I was 10 when the world ended. The 4th of July had just passed, so my father, my brother Henry and I spent the early afternoon before the blast eating leftover hot dogs in the yard. My mom was at work in the nearby farmers' market, selling some of our produce to people from town who sought a connection to nature that concrete supermarkets couldn't offer.

Our bellies full, my brother and I ran to Ellie's house to ask if she could come out and play. She was our closest neighbor, separated only by our family's cornfield, a sparsely used road, and her family's maple out front, a treehouse resting on its looming branches.

I knocked on their front door, and my hand, greasy from lunch, left glistening stains on the paint. Their home, displaced from the traditionally suburban neighborhood past the train tracks up the road, was built from burnt red bricks, unlike our white painted farmhouse, with cream window panes and a craftsman-style overhang protecting its cream door, which Ellie's father answered.

He was a tall, thin man who wore buttoned shirts and bow ties, even on the weekends. Both her parents were professors at the local college: her father, a professor of sciences—most often biochemistry, though he was well versed in physics and the general sciences as well—and her mother, a professor of history. Their home was lined wall to wall in books of their specialties and interests, whose papers had sucked in all of Ellie's family's signature scent—rose water and fresh linen—so that any time they opened the door, the aroma would radiate outward.

Ellie's father smiled. "Good afternoon," he greeted us. "Let me guess: You're here to see if Ellie can come out to play."

"Yes, Mr. Timmons. Can she?" I asked.

Henry rocked on his heels beside me, and Mr. Timmons knelt to meet his eyes. "Henry, do you need to use the bathroom?"

My brother nodded, his tight springy curls bouncing on his head. He had just finished potty training a few months earlier, and hadn't quite learned how to hold it yet. Mr. Timmons smiled and held out his hand.

"C'mon, I will take you to the bathroom," he said to Henry, welcoming us into their immaculately kept home. "Ellie is playing in her room if you'd like to join her. Do your parents know you two are here?"

"My dad knows," I said, shutting the door behind me.

"Okay, I'll text him to let him know you got here safely," he said, no longer even looking at me, as he helped Henry into the bathroom.

I scurried up the stairs, lightly running my fingertips over their polished banister. Up the stairs and to the left, I turned the knob into Ellie's room. Her blonde-white hair, like strands of spider webs, spun around as she snapped her brown eyes to the door. She sat on the floor of her pink-filled room, surrounded by her fashion dolls and their dresses, gathering them in front of her for a party. In an instant, her thin lips exploded into a smile, and she called, "Beatrice! Do you want to play dolls with me?"

Ellie was always more of an indoor kid than me, preferring to put on plays in her living room and gather imaginary people together for parties, whereas I grew up with nature as my playground. We were a strange pair, but our proximity bounded us.

"No thanks. Henry and I are playing outside. Want to come?" I asked from the doorway.

She shrugged and brushed the hair of one of her dolls. "I think I'll stay in," she said. Little did she know she'd be forced out in less than an hour anyway.

"Okay, see you later," I said, pulling the knob toward me and heading back downstairs. We had grown up together, so we were comfortable moving through each others' homes.

Mr. Timmons and Henry greeted me at the bottom of the staircase. "No Ellie?" Mr. Timmons asked.

"No, she's playing in her room."

"Would you like me to talk to her?"

"No, it's okay. We'll be outside at my house if she changes her mind," I said, reaching a hand out to Henry.

"Okay, see you soon," Mr. Timmons said as we walked back to our house.

"Why can't we play with Ellie?" Henry asked, crossing the street into our field.

"She wanted to stay inside. It's okay, Henry. Me and you will play," I assured him.

"Can we play toy soldiers?" he asked excitedly.

I didn't want to—I wanted to play in the woods—but I took care of Henry so much while our parents worked on the farm that I was used to putting his needs first. I was 6 years older than Henry, so at 10, I was his unofficial babysitter. I loved him, though, so I usually didn't mind. What I minded were the toy soldiers, boring and unadventurous. Henry would set them up, only to push them all down with his fists moments later. He loved this game, though, and hadn't yet realized that he didn't need me to play.

"Sure." I sighed.

As soon as the sound left my mouth, Henry jumped into a sprint, running ahead of me and up to his room for the army men. My dad, who was pulling weeds from the garden around our porch, turned back to me. "He looks happy." He wiped the sweat from his forehead, leaving a line of dirt over his bright green eyes.

"I'm letting him play with his army toys... again..."

"Ellie didn't want to play?" I shook my head. "You're a very good big sister, you know that?" I smiled and nodded.

Henry ran back outside, his arms full of little plastic men, spilling over the sides of his grasp with his gait. He dropped the rest on the porch and scurried to gather them all in front of his crossed legs, when my mom pulled into the driveway, gravel shifting beneath the tires of her truck.

"Mommy!" Henry called. She parked the car, and hurried over to us, kissing the top of my dad's head on the way.

"Hello my babies," she sang, scooping Henry in her arms, and planting a kiss on my forehead. "How is everyone?"

"Good," I said, kicking all of the plastic men into a pile.

"Excellent," she said mindlessly, scanning my dad's work in the garden.

"How was the market?" he asked.

"Oh, same as usual." She put Henry down with a kiss. "I'm going to start unloading what's left."

Henry sat back down, and we began lining them up on opposite sides between us when I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I turned my head eastward.

In the distance, I could see a cloud of white light and dust rising over Philadelphia, but this wasn't an ordinary cloud. Of course, to a child, it looked incredible, like a second sun on the horizon. At first, I thought maybe it was a firework left over from the 4th, so I laughed. "Dad, look! A firework!" I called.

He looked into the eastern sky. I'll never forget that moment, how his whole face melted. "Get in the house," he mumbled. Then, as if some invisible force slapped him across the face, he shook his head and yelled, "Get in the house!"

"Hon?" my mom asked.

"Get in the house!"

My mom raced from the truck and scooped me and my brother up in her arms. "Where are you going?" she yelled after my dad, who had sprung from the garden and started up the street toward Ellie's house.

"I'm getting the neighbors!"

My mom rushed us into the house and shut the door. "Into the basement," she panted, though she was still carrying us. She raced us through the kitchen and down the basement stairs to a room my dad had been working on for years. He called it "the safe room" because he had built it to withstand any natural disaster or catastrophe. He spent years filling it and the surrounding area of the basement with jugs of water, cans of food, guns, ammunition, toilet paper, first aid kits, and sleeping materials. It was made entirely out of cement blocks and metal, and the thick steel door was fastened shut with a padlock.

When we reached it, my mom dropped us from her arms. She stood in front of the door, fiddling with the key that my dad left on a table just outside the safe room. It slipped from her hands and pinged against the cold concrete floor.

"Shoot," she mumbled.

"Mommy," Henry whined.

"Yes, yes, dear, I'm going," she said, trying not to yell.

I hopped to her side and swiped the key from her hands. My hands weren't shaking—I didn't understand why hers were—so I slipped the key into the lock and twisted.

"Thank you," she whispered and pushed the door open. "In we go," she said, trying to speak to us in her usual sing-song voice, but it was shaking as badly as her hands. I grabbed Henry's arm and dragged him into the room with me.

"Where's Daddy?" he asked.

"He's coming, sweetie, just wait," my mom said. She closed the door behind her and pushed us into the corner of the safe room. "Here," she said, pulling a sheet from one of the shelves lining the safe room, which held all our supplies. She unfolded it and threw it over us. I'm not sure why she felt that was necessary, but somehow it worked. Henry and I huddled beneath the sheet and embraced one another, making all the uncertainty of the situation a little more bearable.

My mom paced back and forth at the door until finally it burst open with my dad, Ellie, and Mr. Timmons. Ellie ran silently toward me and Henry and slipped beneath the blanket. Just as my dad snapped the padlock shut over the door's latch, a shock wave slammed against the house. We all screamed and the lights went out. A few moments later, an alarm began blaring, like the ones we would hear every first Saturday of the month, but louder and more desperate, and emergency sirens echoed between its cries.

"Dad," I started, my voice rattling awake. "What happened?"

In the darkness, I couldn't see the look on his face or how he passed the time before answering me, but finally, he said, "It was a bomb, Beatrice. A big bomb. We have to stay inside until it's safe to go back out."

I said, "Okay," but it was barely audible. I didn't know what else to say.

"We need to go out there," Mr. Timmons whispered. I remembered his bow tie and his smile, and wondered what he looked like now.

"No, we have to wait," my dad said.

"Meredith is still out there," Mr. Timmons insisted.

Ellie sniffled beside me. "Ellie's crying," I said.

"Ellie, honey, where are you?" Mr. Timmons asked.

She made a noise and I could hear Mr. Timmons moving toward us. I felt his arms disrupt the sheet around us, and I felt her being lifted from my side. He began humming "You Are My Sunshine" to calm her down, but that only made her cry out, "I want Mom."

Mrs. Timmons hadn't made it home in time. "She'll find us," Mr. Timmons said, his voice shaking.

We waited in the darkness until, hours later, the screaming settled. My dad opened the door of the safe room to check what was happening outside. A subtle golden light crept into the room, but none of us questioned what it was. I think we all just assumed it was the sun.

The light strained my eyes, but Henry and I still sprung up, like moths to a flame.

"No, stay here," my dad ordered us.

I turned back to sit down, feeling the muscles in my legs pull like taffy, and in the light, I could see the faces of my mom, Mr. Timmons, and Ellie. My mom's eyes were blood red, as if she'd been crying nonstop since we entered the blackout. I rushed to her side.

My dad left the room, taking a gun I'd only seen him hold during deer season, and left the door ajar.

I looked to Mr. Timmons. His eyes were hollow in the shadows, his bowtie and collar were loosened, and his hair was greasy from running his nervous hands through it too many times. And Ellie, the girl who lived in a world of pink, looked gray in the light. She met my eyes, but didn't smile as she usually would. All the magic had left her. Henry curled into my mom, as I had, and all I could see were his tight curls springing up from beneath her arm. At least something was still normal.

A shadow stretched from the doorway, and I looked up to see my dad, his face drained of blood.

"What is it?" my mom asked. She whispered the question, but with my ear to her chest, it sounded like those were the loudest words in the world.

"It's all burning," he said.

Mr. Timmons unleashed an unexpected yell that shook the room, "What do you mean?"

"Fires." None of us said a thing. All our sounds escaped us. "Come and see," my dad said.

We took our time to stand and catch our balance, though it felt like we were all racing to get up. We shuffled out of the room, all of us like sleepwalkers, except for Henry who somehow still ran to catch up with Dad and take his hand. The glow of fires through the storm windows lit our way, and we carefully emerged from our underground bunker.

Once we were in the kitchen, we could see what my dad had meant. From the window, all I could see of the world around us was a black landscape, punctuated in untamed fires. The houses on the Timmons' street were fine, but in the other direction, just across the highway, all I could see was a roaring blaze.

My dad lit some candles for us to use in the house. The adults took the tapers, and the three of us kids took scented jar candles. He told us to go get clothes and anything we'd like from our rooms, and come immediately back. Mr. Timmons left, despite our protesting, to get things from their house and look for his wife. Ellie and I went silently upstairs to get clothes and toys and returned to the safe room without a word. We were confused and lost and scared. There was nothing else to say.

Eventually we all returned to the basement in silence, Mrs. Timmons still missing. "We'll stay here until things start to look safe out there," my dad said. "I'm sure the government will clean everything up and put out the fires. Everything will be all right."

How could he have known that no one would come? The world had ended, and we had no idea.