River’s POV:
We don’t know what caused the deadly rain that took out Sunset Valley. All we know is that only some of us survived. I was two years from graduation and my boyfriend had one year left to go when astrophysicists said that some gravitational anomaly was sending a whole bunch of rocks currently in orbit around Saturn in the direction of our planet. And that was going to make things absolutely horrific for those of us here in the projected impact sites. We had an estimated time of impact as was conveyed to the news stations, but unfortunately, those warnings were unheeded and many who thought they had time perished when “The Rain” came. According to what we heard on the radio from what radio stations survived, that 99.997% of the planet’s population perished.
My mother, my boyfriend’s parents, and many others didn’t make it. Parker’s parents did, so did the Bunch family’s parents. Now we were all living in the ruins of what used to be our town. The Landgraab’s property, was an impact site for the largest chunks of meteor to hit the town. And naturally the Landgraabs were no longer with us.
We: Bebe, Haruo’s cousin Torao, me and my boyfriend Haruo, his best friend Phil and Phil’s on and off again friend of the opposite gender decided that we were going to seek higher ground and live where the Landgraabs used to live. It provided us with ready access to water and fishing resources. Food was scarce and we needed to think about where our resources were going to come from. Lack of food sources spelt early death.
We also hunted for our meals, catching small animals for roasts and steaks to make meat soup and catching fish to cook fish soups. We tried to pack in as much protein as we could. Luckily we managed to salvage quite a few items from the school, including a science station, a workbench for inventing a potion table, an alchemy table, sculpting wheel, and a plumbot station and recharger. We also managed to trap cows and chickens and with bits of wood scavenged from here and there we managed to cobble together somewhat of a shelter for them.
We on the other hand lived in tents seeking shelter that we knew was going to be untenable in the near future when winter hit. We could already feel the temperatures drop from the soot being thrown up into the air from all the meteor impacts around the world blocking out the sunlight. We never really got above fifteen Celsius. And temperatures on average were falling. When you see your breath when you exhale in the wee hours of the morning, you know it’s cold. How much longer before we would have to go underground to escape an endless winter; a winter that would bring starvation to many. If we dug underground and heated it with fires, we could possibly warm it up to tolerable, perhaps even enough to allow plants to grow.
In any case there wasn’t a whole lot of time for hope. Stock up to ensure our survival and use cloning on the edibles to make sure that we had plenty of them.
Society was no longer civilized. The strong took from the weak and those who couldn’t manage to find a way to scavenge and persevere did not survive. It was Darwin’s survival of the fittest down to a nutshell. Those who had weapons were at the top of the food chain. Those who didn’t were prey.
Bebe decided to learn elixir-making at the elixir table. There was a tingle in our bodies as if something had fundamentally changed in our physiology enabling us to channel energies through us that we never could quite grasp the know-how to do before. Bebe needed to find a wand to start working with magic. And magic would make an effective weapon against those who meant us ill.
Phil opted to work on something he knew which was inventing. He would use the invention table in order to make useful things for us and in order to sell so we could make money. Of course for the first little while his best efforts yielded little but lighting himself on fire which amused my boyfriend immensely who would laugh hysterically watching Phil flail his hands in the air while frantically running to the shower to hopefully successfully extinguish himself. If anything, it made for an interesting afternoon.
Torao was busy at the Plumbot building station attempting to understand robotics and designing nanites and trait-chips. Occasionally the inputs would go awry and he would trigger a system shut-down alarm. Which meant that whatever he was working on was toast and had to be redone from the very beginning. It looked rather tedious and annoying, but Torao did look like he was having the time of his life making what would in essence be our night security while we slept.
But eventually he managed to produce a plumbot who he named C7Y03 otherwise known as Clyde. Clyde was a typically happy go lucky plumbot who tended to view even the worst of situations with a cheery demeanor that one found quite amusing. And this apres-The Rain was a test for all of us mortals however Clyde took it in stride. Clyde would charge up during the day and stay awake and conjure with the conjuring kettle throughout the night time thus enabling us to get a full night’s rest while keeping up security for the rest of us. Torao was working on trait-chips to install on Clyde so that he could take over some tasks for us like gardening and fishing and other things while Haruo hunted.
That’s what my boyfriend did. He would take the rifle out and go shooting, whether it was deer or raccoons or large birds. Which enabled us to get links, patties, steaks or roasts. Sometimes we would also get eggs and vegetables. It was not an easy existence and most of the time food was scarce. Vegetation was sparse, at least green vegetation so the deer were not as big as they used to be having to range further out to find edible greenery. Raccoons scavenged through garbage so they were still nicely sized and we caught other small creatures that allowed us to eat. Womrats were relatively tasty as were guinea pigs.
My boyfriend would head out in the morning and not return till afternoon. It served to show just how scarce game really was and just how far he had to track just to find what he did catch.
When he came back he was dragging a fresh kill with him. Two snakes and a tasty womrat. We’d be able to have meat soup tonight.
Meanwhile Phil had managed to make a fridge at the inventing table that would be better than our current one, however, he’d invented a lot of things that we currently had no use for and were better off being sold at consignment. Others in the town whether delusional from post-traumatic stress or managing to function well tended to buy things that reminded them of the pre-apocalyptic days.
“The Rain” had traumatized many in our community to the point where they were living their lives in what appeared to be a catatonic stupor. The massive explosions of the meteors had caused craters into which houses were collapsed and our city hall was half-buried under a rubble-heap from the tsunami that had inundated the coast from an impact strike of a quarter-kilometer long asteroid. It was almost like being hit with all-out nuclear war but without the radiation.
Haruo and I took what solace we could from each other. In the past there would be taboos. But he and I were alone, together and we loved each other. I’m sure Bebe and Torao were also of the same opinion - and either a shower together or a romp in the hay (in the tent) served to satiate our overheated hormones which did not subside even though we’d just been through a cataclysmic event that had wiped three-quarters of us off the face of the planet.
The odd one out was Phil who had to deal with the fact that he was alone since Clarissa was in one of her cranky moods and would go off a ways to brood. Clyde was also male (if a plumbot had genders). I’m sure Torao could opt to make Phil a mate (a female plumbot) but well, so far he hasn’t.
Life was going to be stressful. In between building a shelter that is intact and would allow us to survive the apocalyptic winter ahead. It also needed to be a safe refuge for us to inhabit and defensible in case others in the community got the idea to come along and try to take what was ours. This was another reason why we wanted plumbots. They would be like a standing army between us and those who wished us ill.
At the end of the first day with Phil still working on stuff on the workbench, Bebe and Torao took the first tent and Haruo and I stood naked in the shower together taking the opportunity to enjoy at least a semi-private moment together that wasn’t marred by pebbles and rocks jamming into one’s back.
The intimacy at least allowed me to forget that my mom was no longer with us, nor his dad. All I wanted was for him to love me and take some of our shared pain away.
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