Part 3

Surviving the Cataclysm

Part 3

River: Morning involved a hasty meal. The longer that we were not in our combat gear the more vulnerable we felt. After realizing that the military wasn’t about to make use of the gear any longer, we felt justified in utilizing what was left behind. My husband was rather quiet and ate his meal. As his wife, I could sense that there was something weighing heavily on his mind.

“We can’t stay here, honey…” He said finally with a deep sigh. "We’re too exposed here. Yeah, sure we can see everything coming at us, but that big expanse of flat terrain gives the opposing side a big target to shoot at, as much as it gives us the opportunity to target them.“ And I could see why. When you looked out at the surrounding terrain, there were many angles that the enemy could potentially come at you from. In essence we were there with our backs against the wall: a prime example of a sitting target.

We knew we had to find cover, but topographically, this was a flattened island, no defining topographical markers, just a flat expanse of plain on an island in the middle of the bay. I knew my husband was keeping something quiet. That he’d seen something on the base that we’d ransacked trying to get some items that we could potentially use. We’d seen what had happened to Sunset Valley through the survivor’s grape-line, something about 1.2 megatons and a horrific explosion which flattened Sunset Valley and left it a radioactive wasteland. But something in my husband’s eyes showed that he was thinking about something else, that he’d seen something that we weren’t meant to see, that the government had been keeping something from us. "You know the island that the research facility is on?” he said quietly. I remembered it all too well, we’d just come from there after looking through the military base right next to the research facility. "We need to go back…and secure what I found. If anyone else gets their hands on it, there won’t be a next time.“

I was trying to slice vegetables to make autumn salad and when my husband said those six final words, the knife nearly slipped from my hands as a chill ran up my spine. When I turned around to see if he was actually kidding or not, his sombre expression told me that he wasn’t. There was only one thing that he could have found that would have caused him to react the way he had. When the ramifications of what he’d stated had sunk in, I quickly finished up the autumn salad and made preparations that we would have to vacate this bunker that we’d created for ourselves.

While my husband went off to see what he could do about securing the military base with a show of 120mm main gun to let them know that he wasn’t kidding about utilizing it if the base was not within his hands within the hour. I knew he’d secured the base when I heard some explosions going off. Evidently he was letting them know that they needed to retreat. I received the call within the hour and we made plans to move what we had back over to the base.

If there was anyone planning to mount an attack on the base or trying to make it their own, my husband had discouraged them with the Abrams and a few well-timed shots from the main gun. The M1A1 wasn’t designed to be sent into battle with only one crewmember but somehow, he’d made it work. After all, necessity is the mother of all inventions. The base was ours.