It was April 3rd , 2032, exactly a year and a half after the start of World War III. America, Russia and China had started attacking each other the very moment the war had begun, while Europe was focused on defending Greenland and Ukraine.
I am a citizen of Berlin, capital town of Germany which has not been attacked even once in the first year of war. We all felt safe there, but we still anxiously watched the news every night, looking for new information about war.
My day started as usual; I dropped my daughter off to school and then went to work. Spring had just started and there were scents of rain and flowers alongside town's everyday hustle and bustle. Political tensions and threats were all over the news, but no one bothered with them. News like that became a part of daily life in Berlin. World was tense, but we all believed nothing would happen, especially in central Europe.
Somewhere around noon everything paused. Traffic lights broke down and phones lost signal. Everything went silent. People stopped working and were looking at the sky. Then it happened. At first there was light stronger than the Sun that erased all the colors, and then everything exploded. It felt like the earth had shattered. Chaos was everywhere. Buildings were on fire, windows were broken, people were running around shouting names of their loved ones. It took me a moment to collect myself. I could only think about my daughter. I was relatively far from the strike, but was she? I already lost my wife, and I could not lose her too. While I was thinking about where her school is located, police officers came to take us survivors to the atomic shelter. I refused to come, insisting on going to my daughter's school to check on her. I was completely out of my mind. I rebelled so hard, that two police officers had to phisically make me go with them. The last thing they said to me was that if my daughter survived, she would be in the shelter.
I woke up in an old, moldy underground hall covered in dust. I was laying on a wet towel instead of a bed, and as an alternative for a pillow I had a rock. There were people everywhere around me. Some were scared, some were crying, and some were simply confused about what had happened. I looked around and saw a bunch of people with serious injuries, body parts missing, and third-degree burns. I could only hope that my daughter was as lucky as I was. I got out of my "bed", and began to look for someone who could give me some information. When I asked one of the police officers, I got the answear of which I was afraid of. He said that they have no information about who had bombed Berlin and that they lost any kind of contact with other survivors and other possible shelters the moment the bomb had struck. That meant that we had to assume that us seven hundred sheltered civilians were the only survivors and were the only ones left of our country's capital. That also meant that if my daughter was not here, that she was most likely - dead. He followed up on that with even more bad news, saying that the infrastructure of the shelter was damaged, and that it would not survive for longer than a month. That meant we had only around thirty days of safety before we had to go out to the radioactive streets of Berlin again.
I fell into depression. I had stopped eating even the meagre portions of bread and sausages that they gave us every day, and I barely drank from my bottle with barely a liter of water inside it. While others were thinking of a plan to escape, I was just lying on the floor not doing anything. I had already been depressed when my wife died, but at that time I could have at least drowned my sadness in alcohol, which was impossible to do in this condition, so the loss was even harder to accept.
Twenty-five days had passed when it was clear that we could not stay in our shelter anymore. "Luckily", police officers and some volounteers had made an escape plan- because of their ignorance about the current situation in the other big countries, they have decided to go with the safer option, which was to walk to Denmark. We all knew that to reach Denmark on foot in this condition would take us around a month and a half and that we would suffer terrible losses, but we did not have any other options. Denmark was our only hope. After the plan was accepted, almost everyone started leaving the shelter, while me and a few other people have already accepted our fate and death with nothing else to live for.
Two hours had passed, and I was almost alone in the darkness. I was just lying there, already half dead. In that month I had spent underground, I lost over thirty kilograms. That is when I saw a light. I was ready to go towards it, to end my miserable life; but then I heard a voice. Voice I had recognized. Voice full of hope and worry. Da-daddy? - someone asked with a mix of fear and uncertainty. I could not believe it! It was my ten-year-old daughter Ana! She was alive! I moved away from the light and looked at her. You could see the consequences of war on her as well - her skin was gray from mixture of dust and lack of vitamin D, she had dark circles under her eyes, and she looked so skinny. I was so happy to see her alive that that realization miraculously pulled me out of depression, and gave me a reason to live for. I had to reach Denmark. Not for myself. But for my daughter. To give her a better life.
The last journey
After a few hours of preparations we had started our journey towards Denmark. We expected it to be tough, but what had awaited us was worse than anyone could ever imagine. Human remains were all over the streets, every single building was destroyed, and the air was unbreathable. We hopelessly wandered through silent streets, streets in which we made our first memories. Those memories were now gone. A place where you had your first kiss, football pitch where you scored your first goal, a cinema where you used to hang out with your friends... Everything was just erased.
After ten days had passed, a lot of people had faltered. Their bodies were unprepared for that kind of exertion, and their lungs could not handle that much toxins and radiation. We have not slept much or got lots of rest, because "we had to" travel fast. The tempo was too strong, and even though we had passed half of our way in under two weeks, we had suffered terrible losses and we could not continue like that. I was exhausted from carrying Ana on my back, and we were all suffering from the consequences of radiation. We had fifteen more days of traveling, and we had already lost half of our crew. Everyone had agreed to ease up the pace, but the consequences of dashing through a radioactive area with a bunch of fragile, and injured civilians were already done. The death rate did not slow down, only we did. Everyday we watched people die in the worst ways possible. People we loved, people we were friends with were leaving this world and there was nothing we could do about it. We could only pray that when we went to sleep we would wake up, when we fell we would get up, and that eventually we would survive.
Escaping the living hell in Germany we had somehow reached Denmark. Out of the starting one-thousand survivors of Berlin, only three-hundred had made it to the Dannish border. The only trouble was that there was no border. Denmark was also one of the attacked countries, and we had led ourselves into a dead end. Only, maybe, that was not the end yet. Our last hope was to reach Sweden with the Dannish boats we had found, and hope that they accept us there. No one was in favor of that plan, but it was either that or death. We had lost hope. We walked to Denmark to survive, and we walked to Sweden because we had nowhere else to go.
When we had entered those damaged boats, we were almost certain in our failiure and death. When we had sailed I had given up on everything I once was. Three months earlier I was an assistant manager of a high rank company in Berlin with a beautiful house and a healthy daughter. Now, I was an immigrant from a country that no longer exists, sailing into most certain death.
After we had peacefully sailed for almost an hour, we were caught in the middle of the storm. Unlike the bombing, we knew that the storm was coming and we had prepared ourselves the best we could. But both the bombing and the storm were too strong for us. We were struck by the first wawe at exactly four in the morning. I had only seen a giant blue mountain before everything went dark. When I opened my eyes again I witnessed terror. People were screaming in despair and fear, but the ocean spared almost no one. I hugged Ana tightly, not wanting to ever again let her go. I still do not know for how long we stayed like that, or how much time passed, or what gods blessed us with survival. I only know that we somehow survived. And that when I woke up I found myself in a quarantine with 50 more German people - the only thing that was left from Berlin. I asked them for how long have they been planing to keep us there, but they said that the Swedish goverment thought that we were too dangerous for their country, and that everyone except children would be shot in an hour.
I left out a sigh of relief. That meant Ana could go. That meant she could have a life. That meant she could be free. Far away from all this mess. That was the thought I had when I was shot. That I died for good. That I died for Ana. And I am glad I did.