The Second Nuclear War

Tom Moore was an old man and thin, not frail, and he would not die. He had managed to survive the first nuclear war by luck and force of will. Cunning and movement. He was sure none of that would get him through the second one.

Unlike the first war, when all the bombs seemed to go off at once, and nobody knew which way to run, this time the explosions were intermittent, and he didn’t see anybody running in any direction at all. The gap had been about two years, he thought, but it was hard to say. No time, no clocks, no communication with other people. His watch broke but he still wore it out of habit.

The first war had plunged the country, as far as he could tell, into the abyss. The darkness. The void. Where once life had been defined by work and television entertainment, now it was circumscribed by the need for food and warmth. 

Smoke and debris from NW I still drifted in the stratosphere, high above the clouds. An old news sheet he had read years ago said it would stay there for years, deflect the sun’s radiation, cool the surface temperature, and ruin the growing seasons. The article had been right. Food came from cans and packages he could still find. And America had brewed a lot of beer.

Corpses turned to skeletons; bones to dust. Cruel winds scattered atoms of unknown origin hither and yon. Everything living and not living had come from the earth, sea or sky, and was now making its way back. From mud. To mud.

~

Tom Moore was sitting in the shade of a tall building in a city he had seen on the horizon for what seemed eons. He had taken his time getting there. Walking. His hand shook as he raised a graham cracker to his dry mouth and bit. He washed it down with an old can of Budweiser he’d found in the hotel bar inside. He munched an olive. Today’s mission was some new clothes.

The air around him crackled bright white, blinding. Another one, he thought. He collapsed into fetal and started praying this wouldn’t be the one that lofted him into the stratosphere. The prayers had stopped working long ago, but he said them anyway, just in case. 

The light faded but the sound had not yet reached him, nor the wind that was sure to come. He had been through so many of these.

The wind gave flight to a car that flew through the opening between two buildings and detonated it against a limestone block wall on the other side of the street from Tom’s position. Pieces launched in every direction, bouncing off the ground and zinging down the street, scratching the walls of buildings, and flying straight up. The motor crashed back to earth fully sixty seconds after its liberation from the chassis, burying itself six feet into the pavement, blasting concrete and asphalt, rocks and substrate in every direction. 

Prostrate on his belly now, Tom screamed, but no one heard him. He was alone. 

The sound of the bomb came through the same opening in the buildings as the car, and the wind blew with the ferociousness of a thousand hurricanes. Blood filled Tom’s ears and ran down the sides of his stubbled face, dripped off the end of his nose and pooled on the sidewalk.

He was still alive.

Tom peaked briefly around the corner to see the now familiar mushroom cloud rise up and dominate the skyscrapers below. He never looked at them for too long.

All sound faded away. And light, too, as the smoke from fires rose in the column of the cloud and blotted out a gray sun. He gulped the remainder of his beer, ate the cracker, and fled down the street looking for a men’s clothing store.