How?

The summer sun beat down on his shoulders. His face burned from the intensity of it. He rushed to remove his heavy winter jacket, dampened by the melted snow of moments ago. On the ground, the hastily disregarded precipitation turned slushy from the sudden heat. He looked up into a sky lit by a second sudden sun as a slow-motion mushroom cloud rose in the east. Armageddon had arrived. It would be only moments before the blast wave reached him. He debated the action he would take in his last moments of life.

Should he pray for the salvation of his soon-to-separate soul? Was there time to ask for the forgiveness of a lifetime of sin? He took another breath. How many more did he have? This blast wave seemed to be tardy. He expected to have been blown to bits by now. The mushroom cloud still grew in the east and he could see the chaos of that blast wave on the horizon. A nuclear warhead was supposed to surprise you with instant death. This slow-paced Armageddon was not fair to its victims.

How could they give so many moments to anticipate a horrible and painful death? This was more evil than the man who launched this destruction on the people of the world. He blamed the brilliant minds that had puzzled out the mechanics of this destruction. He blamed the politicians that had latched onto it as a misappropriated and misunderstood deterrent. It deterred nothing, but the continued existence of life.

Disgustingly some fool had pressed the button. They had launched the end of all things. What fools we all had been to tolerate the existence of the devices. We could have gone Luddite on them and everything else chasing us down the road to Armageddon. No, we had to have our YouTube, our Facebook, our Amazon two-day shipping. It all contributed to the fountain of knowledge holding the nuclear altar.

The blast wave couldn’t be more than seconds away. It should have hit by now. He estimated the distance to the obliterated horizon of destruction. This was all way too slow. In videos, the blast waves took out everything with terrifying speed. The heat was becoming more than uncomfortable. For that matter, the heat should not have arrived before the blast wave. They should have been one and the same.

He shucked out of his long-sleeved sweater. This all was so wrong. He should not have time to perform a striptease during a nuclear blast. Once the sweater was off his head he was almost relieved to see the blast wave had closed on his location. As it did the heat was replaced with a comfortable warmth. It was almost like a hug. The blast wave passed through him and his awareness became an infinite embrace a cooling white glow. Was this heaven? Had he passed through hell into eternity painlessly during Armageddon? He floated in the embryonic glow of eternity and wondered.


500 words