Day 1,421

It's been thirty four years since the bombs dropped and the air's still as dusty as day one. Life's moved on now, we aren't the same fragile children who'd been shoved into shelters without so much as a "be right back". We were grown and we were used to everything the world saw fit to throw back at us.

We knew it wouldn't be easy, going back to the surface after living out our formative years in stark concrete hallways. We'd spent so long breathing recycled air and eating our way through seemingly endless ration packs that anything else just seemed... wrong.

I wasn't the first to suggest going topside to check for other survivors, at some point or other everyone had asked to see if their parents were waiting by the main doors. When we finally had a majority vote to go and check, we didn't actually think we'd find anyone let alone find so many bodies that the first to open the door was crushed beneath their weight.

It took us days to move them all out with one of our own joining their ranks. We were all so busy carefully moving the bodies and cleaning the puddles they left behind that we barely noticed our observers. Of course we'd all heard of birds and a few of the older ones remembered seeing them in person but just like everything else, the bombs changed them.

It's hard to tell if they have feathers under all the dust but they still have beaks, they may be lined with broken bones and metal fragments but they're still the same sort of shape. Apparently birds used to be small too but the ones we saw could fit eight of us in their beaks at once with room to spare.

That's just how it is now, I suppose. Life adapts to whatever the world throws at it and we're just here for the ride. Maybe one day we'll find other survivors but until they we'll keep burying the dead, avoiding the birds and hoping the dead stay down for good this time.