The Late Harvest

Category A: Highly Commended (2026) Monash Short Story Writing Competition
Author: Pratham Kalani

We were in Heathrow Airport now. Terminal 1. Me and two others left — out of ten who suited up, out of forty-seven who lived in Bunker 467. Grant and Peter, who were supposed to keep the Ghouls off us, are probably dead. Ghouls get through everyone eventually.

My real name was Zenith, but my family called me Elijah. I kept that name. Everyone who knew the first one is gone.

It started with Bloom — grass no one planted, too pretty to be natural. Then it turned black, crimson leaking through the cracks. Nocturnal Gloom, they called it. Corroded metal. Rotted flesh. Burned your throat from the inside. The only fix was nuclear fission on its head atom, and the second that happens, the entire structure combusts into violent and deadly, bright crimson and void coloured flames.

The government wanted the pesticide Bloom made more than they wanted to save anyone. Scarcity caused famine in 2054. Famine caused war. Greed fed the Gloom until it ate the whole planet in hours. Billions died breathing it in. They nuked it anyway. By 2058, The Earth was smothered in the flames after the head atom went down. A place worse than hell.

Now it's 2060. I'm nineteen. There's a chemically altered deposit of Bloom buried under this terminal, and NEXUS sent ten of us to reach it. Little did we know our armor wasn't enough. The fumes ate through it one soldier at a time. Two died from Gloom. One from radiation. Two from Ghouls, right before the doors. Five of us made it inside. Now it's three.

Lush is near the runways. Ashe is by the souvenir shops. I'm at check-in, tearing debris off an elevator shaft with my bare hands until my knuckles split open. I contacted them.

Lush arrives, arms crossed. "Why would it work?"

I step onto the elevator and let Ashe lower us down, praying for a lab and not a grave.

Unreplied.

It's a lab. Pink light. A canister wired into the wall, locked behind a password. I remember it from Eldritch, our old bunker scientist — gloom_emergency_by_eldritch467 —. He knew something like this would occur. It drops into my shaking hand.

We follow a tunnel back out into the poison air. Lush gags, gasping for air that isn't there. We crack the seal and pour the Bloom straight onto the Gloom pooling under the terminal.

No explosion. Just black mist, thinning. Clearing. The last time it was this peaceful was in the late 2020s. The world took a horrible turn.

Blue sky. No ruins. Just a green field, more vivid than anything I've seen since I was small. We pull off our masks and breathe. Really breathe.

It gets better. Heavenly, even. My feet lift off the ground.

My eyelids are still heavy from the gloom fumes and fall.

A thud behind me — Lush, or Ashe. I can't tell.

Or maybe it's me.

Either way, I'm getting better.

I fall into what I assume is an eternal slumber.