Failure by D I Jolly

It was early afternoon when every cell phone and television within 1000kms started to scream bloody murder. Announcing that someone, somewhere had finally fulfilled the promise of the Cold War and pushed the ‘big red button’ firing a country full of rockets at their most beloved frenemy. And James Whitmire, who at that moment was standing on his lawn looking up at the sky wondering if the clouds meant rain, or if the wind was too high, saw the message on his phone and thought.

“That’s funny, I always thought the world would end at night.”

Then goosebumps erupted over his whole body in three heavy waves, and when they stopped, he found himself on his hands and knees without a clear memory of how he got there. Tears had apparently been running down his face, but they too had stopped. He straightened his back and looked up again at the clouds and hoped that it would rain. There would be a lot of fire coming soon, and it might help. He then became aware of a ringing in his ears, by the fact that it had started to fade and be replaced by the sounds of screaming, and crying, panic and disaster.

He tensed and pushed himself back to his feet with an effort, and saw his neighbours frantically packing trinkets into cars and trying to race off in whatever direction felt safest in that moment, some narrowly missing, some driving directly into others. Killing each other accidentally. Parents who were blocked in tried to flag down cars to give away their children in the hope that they could get them to safety, hoping that that somehow was the right decision.

And in between the chaos he saw others like himself. Standing still, and watching, observing. Some cried soundlessly, some shook and it made James realise that he too was shaking. And then came the whistling sound his grandparents had told him about when they described their childhoods.

James looked up and saw six black dots shooting towards him. From the distance he thought it looked like 2 big ones and 4 smaller ones, which felt like a strange waste to throw that much power at his small town. Or maybe it was just that they had that many to spare. As they got closer they began to pop and break up and suddenly the sky was a wall of fire that was about to fall on them.

Another wave of goosebumps rocked James, but this time he didn’t fall. The chaos around him had stopped as all the others also turned to look up.

The house directly across from James was the first to explode and the force of it knocked him tumbling backwards over his lawn, through the little gate that separated his property from the Walter’s who lived behind him and into their swimming pool.

The shock of the cold water sent a bolt of clarity through his mind and he had to stifle a laugh at the idea that despite all the bombs that were going off around him, his cause of death would be drowning. Fire filled the sky above him and that same clarity caused him to swim down to the deepest point and try and stay there for as long as he could. The water splashed and thrashed and he became very aware that it was getting to feel more like bath water than a nice cold plunge.

Another wave of force hit and he had just enough time to think that it was probably his house, before the side of the pool split and half of it tore away. Within a second, he was lying wet on hot mud. His ears instantly began to ring again with the sounds of the apocalypse going off around him. He pressed his hands as hard as he could against his ears and pulled his legs up to his chest, curling into a ball and waited for the end to come.

After a few minutes James realised that the explosions had stopped, that all he could hear now was the crackle of fires, water pouring from somewhere onto wet earth, and his neighbour’s annoying car alarm that always went off when the wind picked up even a little bit.

Slowly, and cautiously, in the same way someone might wake up from a nightmare that seemed too real, he began to uncurl from the ball back into a man. As if hatching from one life into another he found himself in a wet muddy hole, as if in the primordial ooze from which all life was supposed to come. He clambered his way out into a world of fire and ash. Some shells that he could only barely recognise as once being buildings crumbled in flame around him. The mountains that had once been his breakfast companions looked misshapen and changed. The hills were now craters and where there was charm and life, now there was death and fire. And slowly, from deep down within him, came up a small and genuine laugh. Bubbling up hand in hand with the idea that with those six missiles, two large and four smaller, that giant sky covering wall of fire, all that power and hatred, all that display of self-importance. They’d missed.

He knew it was irrational, he knew that it wasn’t true for most people, and he knew that it was laugh or scream, so he laughed. He clung to his happy little silly joke and let it bubble up and carry him out of the darkness that surrounded his mind so that he could truly climb out of the hole and come back to life.

He turned his face up towards the sky as he laughed, with tears running down his face and absently recognised that it was still early afternoon, and that it had only taken about 10 minutes for the world to end.

He let his laugh fade naturally, then he began walking through the rubble to see if they’d missed anyone else.

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