I want to hold Nicholas. I want to kiss my wife.
The reasoning of where the missiles were heading, and why—this yearning to be with family—took place in his mind for less than a second. By the time he’d finished thinking how much he wanted to feel Mandy’s warm skin against his lips, the blinding missile light winked out of sight over a distant ridge of trees five miles away. A few seconds later, the blue sky with its growing number of puffy grey contrails, was consumed in white.
Jake raised his hands instinctively to his eyes. The light was like knives, burrowing between his fingers, slicing through his eyelids. He turned away from it and collapsed to his knees. Jake was enveloped in white and almost complete silence. Moments later the truck’s engine sputtered to a halt.
No. I want to see them… I want—I’m only twenty-four and I don’t want to die.
He was on his feet again, or at least he thought he was, lurching forward to where he believed home was. He fell from the small hard trail he’d driven the pickup down and rolled into a ditch. He continued to roll and ended up in water. Jake tried to picture where he was as he gasped for air. His head went under. Ice cold. Sitting water. I’m at the southeast end of the farm. I’m in a low slough of sitting water. Winter snow melted and collected here less than two months ago. So cold.
Jake flailed about in the bottom of it, his hands clawed at the mud, and his knees and boots became mired in it. Like quicksand. Can’t work myself free. He needed to breathe, he needed to get his head out of the water and provide his lungs with fresh air. The water and mud he was trapped in was about to save his life.
Another rumble, this one much louder, rippled around and over top of him. Jake no longer felt so cold. His body was going into shock—or the water was warming up. A sound like a million stampeding elephants being slaughtered by a million screaming monkeys roared somewhere above. The water was becoming hot, boiling hot. With his last bit of remaining strength Jake pushed his body up.
The water and mud in his hair dried away almost instantly. The soaking fabric of his jacket and shirt steamed into his skin, and Jake fell forward. He pressed his burning face into the ground and sucked air between his teeth that scalded the inside of his mouth and the back of his throat.
Dad saw it happen. He saw this in his dreams over thirty years ago. Did he feel the pain?
The rumbling lessened. The charging elephants and screaming monkeys moved on. Jake took another small breath, a gulp of hot air. It didn’t hurt as much. He inhaled slowly through his nostrils and smelled the end of the world; charred vegetation, boiled water, and something else. The air was different. It was something else now… something foreign and unpleasant. It smelled dead.
Jake lay there for another minute, his body and brain adjusting to this new, horrible reality. His body ached. He looked at the fingers of his left hand placed palm down in the cooked mud his cheek was adhered to. He wiggled them and wondered why they looked so fat and pink.
They’ve been burned. They hurt like hell, but they’re still working.
He pulled the fingers towards his face and felt his cheek. It was numb to the touch and rough feeling. Not good. He reached for the top of his skull and felt more dappled flesh. My hair’s gone. It’s all gone.
All gone. All of it. The field, the slough at his feet boiled away. The farm.
Mandy and Nicholas.
A fresh wave of panic flooded through him and Jake tried rising to his hands and knees. His cheek peeled away from the ground and he vomited violently. After a few more dry hacking heaves Jake was standing. He swayed back and forth taking in the devastation all around. There was no more color. Everything and everywhere was grey. The slough he’d fallen into was a basin of steaming, baked mud that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the bottom of Death Valley. The sky above was grey. Most of the missile contrails had puffed away in the shockwave, but a few billowing streaks remained—or they had just appeared. They’re still sending them, he realized. They’re firing more and more and more.
He climbed up out of the ditch and stood on what was a road only minutes ago. Jake’s truck was nowhere to be seen. It was gone with everything else… the trees, the fields, and the fence posts. Gone in a puff. All that remained was Jake and the towering monster before him.
He had seen pictures of mushroom clouds in books and on television. Jake had watched documentaries and movies depicting the power and terror of thermonuclear detonations. But nothing quite compares to the real thing. It filled the entirety of the south, rising into the cold upper atmosphere, seemingly intent to eat up the sun and stars somewhere beyond.
There was color left in the world. The blue had been snuffed out and replaced with awe-inspiring orange and brown. Jake had missed most of it, but there was still enough left to haunt his dreams for the rest of his life—a much shorter life than he’d been led to believe. It would be the final spectacular display of mankind’s power anyone would ever see again. This was the last big bang of human civilization. He didn’t want it to end. He reached out with swollen fingers, grasping at the dying light near its center.
Jake began to cry and the tears stung at the raw flesh of his cheeks. “No.”
The orange faded away and the immense rising brown column was slowly enveloped in the grey and black above.
Jake knew the human race had been living on borrowed time. Mankind had spent the last century industrializing, overpopulating, and polluting. But a part of him had hoped something more natural would play the final hand; a super-volcano, an asteroid from space, the magnetic poles reversing, a new goddamned Age of Ice that would’ve frozen civilization in its tracks under a thousand feet of glacier. It wasn’t as if Jake wanted the world to die, but it would’ve been fitting for Mother Nature to have the last word.
Imminent.
For once the news media had it right. They had warned Jake, and he hadn’t paid attention. He started the long walk back to the farm house—where the farm house had been—certain there would be nothing left. He should’ve stayed home. He should’ve woken his wife and son from their slumbers at 6 a.m. and enjoyed those last few hours with them. He should’ve paid attention. He should’ve known.
Jake had no idea how long it had taken to trudge the two mile distance from his life-saving water hole back to the farm yard he once called home. The mid-afternoon sky was blanketed over with nasty fallout. The stinking air swirled about Jake, buffeting him in cold and warm blasts. Most of the clothes on his body had been burned away, and the skin underneath had grown numb. Perhaps his mind was blocking out most of the pain, helping him cope with the physical agony and mental anguish. He didn’t know which, and he didn’t care all that much. The landscape had been transformed so drastically that Jake wasn’t even sure he was going the right way. He saw the remains of his house a few minutes later—a little further off to the left than he’d guessed.
A bit of it was still standing, a few charred two-by-fours and slabs of cement foundation transformed from grey to black. There had been a shelterbelt of poplar and spruce trees surrounding the yard. They were all gone—like Jake’s truck, blown off and scattered in the wind.
Maybe they had time to make it down into the cellar.
Jake tried running but could only manage something less than a jog. It was killing him to breathe, and his throat was swelling up. Everything felt so dry. He needed water. He needed to find his family even more.