It had been sunny that day. Warmth had stood in the air like a person to talk to, creeping through every crack and crevice. It had invaded every house and every street. Sometimes there had been resistance, but progress had, at large, been unimpeded. The air had been flirring, cutting sabres, drawing things out like snakes in the distance. A mess of snakes coiling around themselves. Granny knew these things. She had seen a lot of summers. Had been through a lot of summers. Late summers even. She had seen the great droughts and the great floods of almost a hundred years and according to that measure, this summer fell short of anything but being mildly irritating. Nothing more than something you could remark upon in polite conversation.

The flowers of the Mansion garden had taken to the sun beautifully. A plethora of fragrances wafted through open windows opened in the early evenings to catch the beginnings cool of the night. She wore light summer dresses, linen even, laid in artistic rumples. Summer was a time to remove some old habits and maybe shock the staff of the mansion (and the students) with another oddity that the old lady was so apt at pulling out of her nonexistent cylinder. A black, shiny cylinder she could call her own indeed. Though it was a relic of some chance meeting with a man earlier in her life. Back when these things were actually worn. And back when she had been what was called a vamp today. (Also she had been, as a teenage girl would now say haaaawt. And still was. And no, not because of the weather.)

The heat had had another beautiful effect. It subdued most of the more irate students and led to many a time of lounging and grilling at the residencies pool, which became one of the pivotal points of life during the summer months. She herself had gone swimming with a nice feathery protective cap earlier that day to the greater disappointment of students who hurriedly left the vicinity. Possibly to their respective classes. Hopefully they had. She would check later. Infamy had its benefits she rather consistently found out. Also if you were a Dragon Woman with green telekinesis, sometimes people tended to stay clear of your bad side. That apparently included vacating nice spots in the pool for her.

At the pool she lay now in her modest bathing suit. (She had found a great online shop that sold nice items for people not willing to display themselves in a bikini.) And she was surprised by the light. The horizon suddenly turned bright-white. So much light there was that she had to turn around immediately, lest her eyesight be damaged. Already they stung with a fierceness that she would remember till the end of her days. And it was not because of the brightness. It was because she knew what that light was. She knew from newspapers articles read a long, long time ago. She knew from Vietnam. From her Army training. From seeing pictures of the City of Hiroshima, which the youth around her did not recall. She knew. And she cried as she wrapped herself in her protective bubble, anticipating the first shock wave to come.

The end had come. It was nuclear.

The End had come and gone. Just another day. Her dress was immaculate. She was not even carrying around a bruise. Things might have somehow smelled different of the stench of the burning city on the skyline had been pushed towards the Mansion. It had not. If the streets full of abandoned or damaged cars had reached to the front gate. Yet they had not. Things still smelled beatifically in the mansion garden, but those notes had soured to her nose. The flowers would have to go insofar they were not of the edible variety. They would have to go soon. Maybe she would be able to ask one of the kids with a fire mutation to do that job. Afterward the ground needed turning. Then the seeds would come.

But the room they had was not big enough, considering that they would need to shift to a form of economy that had not been seen in the 2000s except in some of the bleakest regions in Africa. Subsistence. A word that even she had nothing much to relate to except pictures of her old home. Memories of the time-before-the-time. Some people would have to go. Some already had. Some even had left on their legs. Others had died as the building was damaged by the blast wave. Things that she had escaped by using her powers of protection. Almost instinctive that reaction had been, instilled during training in a black ops unit that the military still denied knowing the existence of. Had denied. Now probably no one still knew.

Somehow the end of your world did little to change your perspectives. The ones of decades at least.

The attack came not quite unpredicted. People of the Mansion had been milling around trying to prepare for a few days at least. The old Lady had done a bit. Cooked food that would keep a long while in backpacks. Prepared stores of nonperishables in the lower levels. Helped carry things by ordering them around and generally organizing a post-apocalyptic horde of teenagers that were in shock. In all it did not differ substantially from her usual occupation. And the attack still came as a shock.

She was one of the last ones to enter the lower levels, the tunnels made for just this case – not the end of the world, but that of an attack with overwhelming force. She went as one of the last, because where she went, the tunnel was sealed by a barrier of green light behind her. No she had decided. These people would not get her children. Not if she could help it. Not a single one. What would happen after they left her care was another matter, but here she could still put her old bones to some use. And she would. No one passed her that night. Two men tried. Died.

Old Soldiers might not be bold, she told her astonished students, but they are still soldiers.