Seek Shelter Immediately - An Original Short Story by K H Simmons

Photo by Max Baskakov on Unsplash

When the message came in, it was pure luck that I wasn't in the shower. Pure luck and burnt toast. It was one of those mornings. My alarm hadn't gone off, or I'd slept through it, meaning I was running late. Any time that happened set the day off to a bad start. I always tried to do too many things at once. Coffee, toast, feed the neighbour’s cat, shower, teeth, make up. Only this morning it didn't happen that way.

Coffee - check. Toast - burnt - bin. Feed the cat - where's the bloody cat? I spent far too long stood in the street, still in my pyjamas, shouting, ‘Cupcake’ at the top of my voice like some kind of crazy person. Normally the cat couldn't get enough food, she'd plod up on her chubby legs, chirruping and purring like crazy for her biscuits. Not today though. Today she was gone. Sammi was going to kill me, I thought.

Checking my phone, I realised that I needed to get in a shower if I was going to make it to work with anything other than my pyjamas on. That was when the message came through.
I undoubtedly wasted valuable seconds trying to determine whether it was real or a joke. Of course, we'd all done the drills. We'd been listening to the news as tensions with the East rose. Still, reading the message on my phone was different. It was real.

‘Incoming intercontinental ballistic missile warning. Seek shelter immediately.’

A wall of sound hit me as people all up and down the street who hadn't already left for the day, received the same message. There was screaming, shouting, crying. Doors slamming, people grabbing anything and everything they could. My other neighbours appeared, Jason and his two children, Sophia and Thomas. They looked at me with panic in their eyes. His wife Emma's car was gone, she had already left for work.

Jason was shouting something and heading towards my house. I forced myself to move. We'd decided a while ago, over a glass of wine that if these tensions came to a head, that they could join me in my bunker. They didn't have one and I was on my own after all. Sammi had been there too, she was on holiday now, somewhere sunny, hopefully somewhere safe.

Inside the house Sophia and Thomas were crying as Jason ushered them to the back garden. An alarm like an old-fashioned air-raid siren began to blare out, drowning out all other sound. It was like a kick up the backside, I had minutes, maybe. I grabbed the emergency bags from the utility room. Jason appeared to help and took the heaviest one. I followed with the rest.

The run to the bunker seemed further than it should, it was only at the bottom of the garden. Jason went down the hatch first and I lowered the bags to him. As I was about to climb down into safety, a young man vaulted over my fence and into the garden. He was slick with sweat and his eyes were wide with panic. He had a kitchen knife in his hand.
Thrusting it towards me, he shouted something. I begin to climb down and try to close the hatch behind me. Later it would haunt me that I was going to do that, that I considered doing that. Panic and fear make people capable of terrible things. I forced myself past that feeling and flung open the hatch. Beckoning to him and shaking I slid down the rest of the ladder. He appeared above me, dropping the knife which clattered on the floor next to me.
The hatch swung shut.

‘Twist the thingy,’ I said, forgetting the proper word for it.

Good job it wasn't that complicated. He locked the hatch and joined me in the small room below. Jason was holding open the vault door. We collected the things, including the knife and stepped into our new home. The vault door closed with a heavy clunk.

Something tickled against my leg, making me jump. I looked down to see Cupcake’s fluffy face as she rubbed against my leg.

Barely a moment later there was a boom that shook the very ground around us. My stomach did a flip as I realised how close we had come to not making it. The ground kept on shaking like an earthquake as the shock wave rumbled through the city. The lights flickered. We stared at each other with ghostly faces. Jason was thinking the unthinkable - what if his wife hadn't made it to a bunker? I was wondering if the cat had somehow known and got down here before any of us. The children were crying, not quite sure what to think only that it was scary. Our new roommate was shaking with relief or fear, or maybe both.

I turned to look at the vault door, still not daring to believe the truth. Sure enough, as if to confirm our fears, the light by the door which indicated outside radiation levels had switched to red.

‘Thank you,’ the stranger whispered. ‘I thought you were going to leave me out there.’

I nodded to him, not trusting my mouth not to say: so did I.

‘What’s your name?’ Jason asked him.

‘Andy,’ he replied.

Jason went around and introduced all of us. It seemed like the right thing to do. We were about to get to know each other very intimately. My bunker wasn’t large. There was one main room, big enough for a simple kitchen, a table with chairs and a sofa. There was a pantry already stocked with tins and jars of long-lasting food stuffs. There was a single bathroom with an underground water tank. Lastly there were two bedrooms with two sets of bunk beds in each. They were designed for survival, not comfort. Perhaps if my pay check had an extra zero or two on the end of it, I could have afforded something more homely. To be honest, it didn’t really matter, the bunker had saved us.

I’d spent a long time sorting the food and water situation, there was enough in here for six people for one year. They recommended enough for six months. I was being over cautious, yet at the same time never expecting to have to use it. Everyone, well everyone apart from Andy, had contributed to the cost of the supplies. I wasn’t so sure that mattered now, I didn’t begrudge him for it. I was just thankful that he was here, mostly because I didn’t have to live with the guilt of knowing I had condemned someone to death.

I began unpacking the bags. Andy bent down to help while Jason tried to calm the children.

‘Where’s Mummy?’ Sophia asked.

‘Mummy is safe, she’s just in a different bunker,’ Jason answered, struggling to keep his voice level.

‘Is she coming here?’ Thomas asked.

Jason swallowed hard, trying to defeat the lump in his throat.

‘Not yet, she’ll have to stay away for a while. At least until it’s safe outside. When it is, we’ll find her, don’t worry,’ Jason explained.

The children sniffed and nodded, tears splashing down their cheeks. Jason showed them through to the bedroom, distracting them with the excitement of getting the top bunk. I wished that I could be so easily distracted. I thought about my family down south and wondered if they’d been hit, were they safe? I thought about Sammi and wondered what she would think. Her home was gone. Cupcake butted my idle hand with her head. I scratched her behind her ears and received a satisfied purr in return. It was fortunate that Sammi had planned on being here, we had a supply of cat biscuits as Sammi couldn’t bear the thought of leaving behind her beloved cat. I didn’t mind, she was a sweet cat really. I just hoped the litter would last. It was a good job we had the waste shoot – I wasn’t prepared to live down here for months with the smell of used cat litter.

It was quiet the first night. No one fancied talking about the dark thoughts on their minds, me included. We ate soup without bread and tried to attune ourselves to the strange clunking and clanging noises that the bunker made. The generator hummed to itself. The clock on the wall told us it was seven PM, far earlier than anyone apart from the children would normally have gone to bed, but we bid each other goodnight. Jason and the children took one room. Andy and I took the other. I hadn’t changed out of my pyjamas since we got down here, I figured they’d probably see me looking worse so I might as well start their expectations low. No one seemed to mind.

I climbed into my bed and Andy switched off the light. I found myself staring at the ceiling for a long time. It was difficult to comprehend what things might look like above ground. My home, my neighbourhood, my entire city was gone. Had the country gone with it? Cupcake leapt up onto the bed and curled up by my feet. Her purring mixed with the hum of the generator. I turned over and shut my eyes, willing myself to sleep.

Morning looked no different to night down here. The more expensive bunkers were fitted with night and day imitation lighting to help your body maintain its natural wake-sleep cycle. Mine wasn’t so fancy. My alarm buzzed at six AM, telling me it was time to get ready for work. That was an unusual thought. Work was gone now. I wondered if any of my colleagues had made it. Would I ever see any of them again?

I rolled over. I’d already been awake for hours. I think I may have fallen asleep at some point; it wasn’t for long though. My heart raced and I sweated with anxiety. I slipped out of bed and made my way to the bathroom before the rush began. I glanced at Andy on my way out, he was sleeping soundly. I envied him. As I was in the low-pressure sprinkle of the shower, I wondered what had happened to him. What had brought him into my garden that day, wielding a kitchen knife.

The shower cut out automatically after a couple of minutes, barely enough time to get the soap out of my hair. I sighed. I guessed I would have to speed up in future. The timer was to ensure we didn’t waste water. When I emerged, Jason was up with the kids. He looked just as tired as I felt. There were dark bags under his eyes, and he looked like he might have been crying. He gave me a smile that might have fooled the kids, but not me.

After a breakfast of tinned fruit, I got out the last of the bags. It was stocked with a variety of board games, a deck of cards, pens, paper and books. I thought it would be enough to keep us entertained. Turns out when there’s literally nothing else to do, you quickly become bored. We decorated the walls with the children’s pictures. Andy taught us a few card games we didn’t know. It all became mundane.

The calendar on the wall told us that three months had passed. We checked the emergency radio every day and received nothing but static. Jason had grown a beard that made him look like a lumberjack, that was funny for about a day. Cupcake had lost weight on her diet of biscuits and no treats. She provided us with entertainment when she decided to sprint around the bunker as fast as possible, batting at imaginary flies.

Andy had grown more comfortable with us, and us with him. The morning of the attack he had caught his girlfriend cheating after he had been on a long night shift at the hospital. The warning had come in when he’d still been arguing with her. She had a bunker and had refused to let him in. Her fling had fought him off with a kitchen knife, throwing it at him before slamming the hatch shut. Andy had grabbed it out of panic and run through the neighbourhood looking for anywhere else to go. It was pure chance he’d found us. Jason wasn’t sure he believed him. I had no reason not to.
Andy did his part around the bunker, cleaning, cooking and even entertaining the kids. He was good with them; he’d been a nurse at the children’s ward. It gave Jason a welcome break from trying to deal with their temper tantrums when he said there was no TV, no ice cream, or no Xbox. They weren’t spoilt kids; they just hadn’t been raised expecting to live life trapped within a bunker.

The kids still asked about their mum, it wasn’t daily anymore though. I had read every book. We limited the best boardgames to once a week, so we didn’t exhaust them any more than necessary. We had played eye spy so many times that we could guess the object before they even started.

The most exciting thing to happen was when the generator needed refilling or when the disposal chute got blocked and we had to link together clothes hangers to poke the blockage through.
The radiation indicator above the door still shone red.

It wasn’t until the sixth month that we heard something on the radio. It was an automated message from the military.

‘Stay where you are, help is on the way. You will receive instructions via the radio.’

The message repeated three times a day. It stayed that way for four more weeks. When it finally changed, we could barely contain our excitement.

‘Please switch on your emergency location beacon. Help is on the way.’

We let Thomas switch on the beacon. It was just a switch on the wall with a blinking green light, but he needed something to cheer him up. The children had grown quiet. We taught them as best we could, with no idea of curriculum or if that stuff even mattered anymore. Andy taught them how to perform first aid. Jason taught them how to cook. I taught them how to operate the radio and how to fix it if it broke. The beacon blinked for days and the message on the radio didn’t change.

‘What if they don’t come?’ Jason whispered one night.

‘They’ll come,’ I said with more conviction than I felt.

‘Do you think there’s anything left up there?’ Jason asked.

‘Not of the city,’ Andy replied. ‘We don’t know where else was hit.’

‘I hope it’s over,’ I sighed.

The radio crackled. Out of instinct I rushed over to it.

‘Can anyone hear me?’ a woman’s voice came through.

I frowned.

‘Who is this?’ I asked.

‘Oh good, you’re there. Listen, don’t open the door. They’re not who they say they are,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

White noise was all I received in reply.

The next day the radio crackled again.

‘Bunker eight-four-six-six-two, your rescue party has arrived,’ a man said.

The number was the correct one, the one our beacon gave off. The woman’s words gnawed at my mind. They’re not who they say they are.

‘Open the door, let’s get you somewhere safe,’ the voice on the radio sounded friendly enough.

I was about to reply when I heard a clanking noise, Jason was already opening the vault door.

‘Wait!’ I hissed.

‘Why? We can finally get out of here!’ Jason said as he climbed the ladder.

‘What if they’re not the military?’ I said.

Jason was no longer listening. He was opening the hatch, no doubt thinking he would be reunited with his wife soon enough. The children emerged from the bedroom sleepy-eyed.

‘What’s going on?’ Sophia murmured.

The hatch swung open and two pairs of dirty hands reached in to yank Jason up. Daylight streamed in. I checked the light above the door, it still showed red. I darted to the door to slam it shut, as I reached it a man dropped down the hatch. He wasn’t wearing military gear, but he was armed. I slammed the door shut and locked it. Bullets thudded into the metal.

My heart pounded against my chest.

‘Open the door,’ the voice said over the radio. ‘Open the door, we’ve got your friend.’

‘Daddy!’ Sophia cried.

Andy restrained her as she tried to run to the door.

‘Open the door, we’re here to rescue you,’ the man over the radio said.

‘They’re lying,’ I whispered.

Andy nodded. He’d seen the man with the gun. He’d heard the bullets impact with the door. The children were crying again. They kept asking where their daddy had gone, and I didn’t know what to tell them.

‘He’s gone to find your mummy, but you can’t go with him. It’s not safe,’ Andy said.

‘The man on the radio though…’ Sophia frowned.

‘Go back to bed,’ I told them. With some pouting and a few more tears they did as they were told. ‘What do we do?’ I asked once the bedroom door was closed. ‘That’s not the military.’

‘We can’t go out there,’ Andy said.

I nodded my agreement.

‘Molly, Andy,’ it was Jason’s voice on the radio. I could just make out someone in the background prompting him to say something. ‘They’re…lying, don’t open the door!’

There was a scuffling sound over the radio followed by silence. Tears welled up in my eyes. I had wanted Jason to be right, I had wanted so badly for it to be a rescue. Whoever they were though, they weren’t here to save us. I checked the lock on the vault door and changed the number pad lock so that neither Jason couldn’t give it away from the outside and the children didn’t know it from the inside.

‘Maybe the real military are still coming,’ Andy said.

I could only hope that he was right. Hope was the only thing keeping us going and we needed it now more than ever. I couldn’t help thinking what if there was no military anymore, no government and no help. What then? I looked at the red light above the door. When that changed colour then we’d go and see. Until then though, the door remained sealed and we hid in our shelter. Every day we listened to the radio, the beacon blinked, and we waited, surviving off nothing but hope and rations.

About Me

I'm Katy, but go by K H Simmons officially. I write a lot of sci-fi, dark fantasy and dystopian fiction. If you're here for sparkly vampires, you're in the wrong place ;)

I frequently post short stories on my Facebook page, as well as work on full length novels. If you want more short stories like the above - check out my anthology Death, Demons & Dystopia available on Amazon/Kindle. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07YN5DY98

When I'm not writing, I can usually be found cuddling dogs, reading, at the gym or playing video games.

Wishing you all a very merry Christmas & a happy New Year! Thank you all for your support <3