**Prologue for Markie and The One-Eyed Bandit**

by cryp2nz (aided and abetted by PanddingtonRed and LilOldHead)

Rain drops splashed on the face of the teenage girl fast asleep on the floor.  Awakening from a deep sleep for what must have been days, Markie sprang to her feet from the floor and looked around.  With her mouth dry and lips cracked, her stomach wretched in pain.  She wondered how long it had been since she’d last eaten or drank.

Settling into the chair beside the desk, hands on her head, Markie slowly began to remember what had taken place.

It was a typical Friday night in the Aurora Gardens community.  As Markie hopped off the bus from school, Clara, the nosy next door neighbor yelled  over, *“Markie - business must be good, you got a lot of boxes today!”*  Markie rolled her eyes and waved back.

Before heading in, Markie carried the boxes to her outside *office* for later.  Taking them one by one, she could see and hear her father standing by the living room window yelling at someone on the phone with the usual bottle of wine in his hand.  

After making herself something to eat and carefully avoiding her father, she slipped out back and down to her *office*.  The office was really an underground storm shelter her father had built to provide shelter when bad dust storms would come to Rachel.  The storms used to be infrequent when she was younger, but had picked up in the last few years, enough to warrant building a separate shelter.

Markie had turned the shelter into her makeshift office and it gave her a place to escape her father.  Her father was drinking again and hadn’t been the same since her mom and little sister were gone.  Markie worked part-time helping with her Uncle’s business.  She had even moved her sister’s old bed down to the shelter where she would occasionally doze off.

Clara was right, that night’s delivery was large and sorting through it, Markie had laid down on the bed to call her Uncle.  She was telling him about all the new arrivals that had come that day.   All of a sudden, she heard loud explosions through her Uncle’s phone before the call dropped.   A moment later, the loud explosions began shaking her small room violently.  They lasted for several minutes until they suddenly stopped.  With the room still shaking, a deafening humming noise began softly and then got louder until Markie finally had to cover her ears.

Still in her slippers, Markie fastened her goggles and climbed up the ladder to crack open the metal hatch and peer out across the park.  The entire skyline was on fire as thick, billowing smoke permeated the air in all directions.  The radio tower behind her home had fallen and was smoldering off in the distance.  

It took her a split second to realize something was terribly wrong - her house was gone.  Through the smoke, the only thing she could see remaining was part of the refrigerator and the two oozing waste tanks that sat underneath the house.  Off to the right appeared to be her father’s truck which had melted into the driveway.

Her eyes circled the neighborhood, seeing no signs of life, and her head began to spin.  She fainted, the metal hatch door crashing shut as Markie collapsed down the ladder to the floor.

Gathering her senses at the desk after recalling what had happened, Markie wasn’t immediately sure what to do.  Reaching over for one of the boxes, she grasped the first thing that brushed her hand, opened the package, and began nibbling on it.

Science Fiction

"Markie, a teenage girl living in the Aurora Gardens community, finds solace from her troubled home life in an underground storm shelter she's turned into an office. One fateful night, a series of unexpected events and devastating explosions leave Markie to face a new reality: her house is gone, and her world has been turned upside down. Join Markie as she grapples with the aftermath of this catastrophe and searches for hope amidst the rubble."

A FATEFUL NIGHT IN AURORA GARDENS

Nerds in this story