Warning

I was stuck in traffic when the world finally snapped. Trying to get down I-405, windows closed to fend off the smog and fumes from other cars, I started to feel a rumble. No, not quite a rumble, almost a shiver. My first thought was fire. It wasn’t quite like an earthquake, and it was something north of 100 degrees; fires had already long been something we in LA were familiar with, but this felt...odd. Not quite right. But the radio continued, and so did I.

At home, I turned on the TV. I wanted to check out the news, see if an evac was ordered. Nothing was wrong. Immediately. But the news anchor was confused. He kept touching his ear like he was trying to really hear his earpiece, brow furrowing, and he had just started a sentence when the TV shut off, the whole house suddenly black. It seems silly now. I still wasn’t that concerned. I puttered around the house, lighting lanterns, and flipping switches.

I had a big front window in that house. One of my favorite things about the place, it was huge and let in a ton of natural light. At night, because I was up on a hill, I could see miles and miles of the LA skyline, and I loved to marvel at the lights. I loved that window. I moved past that window towards my kitchen, and looked out to see if the whole neighborhood’s lights were out.

And I couldn’t see anything.

Nothing.

Miles and miles and miles of darkness.

I never knew, until that moment, how dark LA could get. It was too much. Too dark. The pit in my stomach felt too much like panic and I convinced myself that that’s all it was. My anxiety was acting up, is all, and in the morning, I’ll feel better. I willed myself to sleep that night, mostly unsuccessfully, and refused to look out the window, even when that shiver started to happen again and again.

We pieced it together, eventually. So much had been brewing for so long, and as it does, when it went it all went at once. Cell phones worked for a while. Sort of. I guess some towers have some sort of back up when the power goes out. Service was spotty, but still, we were able to figure out that there had been pretty much everything. Earthquakes started it. Fires followed. As the earthquakes got worse and worse, we lost roads and whole buildings to the ocean, and the power continued to go out. Ha ha, California, right?

But it didn’t stop with us. We tried to leave. We tried to head further inland, figuring that it was just the old “California is going to fall into the ocean” thing that came to pass. The group I was travelling with started to get worried when we hit Arizona. Huge piles of rock, unexpected chasms, and empty cities were...off-putting. Stragglers let us know that they had had the same, but different. Earthquakes opened up huge holes in the ground, destroying entire towns, let alone water and electric systems.

Life was...changed. Once our phones stopped working for good, we could only communicate in person. We kept travelling for a while, but without news, or electricity, or anything, most of us ultimately decided to settle somewhere we were pretty sure was probably Tennessee. It was a little cooler, and we had been on the road for so long. Some people from our group kept going, swearing that they would figure out what happened and come back with help.

But they never came back.

It’s been 40 years now. We survived. Mostly. We made a new home here where it was a little cooler, and once the tremors stopped we were able to get fairly stable (ha ha, get it?). We had a rough time at first. A bunch of softies from around LA (give or take a few picked up along the way) didn’t really have any survival skills. We lost quite a few people at first, once the packaged food ran out. Eventually, though, we figured it out. Started growing things, found some animals. We had a basic outline, at least, that helped. More people came and joined us, and some of us even started having families. After 20 years or so, the weather wasn’t quite so bad.

We never really found out what happened. A few folks had disjointed pieces: floods and tsunamis on the East Coast, freak lightning storms that set off fires and weeks of crazy high temperatures. Systems failing in big chunks. But we don’t know why.

I do have a theory, though. I can still remember, after all. I may be old, but not quite that old. We had already been dealing with things like increasingly dangerous and widespread fires. Temperatures were increasing all over the globe. I had even watched documentaries talking about the crazy weather that would come. It all matches.

The signs had been there for a long time. And believe me, some people tried to do something about it. They warned of ice caps melting, floods, and more. Things that apparently happened. But too many were inconvincible. And it would have taken all of us to avoid it. We were too broken. It was never going to happen.

We can’t look back anymore. If we’re going to keep surviving, we have to look to the future.

Gen gently folded the paper back up and tucked it back into the heart-shaped locket she had found in the dirt. She didn't know what a lot of it meant, but she knew this story was important. She knew some about the before the Rumble, what they told them in school, but a first-hand account was amazing.

Only now, more than 100 years later, were folks starting to become able to really figure out a timeline. Gen had always been fascinated with what came before, reading hundreds of books that she had found, that talked about malls, TVs, cell phones. Theoretically, she understood the concepts, but how they went from that to her mostly candlelit town was a mystery. Gen tucked the locket in her pocket and continued to search.

How could you build a future without knowing the past?