by Gina Macdonald

Created on: December 14, 2008

The Future Looks Dark
She walked along the long narrow road, not knowing where she was, or where she was going. As she walked, a raven crowed in the distance. She involuntarily looked in the direction of the sound, and saw an old farmhouse in the distance. She sighed, relieved, as it was almost nighttime, and her pack was growing heavy. She needed a place to rest.

It took her almost ten minutes to reach the house, and when she did, she saw it wasn't as old as she had thought. It was still brightly painted, and when she walked inside she saw a thin layer of dust, but not enough to assume it had been there for a very long time. She supposed the owners must have fled a few days ago.

She was fleeing too. She had heard a rumour that the spies had noticed her, so she gathered her things and left as quickly as possible. It was a good thing she lived alone; she didn't want to put anyone else in danger. All she wanted was for the government to stop intruding into her privacy. It used to be like that, before the war. Before everything went wrong

It was the year 2035. As she put the dishes in her new self-washing-and-drying sink, she looked out of the kitchen window and saw a strange looking cloud in the sky a few kilometers away. She turned on her LCD plasma flat screen television to find out what happened. Every channel said the exact same thing: "State of emergency... A nuclear bomb has just been detonated on the US-Canadian border... We are evacuating the immediate region If a mushroom cloud is visible, please leave the area at once State of emergency"

For a moment she had just stood there in shock. Then she had realized that she was in the immediate range of the nuclear bomb. She remembered tearing through the house, picking up things and throwing them in bags to take with her to wherever she was going. After what seemed like an hour, but, looking back, was really only a few minutes, she ran out the door, dragging a large suitcase and a full-to-bursting garbage bag. She had seen that she wasn't the only one; all her neighbors were doing the same. As she climbed in her hybrid Smart Car and followed the long line of vehicles snaking out of the suburb, she had whispered a line from a very old movie she remembered her mother saying sometimes, "We're not in Kansas anymore."

Now, as she looked back on that day, ten years ago, she reflected that her younger self hadn't realized the full extent of what was about to happen. Only a few days after that first blast, another

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