Suzy’s Strange Saga

A loud noise in the distance wakes you up and you also notice you’re no longer moving.

“HOLY SHIT SUZY WAKE UP! LOOK!” Lance yells and you feel a rough shake to your arm.

You instantly open your eyes and with a brief head swivel, you see something that is going to change your life more than anything else in the world.

A mushroom cloud in the far distance.

You’re not feeling any tremors or aftershocks, a wave of fire hasn’t engulfed you, so you’re guessing that it wasn’t excessively close, maybe it was even a small one. Still, you can’t help but wonder if you’re in some sort of deadly radiation radius though. If so there isn’t much that can done about it.

“That’s it then…the world finally went and did it…” you say to yourself.

You’re much calmer than Lance is, who is obviously distressed. In fact given that most of the vehicles haves stopped, you can only guess that he’s not the only one. Some are getting out to look and that’s soon followed by a few breaking down into tears or arguments.

“Lance, we’re going to be okay. Just like you said, we’ll figure something out.” You say and start unlocking the door.
“Where are you going? I think we should stay inside, I mean there might be radiation or something.”
“Lance, if we are within the fallout blast, then we’ve probably already acquired enough rads to kill us anyway. I’m going to go try to calm everyone down because if this is it, then we’ll actually do a lot better in the survival aspect if we all work together.”

It takes a moment and you stand on top of your vehicle to do it, but you soon get everyone’s attention.

“Hey! Listen up! This might be the end of civilization as we know it, but it isn’t the end of the world! Sure life is going to be harder now, but when hasn’t it been for us carnies? Why just this damn week we suffered through a military occupation, an internal civil war, an attack by freaks, and an attack by a bunch of rednecks. We’ve already splintered apart enough already. No way are we going to descend any further. We’ve come too far.”

You think you’re getting better at making speeches because this time you’re seeing less frowning faces and general attentiveness.

“We used to drift from place to place providing entertainment as a source of our survival well what has really changed? We’ll still be drifters because that’s how we’ll survive. This world just got a whole lot shittier and we ARE nomads and vagabonds by nature. Surely we’ll be picking up, collecting, and scavenging useful material, items and the like to trade in our travels. I know we all have useful skills, surely with those, our ability to learn and adapt and a team effort we’ll be able to keep this FAMILY together a very long time.”

“Yeah. Suzy’s right. We can survive this.” someone says and several others agree.

While you don’t get a feeling of enthusiasm, at least this time you are not met with apathy.

In any case, you and some of the others get together to decide where to head next and what to do about food, and fuel. This isn’t going to be easy, but then this whole week has been a trial for you.

No longer are you the shy “good” girl who hid away in the basement, harassed by your family and living as one day blurred into the next. You are part of something bigger and not just that, but a leader.

It’s a brand new day and this is just the beginning of your brand new life.