Short story
- melissaliu2007
- Apr 24
- 8 min read
Born Again
The bunker smelled of stale air and old metal, like rusting time itself. I sat on the floor, legs crossed, my hands shaking as I pressed them against my lap. The light from the overhead bulb flickered, casting shadows across the concrete walls. My parents were lying on their cots, their breathing shallow, faces lined with deep wrinkles that had not been there just a few days ago.
The gas had changed everything.
I was seventeen when it happened—when everyone started dying. The government never admitted their participation in the decimation of the American population, but it was obvious that the government had done it. There were too many of us, too many mouths to feed, too many bodies crammed into every inch of land. Overpopulation had strained the country’s resources. One day, people started aging years in only hours, collapsing in the streets, their hair turning white as their skin shriveled. Some barely made it through the week before they turned to dust.
My parents and I had been outside when the gas began spreading. There was no warning, no alarms. The gas was invisible, scentless—just another breath of air, only this one carried death. One minute my father was leaning over the fence to exchange pleasantries with our elderly neighbor; the next minute the man collapsed in front of us, his skin sagging, his hands clawing at his face as his body deteriorated under time’s accelerated hand. The realization hit all at once—. I had once mocked my parents for their paranoia, accusing them of being irrational when they claimed an apocalypse was coming. However, they were right.
My parents had always been paranoid, always convinced the world would collapse somehow. They had built a bunker years ago, stocked with supplies, a water and air filtration system, even emergency rations that tasted like cardboard. They had always foreseen a future in which the cramped, useless bunker that my mom and dad had tirelessly built underneath our house would be put to good use.
“Run!” Dad yelled, grabbing my wrist, dragging me towards our house as the chaos around us unfolded. As I saw people running around in a panic, for the first time, I was glad my parents had built a shelter in anticipation of such a seemingly impossible event. At the time, I was embarrassed, but now I was grateful for their foresight. People were screaming and falling to their knees around us, their bodies betraying them. I saw a woman’s hair turn white before she hit the pavement. A toddler stumbled, falling out of the arms of her mother as her limbs elongated and her features sharpened, aging the child into a pre-teen in just a few minutes.
My father shoved the front door open, running into the living room to grab the last of the emergency food, throwing dusty bags of unopened rations into the hatch that led to the bunker. My mother gathered the rations alongside him, the two working seamlessly.
“Grab what food you can from the refrigerator!” my father yelled at me, his voice anxious but steady. As I filled bags with the food from the fridge, my mom turned on the television, hoping to hear some news about what was going on.
The panicked voices of reporters blared from our television as they reported about some kind of unexplained aging epidemic that was spreading across California. The reporters debated theories—bioweapons, environmental collapse, divine punishment. I could tell that they were trying to stay calm, but the reporters’ faces told another story. Then the broadcast started cutting out. The last image I saw before my parents dragged me into the bunker was a reporter clutching at his chest, wrinkles forming on his face before my eyes, his mouth opening in a silent scream. The feed went completely dark.
By the time we had sealed the hatch behind us, the gas had already touched us, too. I reached up to gingerly touch my face, feeling the sharper planes of my newly-matured face. I noticed a new tightness in my clothing, which was straining against my longer arms and legs. I dug through the box marked “toiletries” until I found one with a handheld mirror. I grasped the handle and slowly raised the mirror to my face, swallowing hard before flipping it over to see my now approximately 25-year-old face. I had changed, and I had grown in the 5 to 10 minutes it had taken us to get to the bunker.
But my parents…my parents had aged even more.
My father’s hair had gone completely white, his hands unsteady as he reached for me, hugging me close to him in a rare act of comfort. My mother looked frail, her once youthful face hollowed out by deep lines. She stood near my father and me, her hands touching her face as if to make sure that it had really changed that much. They tried to hide the shock in their eyes, but I could read their expressions.
“We made it,” my father said, forcing a smile. But we all knew the truth—the bunker had saved us from immediate death, but it had not completely saved us from the aging effects of the gas.
Time passed differently underground. We were in the bunker for over thirty days, listening to the emergency radio. There were no windows, no way to measure the days beyond the dimming light bulbs and the dwindling supplies. My parents and I settled into a strange routine. Mornings were spent organizing food, checking the water supply, and making sure the infiltration system was still functional. Afternoons were calmer. I read aloud old books that my parents had packed along with the prepared supplies, my voice the only sound in the still air. Sometimes my dad and mom spoke of the past, of the world before the gas, reminiscing about slow car rides we had taken for granted or the way we had underappreciated the outside world.
Days blended together. I kept a tally on the wall, but at some point, the numbers felt meaningless. In order to preserve battery power, we only listened to the radio for an hour or two in the morning. However, the radio provided minimal information, so we wondered what was happening outside. Were there others in our town still clinging on to survival, or was anyone left at all? The silence of the bunker became oppressive. My mother tried talking to keep hope alive, but my father grew quieter as if each word drained what little strength he had left.
My mother was the first to go.
She had been weak for days, her voice barely above a whisper. I tried to feed her, tried to make her drink, but nothing helped. I sat beside her small mattress, gripping her frail hand, feeling the bones beneath her skin. Her breath was slow and shallow.
“I love you, Perdita,” she murmured, her lips barely moving.
“I love you too, Mom,” I whispered, my throat tight, the words feeling too small for the weight they carried.
My mother did not say another word. She just closed her eyes, and I watched as her chest rose once more, then stilled.
I did not cry right away. I sat there staring, waiting for her to take another breath. Waiting for her to move. My hand trembled as I reached out, brushing a strand of white hair from her forehead. Just a few weeks ago, that hair had been jet black, with just a few strands of gray in it. Now as I stared at my mom’s haggard face, nearly destroyed by the gas, the sobs came. Loud, wracking, painful sobs that echoed against the walls. I clutched her hand, pressing my forehead against it, my body shaking.
My father tried to be strong. He held me as I cried, his own eyes red-rimmed but dry. We laid her to rest in one of the smaller rooms, covering her body with what spare blankets we had. My father never entered the room again.
My father and I spoke less and less after her death, our conversations reduced to whispers, to only necessary words. No gas was affecting us now, but it seemed as if my father was aging rapidly, withering away before my eyes. His body weakened, and his movements slowed. I watched as my dad struggled to lift things he had once carried with ease. I had to help him more and more until eventually, he could not do anything on his own. He tried to hide it, to act like he was still strong, but I could see it in his eyes. He was done.
I tried not to resent him for it.
The night he died, I sat beside him just like I had with my Mom. My father held my hand weakly, and when he stopped breathing, I sat in silence, feeling the weight of everything pressing down on me. The emptiness of the bunker and the stillness of the air became even more pronounced.
I carried his weakened body to the room where we had laid my mother, gagging as I opened the door while tears rolled down my face. The smell of decay invaded my nostrils, even through my mask, as I placed my father’s cold body next to my mother’s. I backed out of the room, my hands shaking as if I had aged like my parents. I never entered that room again.
I spent days—weeks?—alone in the dim light of the bunker, following the monotonous schedule that my parents had laid out. I tried to fill the nights with reading, but that only lasted a few days. I let out a bitter laugh the last time I read to an empty room, my voice lingering in the air as if waiting for a response.
I gave up the pretense of following any sort of schedule: I slept however long I wanted, ate when I had the energy to make food, and stared at the ceiling for hours.
I woke up one day, dragging my tired body out from the cot I called my bed, and I noticed the blinking red light of the air filter.
The massive filtration system was near my head, a reminder that if I did not replace it soon, I would suffer the same fate as my parents. I looked away once again.
The next morning, the water filter failed, and I was down to the last of my food supplies. I knew my parents would not have wanted me to die alone in this bunker, so I had to make a decision: go outside or die here alone.
I grabbed a dusty backpack, filled it with my remaining supplies and put on a mask. After one last look around the bunker and at the door of the room where my parents were, I made my way up the stairs to the hatch.
When I emerged, the world was unrecognizable. Cars were scattered along the street, their doors left open, rust forming on their surfaces. The door of the house across the street was wide open, swinging back and forth, its squeaking the only noise on the street. There were no bones or bodies anywhere—just dust, scattered by the wind, the only remnants of those who had passed.
I stepped off my porch, my boots leaving clear distinct footprints in the dust. I tentatively breathed in and out, but nothing happened. The world was not the same as before; it was a graveyard. However, the gas was clearly gone, and I was still here, just older.
Now, I would go on for them.
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