goldblum once said, life finds a way.

I only met a few unsavory characters while still in the city, but my gun and adrenaline crazed shouting was enough to keep them at a safe distance. Once I was in the outskirts of suburbia, it was the animals I was most worried about. I found myself a constant case for curiosity among the wild cats of the region, but they didn’t seem interested in eating me. Probably because I hadn’t bothered to shower in several weeks, and I was thinner than a toothpick since I’d started eating a more limited diet.

I spent a slow and worried week hiking down highway 20, but I felt my hope rise and pace begin to quicken as I started recognizing landmarks beneath carpets of grass and flowers. I rehearsed the speech I’d planned for my sister over and over until I could recite it in my sleep. That didn’t prevent it from fleeing my head entirely when I at last stood in front of a white picket fence on the outskirts of Abilene, watching a familiar figure with a straw hat look up from her toils in the garden.

I felt suddenly uncertain as she raised a hand to shade her face, the other coming to rest on a bulging belly.

“Sissy!” I wanted to shout, but my mouth refused to open, even after her suspicion transformed into rapturous joy.

“Sydney!” She cried, flying towards me with a speed I didn’t think pregnant women could possess. I stood stiffly as she slowed to a stop, panting. Her cheeks were bright, and her honeyed eyes were filled with motherly concern as she looked me up and down.

“Sydney, are you alright?”

I opened my mouth, prepared to offer her my grand apology. Then promptly burst into tears.

“Oh Sydney.”

In less than a moment she was wrapping me in her arms, and I sobbed into her shoulder.

“You were right Lauren! I’m a…. terrible person... I never should have… ghosted Chad… or said those things…. About Phil!”

“It’s okay Syd,” She soothed, rubbing my back gently. “That’s all in the past. You’re here now, and we have a chance to start over. All of us.”

I felt something hot drip on the top of my head as her voice cracked. “Everything’s going to be alright.”

“Promise?” I sniffed.

Her grip around me tightened. “I promise.”