Life after the Nuclear War

The world didn't end. The truth did.

The first thing you learn after a nuclear war is that hunger makes people cruel.

The second thing you learn is that they are cruel even when they are not hungry.

I learned the first in the spring, from a man who bit through a cook's wrist over a heel of bread. I learned the second that night, from the forty people who watched him dragged out by the ankles and went on eating. Before I left the hall I took three pulses under the pretense of checking for fever. Seventy-two. Seventy-six. Sixty-eight. Resting rates, all of them. Nobody in that room had been frightened by what they watched.

I still take pulses. It is the habit that outlasted my supplies.

The rules hung beside the dining hall doors on a sheet of steel that had once been the front of a medication refrigerator. Someone had punched them in one letter at a time, and the dents caught the lamplight. I no longer read it. I only knew where my eyes went while the line crawled, and what each rule had cost somebody I knew.

1. No resident may open an exterior door without authorization. The east door stood at the far end of Sublevel One, with a yellow line painted across the concrete three meters in front of it. Nobody crossed the line. Nobody had asked who painted it.

2. Every resident must surrender private food and medicine reserves. On the sixth day I had emptied my bag onto a trestle table in front of a man with a clipboard: forty ibuprofen, a tube of antibiotic ointment, a roll of tape. Wren had stood beside me, eleven years old and solemn as a witness, and handed over the half packet of crackers from her coat pocket.

3. All communication with unknown radio signals must be reported. Jonas Pike, the radio technician, stood two places ahead of me with his signal log under his arm, a green hardcover ledger he carried to the Director's office at eight every morning. He held it like something that might spill.

4. The medical team must investigate every suspected case of contamination. The medical team was me, a former veterinary technician named Beatrix Cole, and a dosimeter with a cracked face. I swept it over every fever and every rash before I touched the patient. In four hundred and twenty-seven mornings the needle had never left background.

5. No one may enter the lower maintenance corridors alone. That one I understood. In the first spring a man named Dell had gone down to check a flange by himself and was found at the bottom of a stairwell, in air that would not hold a match flame. Carbon dioxide pools in the low places. It smells like nothing.

6. The shelter director has final authority during emergencies. Nobody had ever defined an emergency. The board did not say who decided when one began.