Kevin Davis sat at the wooden table in the small front room writing in a notebook: “How do I explain in this diary, how the world came to an end?”

Sighing deeply he looked up to where his wife Sally, and their best friends, Dave and Katy Bevan, were seated together on the small sofa, one of the few pieces of large furniture that they had been able to bring with them.

Kevin couldn’t help thinking how beautiful Sally looked, and how lucky he was to have her for his wife.   Tall, lithe and shapely, with long, jet-black hair and deep, soulful eyes, Sally was the most beautiful woman he had ever known.   He blushed, embarrassed though to see her wearing her hair in pigtails.   At thirty-two Sally was thirteen years his junior.   At the best of times Kevin felt like a cradle-snatcher.   But when she wore pigtails, she looked like a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, making him feel like a child molester.

He looked away from Sally and saw Dave reading a hardback book.   Catching sight of the title, ‘Myths and Legends of Europe and Asia’ by Francis Wong, Kevin sighed and shook his head in dismay.   He thought, ‘We agreed to bring only the essentials, yet even at the end of the world he has to bring along crap like that.’

He knew though that Dave was a lifelong occult freak.   In the days when they lived above ground, three rooms of the Bevans’ house had had their walls covered in bookcases containing thousands of books about UFOs, ghosts, yowies, and legends from the Aboriginal Dream-Time, AmerIndian Mythology, as well as ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Norse, and Keltic legends.   In those days Kevin had laughed at Dave’s eccentricity.   Now he found it an obscene waste of space in the small, bomb shelter.   Still he knew they were better off than most.   After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, most people had filled in their shelters and had nowhere to flee when the world ended.

Returning to the small diary, Kevin wrote, “The first sign of any trouble occurred in early February 2029″:

Kevin and Sally had been relaxing in their living room after supper, watching TV, when they heard the sound of excited voices outside.