It was May 3, 2022 and it was about 3:00 in the afternoon when my sister and I got home from school. As soon as I got home I kicked off my shoes and threw myself on the couch, as usual. I grabbed the remote and turned on the show of American Idol that I had missed the night before. I had been watching it for about half an hour when my dad finally got home. He burst through the door in a panic. I asked him what was wrong and he said that he needed to talk to mom about it first before he told my sister and I. He was pacing around the house until mom got home. They went up to their room and talked about it. When they finally came downstairs and decided to tell us, my dad said this, “My team and I at work have been studying our atmosphere and climate change very closely, and we believe that the end of the world is coming pretty soon”. My dad was a scientist and the president of his company. Sometimes he said crazy things like this, and they never actually happened. He got worried about his studies at work often, so we weren’t really worried about it. Although, we did have an underground bunker built incase something like that did happen. That night, I went into my sisters room to discuss what my dad had told us, we were pretty much laughing about it because we thought it was so crazy.

It had been about a week and nobody had discussed what dad told us. My dad did seem more worried about this than any of the other things that he had told us before. I did get a little worried but I was more focused on having fun at the end of my senior year and graduating.

I graduated on friday, May 24. The next day, something happened that I would’ve never imagined…

I had gotten home pretty late the night before because someone had a party after graduation. So, I slept in until around 12pm. When I woke up, I looked out my window like usual and I realized that it seemed darker than normal, but I figured there was just a storm coming. So I went downstairs to get some breakfast. My dad was frantically running around the house gathering the most random things. As he took an armful of things outside, I stood up and watched him. He ran into the woods that were behind our house, and I thought to myself, “why is he taking that stuff into the woods? Is there something wrong?”. I walked outside to ask him what was going on and as I walked towards the woods I noticed that he had dropped something; a family photo book. My mind immediately went to the thought of the underground bunker. I thought, “maybe he’s just putting some supplies in it; but why would he be bringing our family pictures out there?”. So I continued walking out there and he was putting that stuff into the bunker. I took the long climb down into the bunker and found him in the stockroom putting that stuff in there. There was way more stuff in there since I had last been in there a couple months ago. He had to of been putting tons of stuff in there everyday, and we didn’t even know it. So I asked him, “why are you bringing all of this stuff out here?”. He looked at me with the strangest expression, one that I had never seen before. He said, “You know how a few weeks ago I told you that we thought the end of the world was happening? Well I think that day is today”. My first thought was that there was no way that was happening, but the more that I thought about it, my dad was a smart guy and he was the most worried I had ever seen him. So I ran into the house and started gathering some of my stuff like blankets, tons of clothes, shoes, pictures, and anything that I thought I would need. As I was coming back in from my third trip outside, my sister asked me what I was doing. I explained to her what dad had told me and at first she thought it was crazy, but then I told her how worried he seemed and she got a little more serious about taking some of her stuff out there too. My dad called a family meeting, which we had never had before. He talked more in detail about his findings at work and how they had been studying when the end of the world was going to be for a while, but they had just found out how soon it was going to be the day that he told us. My mom asked, “how come you guys haven’t made these findings public?”, and dad said, “because of two reasons, one being that most likely nobody would believe us, and two being that if they did believe us the world would be panicked over something that was out of anyone’s control”. My dad started crying and that’s when I knew that he was 100% serious. I sat there and cried with my family for a little bit, and when I had finally calmed down I decided to go outside on the front porch and call some of my best friends. I didn’t want to mention the end of the world to them because they surely wouldn’t believe me. First I called my boyfriend, to tell him how much I loved and appreciated him. Then I called Maddi, and Skyann. I told each of them how much they meant to me and how much I appreciated them for all that they did for me. Each of them were equally confused about it, and I had to keep myself from crying each time I hung up with one of them because of the thought that I may never see or speak to them again. Finally, the last phone call was to Brooklyn, and as I was about to hang up, a loud beep came onto my phone and turned my phone off. Suddenly, the tornado sirens started to go off, so I ran inside. When I got inside every single alarm in the house started going off. Then the lights started flashing, and then sparks started blowing out of every outlet in the house. We threw water on the sparks hoping that a fire wouldn’t start. Everyone was panicking, my dad told us to grab anything else that we needed and to go to the bunker. I ran up to my room and took a good look at it, thinking that it could be the last time I would ever see it and I started sobbing. I ran downstairs and then outside and took one more good look at our house and then got into the bunker. As we got into the bunker, a wave of emotions hit me and I thought, “what if we die in here? What if we never get to go above ground ever again? Will there be anyone left if we do get to go up there?”. We had been in the bunker for about a half an hour when it started shaking. It was faint and then it started to feel like the shaking of 10 earthquakes, and then we heard a loud boom. I wondered what it sounded like above ground because our bunker was supposed to be soundproof but we still heard it. We weren’t sure what was going on up there but we knew it wasn’t good.

It has been a couple of weeks since this happened, and we still haven’t went above ground, although nothing else has happened since. My dad said that he was going to go up there tomorrow, but we all felt uneasy about it.

The next day, my dad went up there. It was taking him quite a while to open the door. He finally got it all unlocked and asked us whether or not we were ready to see. I was nervous, but we had to know what happened. He finally opened it, and pretty much everything had been charred from fire. We looked around and thought… what’re we going to do next?