Once I had finished my stale bread and cold tea I started to pack my rucksack with the books school had provided, as well as my pencil case and my packed lunch – stale bread, an apple and if I was lucky a small bar of chocolate. After putting my lunch together I gave my mum and dad a little cuddle and a kiss before leaving the apartment and walking down the sixteen floors of our apartment block, the lift has been broken for as long as I can remember so I have to walk down every step until I reach ground level. I had to then walk through the waste filled lobby before I could get outside onto the street. The five mile walk doesn’t seem that long when you start to think, we used to be able to drive to school but ever since the year 2020 if any motor vehicle starts their engine on the road you get fined as well as put in jail. So I have to walk. The streets I walk on are covered with rubbish every where I look there are piles of rubbish, strayed animals wandering free and sky high apartment blocks without any lifts. The smell coming out of the drains hits you right at the back of your throat making it taste like you’ve just eaten a rotten egg sandwich. Some of the dark alley ways haven’t been walked down in so long you can feel all the cobwebs brush against your face and the spiders falling onto your head. Looking into the lines hanging from window to window you can see all the crows perched it’s as if there watching you with their small beady eyes. Watching and waiting. Squawking every now and again, wanting you to fear them.
At the entrance of our school you have a metal detector which you have to walk through before getting into school, every school in the area has one even the nurseries have one which I think are pretty pointless but still. Once you get through the metal detector there are five different corridors one for each year group. Each corridor leads onto six classrooms and each classroom leads onto a toilet and the hall. Personally I don’t think you can call the hall a hall as every wall is covered in graffiti and in each corner there is a small rubbish bin which always spills out onto the floor leaving it smell as if someone or something has just been sick. Absolutely revolting. Then at the end of the hall there is a stall where every lunch time an aged old lady comes to serve children their lunch. The menu sounds delicious – stake and peppercorn sauce, sausages’ and mash, lasagne. But that isn’t what you would be getting more like something you would feed a dog or a cat. Something that you wouldn’t recognise what it was even if you were told. That’s how bad the school lunches here are. Then during lesson time if one student out of the hundreds that go here, make a teacher angry and that teacher happens to snap all other classes go silent and listen in and stare at that one pupil and teacher. Anyway once we got to school we all got sent to the hall which meant we were all like squashed sardines in a tin, we were told that everyone has to go home immediately. Nobody either bothers running, everybody knows that this is just another one of them false alarms, if anything the children as well as the teachers feel relieved that they simply have a day off. To be honest with you, at this point I was a bit annoyed, not only did I walk the five miles I usually had to come here but we get sent home straight away.
On my long trek home I started to realise that every house I had walked past was panicking or sitting in front of the television anxiously. People started running around talking about today really is ‘the end of time’ and preparing themselves for the worst. This really did scare me; actually it scared me so much that I ended up sprinting all the way home. Is this really it? Is this the day I’m going to die? Is this what everyone had been going on about? After about 10minutes of me running everything went quiet, silent even it was as if everything and everyone just got paused in time that was everyone but me. Once I got back to the apartment block and up what seemed to be never ending steps I finally got back home and was greeted by my family’s warm loving hugs.
We were all in complete silence listening into the television wandering what we should do everyone was told to be prepared for the worst but weather anyone did or not was a completely different matter. After listening to the television for half an hour in silence the silence was broken by a loud knock and my father telling me to answer it. A lady was standing by the door telling me and my family that we needed to pack the bare minimum as there is a way that we could survive it. We were also told to take whatever we needed and quickly go right down to the basement which was a hundred and sixteen floors below us. Each of us with once plastic bag in our hand walked briskly down to the basement to find a large padded metal box waiting for us around ten other families were in there staring around a television. Waiting. Once the lady had come back she told us that nobody else from this apartment block wished to come and that we better lock up the box. Once everything was tightly locked she showed us around a week’s supply of food of which we can eat and ten huge bottles of water, one for each family. Everyone found a comfortable spot on the floor and sat there listening in complete and utter silence to hear what should happen and when the world will end.
It’s now 5 O’clock and it’s started...
Chapter 3
Every single volcano in the world has just gone off. Mount St Helens, Akan, and Enta, all of them, exploded. The volcanoes are spurting out hot rocks which are killing people. Then they are pouring hot lava into the valleys destroying towns, killing people. I was surprised to be honest with you that the television didn’t go off, we could see it in our television screens, people hundreds, thousands all of them either dying or dead. But that wasn’t even the worst of it after each volcano had been pouring hot molten lava for an hour it stopped. Everything went quiet. Silent. Every single volcano stopped pouring lava into the valleys and stopped shooting hot blasts of rock. All of the lava that had been poured into the valleys just stopped flowing. Everything just stayed completely still.
Then just five minutes later the earth started to crack. We could hear parts of the earth’s crust cracking around us. Children and babies were crying, mothers screaming. Houses, trees and people just fell down these cracks. The world was falling into itself and there is nothing anyone can do about it other than sit and watch, it was as if the world was swallowing everything that got in its way.
Then everything the television went blank.
Chapter 4
After spending two long torturous days inside this metal box we have decided that it is about time we see what it’s like outside the box. The earthquakes stopped yesterday and everyone is itching to see what the world is like now, to see if there are any other survivors. To see what the world looks like now that the earthquakes have stopped. Most people are expecting there to be a ruined world, a world in a far worst state in which we left it in.
Opening the box everyone gets blinded by ‘the sun’. I could feel the sun glowing on my skin; the heat is amazing, as soon as stepped out into this ‘world’ I could feel warmth as if someone’s giving you a huge hug. Looking around we realise this isn’t the world we left behind. The run-down, shabby, cold world is the one we left behind this world is somewhat the complete opposite. It’s like the world every child dreams of because they know it couldn’t be possible. The streets are faultless, not a crack or a weed in sight. Then each house has a pitch black front door with a letter box and a shiny door handle, four windows of which are white, double glazed and gleaming. Every brick which is used to build each and every house couldn’t have been any cleaner. It was as if someone had just put this whole town into a dishwasher taken it out then dried it. At the moment there isn’t a person or animal in sight. Not even a bird in the sky and at the moment it was quiet. To quiet...
Some of the older people in our group from the old world were telling us how when they were little they grew up in a town just like this one and how they loved playing on the streets knowing that there wasn’t going to be that many cars around. But they were saying something along the lines that it was never this quiet. They told us that in the 1950’s every town was like this everyone was friends and nobody was left out. But somehow although it was like the 1950s nobody quite believed that we had gone back in time.
After everyone stopped their conversations, we all split up and started exploring this strange new land. 10 minutes into our adventure the silent was broken by every single door handle on the street turning and a man, a woman, a boy and a girl stepping out onto the street. It was as if everyone was set to a certain routine. We asked this one family where we were and what year it was, the answer for both questions... 1950. Although when we asked her how we got a house and money she gladly showed us the way to what seemed like a huge shopping centre. Each shop name started the same ‘1950’ it was as if they were obsessed with that number.
Once we found the ‘estate agents’ we asked how we got houses and they told us to choose a number from a board, we chose the number six and he gave us some house keys, a map and a wodge of money. But this money was not like any money we had at our ‘old’ world. This was strange, it had 1950 on it and that was it. We counted to see just how much money the man had given us 10,000,000 1950s. At first we thought it was a mistake and took it back to the shop but when we did he just doubled it.
First of all we went into the food shop it was exactly like the big supermarkets we used to have, so was the clothes shops, every single shop was exactly the same as what we used to have. Once we had brought everything we thought we would have needed we made our way to the house the man gave us and started to get ‘unpacked’. It didn’t take us long at all we just put all of the food away then put all the clothes we had just brought into the wardrobes in total there was four bedrooms; a bedroom for me, a bedroom for my sister, a bedroom for my brother and a bedroom for my parents.
Chapter 5
Two weeks later...
People who came with us from the ‘old’ world have started going missing. At the moment the Harrisons and the Varley’s have gone missing. In the first week we were here the Harrisons went missing, then this week the Varleys went missing. Nobody knows whether or not we should panic or not. We have decided that if anyone else who came from the other world goes missing then we should investigate and try to find them.
Chapter 6
Two months later...
Today we are going to meet up with the Evan family and do a round of golf before going out for a meal on the ‘1950s Beach-Front Resort’. At the moment we and the Evans are the only families from the other world who haven’t gone missing. The Evan family don’t seem to be picking up their phone at the moment so we (as a family) have chosen to go over to their house to see what’s taking them so long.
There front doors wide open and nobody’s inside. We are the last family from the other world who is still alive. Are we the next family to die?
