A New World Order

By: Jason Youssef

I wake up. As I start to get out of the white and blue striped bed, I curse myself. “Shoot! I left the stove on this morning! I gotta get back before it starts a fire.” I walk out of the dusty, grey room I was in and into a hallway that seems to be a sort of tunnel. Where is this? As I start thinking of what happened to me and how I didn’t even consider the fact that I had woken up in such a weird place, I hear sirens blare. “Patient X has escaped! All personnel are needed immediately!”

I see four men dressed in dark-black camo with automatic weapons barreling towards me. My instincts kick in immediately and I attempt to run away, but before I can get any farther, I feel a hard material, perhaps a cosh, hit me in the head and everything turns dark.

When I wake up, I have a bad headache, and I try to run away again. This time, however, my hands are handcuffed to a metal chair that I am sitting in, the freezing metal of the cuffs almost burning my skin. “I see, Mr. Zane, that you have finally woken up.” I realize there is a man in a lab coat and holding a clipboard seated at a desk across from my chair.

“Who are you and where am I?” I demand.

“You are in a research lab underground, Mr. Zane,” the man coolly responds. “You, my friend, have been asleep for over 200 years. You will not remember because of the temporal amnesia you are facing, but soon you will remember that you were recruited to undergo a series of clinical trials on cryogenic freezing.”

“You’ve got to be lying!” I shout.

“I am not,” the man answers. “You volunteered for the trials because you were terminal.”

Memories start to slowly flow from my cobweb-filled brain. The doctors. The cold, cold chamber, people screaming as I had just started to be put in the chamber. I was still confused and scared as to why I was here, with some doctor in an underground research facility in who knows where! I just wanted to go back home to Paris and cuddle with my bunny, Flopps.

“Why are we underground?” I ask.

“Hmm, I was wondering when you would ask that,” he said. “While you were sleeping we (humanity) had a few ... problems, but nothing bad. Just two nuclear wars, three famines, global warming, nuclear fallout, the overthrowing of several European governments, and so on.”

“That’s horrible!” I exclaim.

“All of Europe, China, Russia, North America, and Australia are now destroyed, and whoever is left above ground lives in extreme poverty, with food and water insecurity. Those from areas most devastated by the past two centuries live in the underground cities, and you happen to be in the largest and most secure one, New Berlin.”

I’m about to break down in tears when an alarm sounds. He suddenly starts for the door. “Why would he leave me here?” I wonder.

“You’ll be safe in here for now—good luck!” he screams before clanging shut the heavy metal door to the room I’m in. Before I can protest this, I feel a trembling sensation as if the ground were dancing and a searing heat coming from the ceiling. I scream and the heat becomes more intense until I hear a thunderous boom and everything around me goes black.