Regrets

Regrets - by Tom Pistone

The days were getting colder. The gray clouds would sometimes take on hues of green and red through the day as storms would rage and wane in our self-made nuclear winter. It’s been seven years since a Russian computer virus went rogue and sent our entire world into the dark. The idea was simple enough, Russia wanted to play some games on its Chinese and US rivals after yet another set of sanctions by the UN. They sent a virus through an attachment in an email to poor sucker named Charlie Brown. I kid you not, a guy named Charlie Brown, an engineer over at the Seabrook Plant just north of Boston, caused the Nuclear Apocalypse by mistaking a Russian Virus for his daily political meme making fun of all those Liberals he couldn’t stand. Once the virus took hold, it was only supposed to give the Russians visibility into our grid and analytics with a kill code to shut down the grid in case of a war level event, but the virus had some flaws in its code that ended up turning it into the deadliest computer virus the world would ever know. A developer somewhere in Siberia forgot a simple semicolon in his code, and it sent an infinite loop of damage throughout the system, eventually making its way into the reactor coolant systems. By the end of the day, Seabrook was a Chernobyl level event. By the end of the week the fallout blew radioactive death-clouds across the Atlantic to Europe and eventually right back to Russia. Thousands died in the Northeast from the initial blast, but the fallout killed a million more in radiation poisoning, birth defects and cancer. After that, the fingers pointed, the voices grew into anger, and War was declared. Not against Russia… no this was across the isles of the Capitol. Civil War. Conservatives wanted to go to war with Russia in retaliation. Liberals wanted to take a more conservative approach and apply more sanctions before bloodshed. A protest broke out in front of the Capitol, it turned ugly. A high profile conservative talk show/blabbermouth got a Molotov cocktail to the face right on live TV, burning its reporters with live mics and cameras on. It was brutal. And it was the last straw. Governors in the South held rallies. Politicians began talks of secession and declared war on the North. They sent troops, and shot rockets at NYC. It was pure chaos. And a scary time to be alive. Well our Civil war turned into a unique situation for all those other world powers looking to assert themselves. More finger pointing, more shouting, and then more rockets. But this time across the ocean. Rockets were shot in all directions by an itchy trigger finger turning cities into rubble and turning our world into a cesspool of radioactive pollution and decay.

I lived in an old warehouse distribution center in the Berkshires. At one point we had 100 people housed in here, living off the canned and dry goods we found in the cargo. It was like winning the shittiest lottery you’d ever be a part of. It helped allowed us to survive. From time to time, we’d head out and try to find supplies, gas, survivors… most of the time we were met with dead bodies, empty stores and homes, or the occasional bullets from those desperate enough to kill for our food. On occasion we even had to defend the warehouse from looters trying to take what wasn’t theirs. As if you could just take free handouts to survive. HA. No. Hard work and a hot rifle. That’s what helped us survive. But in the end, there was no surviving. If people weren’t dying from their bullets, there were plenty of other ways to die. Let me tell you, I would rather die from the bullet anyday, than die from the cancer. Dying slowly and knowing your day will be coming sooner than later… that’s a shitty way to live out your life. Just slow rot and decay until BOOM you’re dead. You try to find help others survive, try to be a beacon of hope, but in the 21st century there was no more living. Only death. This was the end of the road for all of us. Our ecosystem was battered. Our population was decimated. Technology was useless without power. All that was left was the occasional straggler trying to survive on crumbs and sewer water. We were like cockroaches, like rats. Scavengers.

My wife Maura’s sickness hit me the hardest. She survived just as long as me. She was a matriarch. Someone the rest of us admired for her natural willingness to help and heal. She cooked for us on occasion, and helped us make even those last fleeting moments of life seem beautiful. Watching her hair come out, turn yellow from the jaundice, and lose that aura of grace as she cried about the pain, it was too much. Too much for any man seeing a loved one suffer with no hope.

She asked me to do it. I pleaded for hours, used every truth and lie I could think of, cried harder than I ever had before, but ultimately I put the gun in her hand. She sat there, as beautiful as ever, taking shaky short breaths. She opened her eyes slowly, and asked me to take something from her hands. It was a small blue jewelry box. It looked familiar. Like an old relic from a dream of another life. I told her I would be there until the end. Even in her last moments of life, I was still the stubborn one, the one with all the dumb ideas, the one with all the bad ideologies. Just as I pleaded one last time “Don’t Go!” she did it. Right through her jaw, up through her forehead, and out the top of her scalp. It left a horrible mess. It was frightening. I’ve never been more afraid. From Billions, to millions, to thousands, to hundreds, I was now alone. Maybe I was the last person on Earth. Maybe not. In that room, it was me and 4 walls covered in Maura’s blood. This was Hell and it finally came for me next.

I cried. A deep, heavy, sorrowful cry. Harder than when the millions died. Harder than when our children died. With our last 7 years, I always thought there might be hope to somehow find a way through, but witnessing this chaos in front of me, I knew this was it.

I threw up. It was mostly beans from this morning. I thought to myself what a horrible last meal this would be. If I could have done it right, it would have been some spaghetti carbonara from that place in the North End we used to go for date nights. God that was good food. The wine, the candles, her beautiful face. The silly banters, the funny stories, the hopeful dreams, the grueling debates.

I looked down at the box in my shaking hands, afraid to open it. I knew whatever it was, it was the last message my wife would ever leave for me. When I opened it, it brought a rush of memories into the light. On the right side of the heart shaped locket was a picture of her and I sharing a swan boat ride in the Boston Common 25 years ago. Back when we were young and stupid kids that graduated from college. Before any real responsibilities. We wore our Red Sox hats, and I had a bit of a sunburn from being the oaf who thought he could beat the sun that day and not wear any sunscreen. I’d always tell her “I only burn once, and then I’m good for the summer!”. She loved to gloat when I was wrong. We both had silly expressions on our face as we had been bantering with the boat driver about how touristy we thought we were being, even though we grew up in the area all our lives. That was an exciting summer. I had just graduated from MIT. First kid in my family to even go to college, so much promise and potential I thought. What a proud moment. My wife went to Boston University. I made fun of her for being on the dumber side of the Charles. But she’d always rip me right back for being a Nerd who studied Star Wars more than my own books. She wasn’t wrong. It was a funny way we had between us, always ripping on each-others insecurities, but lovingly appreciating our differences.

On the left side of the locket was a tiny inscription. When I saw it, I hated it. It reminded me of everything I had tried to forget these last 7 years. It couldn’t be a more polar opposite emotion from the love and hope I saw in the picture. Just the letters alone made me cringe. I bellowed like a dog for an hour. I threw the locket against the wall, hoping to break it. Instead, in the dim light of whatever daylight was left, I could see the inscription, plain as day, staring right back at me. Telling me it was time to stop running. Time to stop pretending. Time to own up for my sins, repent, and join the masses of others who met the same fate. That’s when I decided to take the gun from my wife’s hands. They were still warm with life. A life wasted because of mistakes by a waste of a human being, who wanted a quick laugh and who never really took his job, or his life, or his wife, or his family or his kids as seriously as he should have. All these years I thought to myself, it could have been anyone. I should live because I had a right to just as much as the next person breathing right next to me. I blamed the liberals for years. Then I blamed the other countries trying to ruin our country. Then I blamed the hungry, starving, sick individuals trying to survive and take my food. The food that I found. I had to protect it! Even if they were just kids. I blamed everyone and anything I could. Except myself.

Today I took the blame. It was a long time coming. I hoped hell was a better place than how I left things on Earth. It couldn’t be worse than this.

The inscription glistened in the light one last time before the bang, when everything went dark. Maura + Charles Brown – True Love Forever.