The Dawn: The Bombs Fall (A Dystopian Science Fiction Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

boiler suits with
black epaulets. Both were wearing the black balaclava and cap that made them
all look the same. Their Assisters swung behind them and it seemed they always
had one hand resting on the handle, ready to strike. They noticed him and took
a glance at each other, but continued on their patrol. Usually they didn’t
bother you if you weren’t causing any trouble. They knew certain things had to
happen after lights out. If you were causing trouble it was a different story.
    The light illuminating the numbered
buttons continued to descend until it settled on the final destination. Ground
Floor. There was no choice to go any further because the final five buttons had
been removed from use by a well-aimed butt of an Assister in the early days. Back
then people still believed that they could find a way back to the old world,
the way it was before the war had destroyed it. They rode the lifts up and down
like lost souls somewhere between heaven and hell. They couldn’t accept that
neither home nor family existed anymore. Many fights broke out during this
time, mainly between people who already knew each other. Colleagues who had sat
together at adjacent desks and who had conversed only days before became
enemies in the fight to turn back time. That was what Leonard had called it in the
first few hours. Then the Guardians came and everything changed.
    When the first bomb fell, Zack had thought
it a meteor. He even raced to Leonard's office to tell him to watch. He
remembered the meteor that had plummeted to Earth only a few years before in
Russia, and afterwards those who had survived told their stories to an
awestruck world. Leonard was already at the window when Zack swung through his
door, his hands pressed up against the glass. By then the first signs of a
cloud had already begun to form, mushrooming upwards in the distance. Leonard
and Zack watched together as the sky lit up and the orange blaze tore a wound
through their world. It was Leonard that shouted at Zack to get under the
desk as the explosion rocked the skeleton of the building. The intensity of
the burst grew until it stifled Leonard’s words. He sat crouched in front of
Zack, his mouth screaming something inaudible, his words lost in the roar of
the explosion. They waited there until the sound of the blast died down and the
building rested. It was silence that took over as people waited in their hiding
places gripped by fear, interrupted only by the occasional bang or smashing of
glass as the city fell apart around them. Together Zack and Leonard stumbled to
their feet to take their first look at what was left. Zack's hearing was
muffled and weak and he couldn't hear what Leonard was saying to him. But he
saw that their windows had stood firm. They had been rocked but not broken by
the evil that had ripped through their city, now left on the brink of
extinction.
    At first nobody considered their
homes or their family. It was the shock. They had been stunned into nothing
more than gratitude for the sparing of their lives. It was only in the hours
and days afterwards that reality swelled like the wave of a tsunami, surging
forth to claim fresh victims. It was then that people started to realise that there
was nothing and nobody else left, and that's when people started to get scared.
Night had descended upon them. The city that would in time become known as New
Omega was covered in hot ash, without any hope for the break of another dawn.
    The lift doors screeched open to
reveal the ground floor lobby, a once-grand entrance to what at one point was
the second tallest structure of the capital. There had been a pond here, and
fish swam in it. People ate them within the first few days. Everybody was
starving. There had been trees here too. The lobby became a sanctuary at first,
always full, people from all floors hoping to catch a glimpse of nature, waiting
for a saviour to show up and rush through the doors, to tell them there had
been a mistake. They sat