Waking up oddly bright and alert one sunny Monday morning, Tom Johnson rolled out of bed and nearly skipped into the shower He was almost giddy this morning, and that was a bit odd, but at least it was pleasant.

Soon after Tom got out of his refreshing and peaceful morning cleansing ritual, his phone rang. Tom picked up and up a calm, well-meaning and yet still obviously distressed voice chirped out to wreak havoc on the last few minutes of his life.

“Tom? This is Dan.”

“Dan! How the-“

“Look I have to be short, I’m sorry. Uh, there has been a sort of…an uh-oh? Yeah…dude, are you at work?

“No, I just got up. Why?”

“Oh..oh . Um, Tom, I have to go but I am serious. You…listen, you can’t tell anyone, all right? I’m really, really sorry. An ICBM is going to strike right in Oakland! You have ten minutes to get out….I think ten minutes, maybe less than that.”

“Haha! Yeah right! Dude don’t pull this shit I know where you-“

“Listen, it’s going to hit the city center! It’s projected to have a twenty mile blast radius-get out!” Just then, some commotion blasted out of the phone. Tom thought he an angry crisp voice shout out, “That’s an unauthorized-” before the phone clattered off on the other end.

Tom tried to ring Dan back at the number, but it would not connect.
His grin turned to a frown and a grim realization that his friend wasn’t lying. It wasn’t like him at all to pull a prank like this. Given Dan’s work at some weird Navy Radar center, he would know if something horrifying and secret was going to happen, and where it would be happening to, specifically.. That was his job, after all. Like tracking a nuke falling on Tom’s neighborhood.

Ten minutes? Ten minutes. His hair was already sticking up as he processed everything. No, by now that would be nine minutes, right? Nine minutes.

He had no chance to live for much longer-he figured that. Those things burst in the air, he thought: I’m going to the roof. It will be instant that way.

He walked out of his apartment into his hallway and didn’t bother to shut the door. He walked quickly up the stairwell and up to the lonely and dark door to the roof. Opening that, he realized he was still wearing his pajamas. Ah hell, why not?

He looked about the grey speckled flat roof and chose a spot right in the middle next to the abandoned TV antenna. He stood and peered into the sky and spun around to see if there was any chance he could spot the missile. With nothing in sight but a couple of landing passenger liners-unlucky bastards. As he peered up, he heard one, then two shifting whines loudly make their mark across the sky. The two planes had shifted their courses, both making ninety degree turns away from each other and speed up and away, their speed picking up considerably.

I bet that is where the bomb hits, he thought. It looked to be just a couple of miles away.

He had picked the right spot. He remembered reading a history of the bomb, and of course pictures of numerous explosions were contained in a small and tasteful back and white photo section in the last third of the book. There was a before and after picture of an island. The second picture showed a large bluish blob over and above where the island ad been-nothing was left but a watery crater. The second picture he remembered was the Manhattan skyline, first with a shot of a bomb like Nagasaki’s sad present, and the second was a shot of the skyline, but stretched out to most of the island instead of a close-up of the Empire State building’s neighborhood. The atomic bomb in the first pic took up most of the picture behind the buildings; in horrifying contrast, the second picture’s fusion explosion took up most of the island’s backdrop. There was no way he could run from this. The first one, maybe. Not the second one. Not an h-bomb. That could have that twenty mile blast radius.

He thought briefly about calling his parents and decided against calling them or anyone else. Why bother? They would worry to no end, and feel some odd sort of guilt. The shouts and screams from below helped to staunch the guilt. Was that a gunshot?

He heard a few sirens begin to break out, until in a couple of minutes a cacophony run in his ears, his neighbors rushing to the street. No one bothered to come up. They are all doomed too, why bother, he thought in oddly calm despair.

He looked upwards to hunt down the final streak, up from where the two planes had parted. The sky held silent, unlike the screams and sirens from below. He tried to focus on the sky. Soon enough, a flicker of red streaked into view, quickly and mercilessly it dropped a quarter of the sky until a bright flash pulsed out.

He blinked, blinded, but alive and stunned. I am still here, he thought. A roar hit his ears seconds later.

It wasn’t an H-bomb. He could have r

, ,