Tag: Apocalypse

Short Story: All The Angles

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

Everything’s perception. Or a matter of it, anyway. I knew that even then. I know it more now. For the bulk of my life I’d been learning more and more about perceptions, perspectives. The “views” of situations. The “angles,” as some would say. The “spin” others called it. So, when the end of the world was in sight, I’d seen it coming.

How? Simple: over years of training to recognize varying angles, I learned one simple reality. That, as it happens, is the reason people are told to examine things from multiple angles. That, as it happens, is to learn to distinguish fact from fiction. In simplest terms, by viewing all the angles, we humans see the truth– because it’s consistent no matter the angle.

So before belaboring the subject any further, let’s just say, I’d learned to see well. In all respects, I had keen sight. I saw the proverbial tidal wave from far off. It had been rising for months. The tides had been drawing back. Little-by-little, the sands lengthened. Day in, day out, the water receded.

I suppose this build-up lasted years, really. There’s some argument there, no matter the angle. One could argue the first moment after the previous tidal-wave was the true start of the next’s build-up. Conversely, the build-up could’ve been said to begin the moment before the wave first struck the shore. No matter what side you viewed it from though, a single fact appears; world’s-end was coming.

No matter the arguments about it, the build-up did have milestones. Those stones are obvious, in reflection. Even then, there was a scent to them– like oncoming rain, but the bad kind that makes you dread breathing.

Politically speaking, world’s-end was the result of a misstep. The Americans had always had two left feet. They’d proven, time and again, their “moral majority,” was anything but. No matter the angle, they were shown to be prone to making missteps. Everyone’s bound to make ’em though. No harm, no foul, right? Especially when glass-houses and stones are so plentiful, right?

Maybe. That’s an argument for another day. Or not– after all, the world’s over, and there’s no-one left to argue. Semantics. The point: the Americans started it. They’d made their mistakes. Those mistakes piled on. Often. In the end, they found themselves with a third-world dictator in charge.

At least, characteristically speaking.

The man wasn’t really a third-world dictator. He could’ve been. Everyone agreed on that. The angles too. Speculation says we’d have been better off if he were. He wasn’t. Problem was, America was still a super-power– or as much as there remained one in those days.

That moniker had been fading. The world was industrialized. More than it had ever been. The African bush had freshly-paved asphalt. Desert oases had turned to fuel stops.

In other ways, the moniker was as strong as ever. Most of all, with regard to militaries. Those of keen sight saw where madness might form. Those without, sensed its death-toll in the air’s copper-taste. Whatever the angles of the human species’ end eventually show, they’ll agree it was spectacularly dreadful.

Surprisingly, the cause wasn’t full-blown nuclear war. People had come to expect that. Personally, I was somewhat looking forward to it. It wasn’t zombies either. Another thing we’d come to expect. Then again, there were enough of those walking around– we called them voters.

No, in the end, it was just missteps and mistakes. Nuclear weapons were involved, but not in the apocalyptic exchange we’d expected. What happened was this:

The US screwed up. They sent the CIA into the mid-east to do some things. Secret things. Eventually, the CIA used what they’d gained during that doing of things to send some mercenaries to North Korea. Those CIA “assets” had a period of doing, too. Somehow it was learned the assets were CIA, and were wreaking havoc on the “glorious leader.”

North Korea was angry. North Korea was “Best Korea.” Best Korea made threats. China disavowed Best Korea. Everyone had known Best Korea had nuclear weapons. They weren’t much. “Baby’s first” nukes. Then again, a nuke’s a nuke, right? Right. Dangerous. Deadly. Best Korea’s nukes couldn’t go far. They didn’t need to.

Best Korea, in its infinite wisdom, nuked Other Korea. Specifically, Seoul. As it turns out. Baby’s first nukes were enough to completely irradiate Other Korea. The world turned against Best Korea. They were finally tired of Glorious Leader’s shit. Both he and Best Korea were wiped from the Earth like shit from a bunghole.

This was a problem for one, simple reason; the US was not involved. Russia was not involved. China was not involved. Although, China wanted to be involved, they weren’t. Too many people owed them too much money. They didn’t want to owe them more. Unfortunately, wiping clean the shit hole that was North Korea had shown the allied-nations, spearheaded by the UK, that they had power.

The UN didn’t quite like that. China didn’t quite like it either. The US liked it even less. Russia only pretended to like it because the US didn’t like it, but privately condemned it too. Soon enough, the UK and its allied-nations thought being able to wipe clean parts of the world without Super-power assistance was a pretty good thing. Everyone else still didn’t like it.

So what happened? How’d the US screw that up? Well, the US had a third-world dictator as President. That meant a super-power was being run like a third-world country– even deeper into the ground than it had been. In the process, it racked up a sizable debt to all of the other nations on Earth.

And, another misstep and mistake later the angles come in again. They’re important here. Regardless of arguments, they all show one thing: a mistake was made. China got pretty pissed about that mistake. Because China was pissed, Russia was pissed. Because China and Russia were pissed, the UK and its allies acted like they weren’t pissed. Actually, they were pretty pissed too.

The UK. They’d done a lot for the US. Naturally, they decided to show how big a fuck-up the US had made. They did so by tanking the US economy and liquidating the assets leveraged against the US debt to the UK. Russia and China, smelling money, did the same thing.

The UK got angry: they’d been trying to prove a point. Russia and China were being bullies. America was now a depressed wasteland. It had become the third-world country its president always hoped for. Incidentally, he died of a kind of dysentery not found in first world nations. Irony is delicious that way.

Anyway, the UK, Russia, and China decided to argue for a while. Then, they decided they were all angry with each other. Then they decided to fight over the scraps of the US. Then they decided to fight each other in Europe. By the end of it, 98% of the world’s population had been conscripted, drafted, and killed in the longest, bloodiest war ever conceived.

No matter what angle you look at it from, that’s pretty amazing. All that death. All that chaos. All that civilization. Gone. Beautiful, in a way.

Bonus Poem: 200 and Counting

~ S.M. Nolan ~ 1 Comment

200 and counting, human years do I mean.
Awakened half-dead to a world once seen,
as progress and virtue now contaminated, unclean.
Where is the hope which we all wish to glean?

Poisoned by radiation, a cry-ogenic dream,
I search for gradation in what ominous I deem;
to follow the dog or to leave it I seem,
to recall that a fall was lonely downstream.

A world once burned up in lust,
from a greater than great, quite dismal distrust,
it cost us a fortune greater when lost,
but the masters have gone, are now turned to dust.

Now minutes between men and women adorned,
by the punctual gun-fire of early morn,
but battles to wage are an acceptable thorn,
for part of a world that is bred but not born.

And when night-fall comes with a beacon of light,
ahead a dominating, large diamond site.
A green jewel of modern, machined upper-class,
that to decayed folks is a pain in their ass.

Is it a friend or foe, a lover or tribal,
that I meet just upon my arrival,
for I know the Piper of the marble,
papers are often on the lips as a garble.

Japanese robots and synthetic fear,
swirl ironically in the air,
while no-one else is really quite clear,
of what it is that’s in the water ’round here.

Mutated husks from captives retrieved,
stolen at night, just like the thieved,
whose hounds howled with greatness but weaved,
alerted that others were madly aggrieved.

To run or to fight, the eternal questions,
when faced with this world’s endless distractions,
To wish or to hope are both useless abstractions,
when cog and sword form metal contraptions.

A final repose is all that there be,
when the fires of synthetics are all that you see,
For the Railroad is hidden and so is its plea,
And they’re simply of no further uses to me.

So after 200 years and some change,
We’re back to warm fires and home on the range,
while around us doth nuclear fission estrange,
the past and the future from the present’s dog-mange.

Short Story: The Flash

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

The Flash

There was a flash like lightning. It lit the sky as daylight in pre-dawn. The momentary brightness gave way to a mushroom cloud of misery. As if meant to since it’s formation, the world changed in a blink. The nearest of its victims were vaporized. They were the fortunate ones. For what came next was a truth that mankind could never own up to; we are cowards, fools, children.

I was stationed near the far-edge of the blasts’ radius, just outside the critical radiation zone. I learned the truth of our nature first hand, saw its repercussions with my own, shielded eyes. Leader of my squad, and like them, clad in air-tight kevlar that stunk like week-old sweat even before our dirty flesh inhabited it. Had the enemy smelled our advance after the flash, the vaporization, the change of the world, they’d have surrendered for posterity’s sake– likely only as a bargaining chip to make as all shower, shave, have some R and R.

But war doesn’t allow for time-outs. That was something that had been drilled into the head of every recruit long before they’d ever joined the fight. Two decades of ground fighting saw the propaganda mill run like wild fire. Every standing wall left was blanketed with the colorful, subtle manipulations of a psychological war of a nation against its own. In a way, no one blamed them. It was the only route left to attempt to keep the peace. There was no longer order, only camps for the refugees, sick and dying. Meanwhile, cities that had stood the test of eons became the central zones of conflict. They were gone. Eradicated. All in a flash.

Our men on the front-lines hadn’t stood a chance, but neither did the enemy. That was the point. The particular phrases used? I remember them as if they’re etched into the blood on my hands: “Expendable assets,” “Acceptable Casualties,” “Cold Calculus.” For a layman they were confusing, but for a soldier they all meant the same thing; the men and women out there in the thick of it were to be sacrificed. The armchair generals had seen to that. They had watched from on-high, strategizing, and in a single thought, sealed the fates of those both friend and foe– sealed the truth of humanity’s cowardice.

Safely hidden away with the other officers, they made a “calculated decision.” Bullshit. They killed millions, raped the earth’s face to save themselves. That was all. My unit was sent in for “damage assessment and clean-up.” Euphemisms for confirming what we already knew, and murdering the poor bastards that hadn’t already been burnt to charred husks. Friend or foe, it didn’t matter, they were to be “neutralized.” I guess for some it would have been the final kindness we could grant.

When we made our advance through the furthest ruins, the buildings were largely intact. Or at least, as intact as decades-long bombing-runs, bullet-holes, and shrapnel could keep them. There were no windows, but you could sense where the refugees and soldiers had been. The former used scrap material to barricade windows and holed-walls. The latter left bodies, sandbags, spent ammunition and magazines in their wake.

The furthest outskirts of the blast were like wading through a physical history of the last twenty years. Bodies both decayed and fresh mingled with the skeletons of the long dead. The flies and other insects peppered the air as if a great plague had been unleashed. The buildings’ colors and brick were faded, pocked and divoted with destruction across their faces. Everywhere there were signs of scavengers– over turned bodies, out-turned pockets, emptied infantry packs. In this land, nothing was a sacred but survival. And now, because of us, even that had been hallowed.

When the clicks of the Geiger signaled the first reaches of the radiation, the sky was still dark. The land was silent. I doubt that even had anything survived in that place it would have been so bold as to make noise. My unit was silent but for the weary progress of our feet through ash and ruins. We had nothing to say, but our collective breaths of awe and disgust bled through our helmet comms. It was enough to tell that we were all present, accounted for, and mirrored one another’s sentiments.

It was almost dawn when we came upon a survivor. Though I hesitate to call her that. She was clearly dying; blind, dehydrated, irradiated, and burned all over. She heard us before we saw her, began to scream and wail for help. We found her under the rubble of a tin shack, its hot roof collapsed atop her. She begged for mercy, amnesty. At that we saw the tattered remains of her uniform. What hadn’t burnt into her skin was clear enough to denote that she was the enemy. Even so, we had our orders and none of us had the gall to tell her the truth.

I pulled the trigger myself. One round to the forehead. Her pain was over in a second. Mine had just begun. All of ours had. We had no idea what we’d find moving forward, but the scene of the woman became the exception.

What few people we did find were all dead. Most were civilians– refugees that had stubbornly refused to leave the war-zone they’d once called home. All middle-aged and more hardened than not. Their corpses were emaciated, soot-blackened, probably had been for longer than they’d known. It was saddening, but disappointing most of all. The groups here no longer knew why they were fighting. The militaries of both sides had long run out of volunteers, turned to draftees to do their dirty work. I doubt a single soul in that blast had any stake in the fight.

The Geiger was red-hot when we hit the first wave of vaporized buildings. They were mostly ash. Fires blazed across the horizons in every direction, had already begun to spread to the buildings behind us. The heat inside our suits increased ten-fold, threatened to bog us down with exhaustion and smother the life from our cowardly bodies.

There were no survivors this far in, only corpses. Each was more decrepit than the last. Charred skin turned to gooey mush nearer the blast’s epicenter. The bones of the dead obliterated inside from the force of the shock-wave. What few, mangled husks could be accurately identified as humans were little more than containers of meat for their cooked organs and powdered skeletons. The terrain had changed too. There were no longer even hints of buildings, just upturned and cracked earth. It formed hills and dirt dunes, all brown and black, composed of scorched elements that could no longer be identified as specific. Be they human, building, foliage, there was no way to tell.

It took nearly a full week to sweep the entire blast zone. We were fortunate enough in our suits’ designs that we could sleep comfortably in them, were allowed a fresh supply of oxygen from re-breathers in the helmets. I’ll never forget the last day though.

We’d just begun the last leg home when we came upon the corpse of a charred-black woman. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen. More than likely she was one of the escort girls one side or the other brought to base for the pleasures of the men and women there. In her arms was the tattered remains of a swaddled infant. My unit stared at the scene, the greenest of us audibly sniffling over the comm.

We knew then what the rest of the world learned in that one, solitary act of inhumanity. We were cowards. Monsters. Everything our species had grown to become, all of its greatest endeavors, its most humbling mistakes, meant nothing. We were children who’d burned ourselves with fire. With little more thought than cold calculus, and the sacrifice of acceptable casualties, we’d given into darkness with a single, atomic flash.