I've Seen Fire and I've Seen Rain

I just saw my hometown get nuked. I sat on the grass in the shadow of one of the university's structures and watched as the seemingly unending plume of fire and electricity thundered in to the sky, and looking around I was somehow not even surprised to see no one running, no one screaming. We all stared silently, almost peacefully, at the oncoming wall of fire that never quite engulfed our tiny bodies.

I saw the bomb fall, or at least saw it's jet plumed path arch across the sky. It was being carried by an orange rocket shaped something like the Bell X-1, the old test plane that broke the sound barrier, but this one was slightly different, and I watched it scream from the north and slam in to the earth near my parent's house. I'm about to puke just trying to remember this long enough to write it down.

I know I thought briefly of how sad I was that I would not be around to reshape the world with the other survivors, that despite every hope ever had for having a long life full of meaning and purpose and adventure, it was beign arbitrarily ended in one brilliant flash. More than any other emotion though, I just sat in resignation, watching my death fly towards me.

I was not alone on the campus. Behind me was a marching band decked out in blue, their drums silent. To the east a middleschool girl's soccer team stood in the long grass, their feet unmoving, their grass stained soccer balls forgotten, and south from me, towards the fire and the whispering death, stood some college students. Their books lay upturned on the dirt.

I thought of the woman I love, and how angry I was that I couldn't hold her one last time, of how useless I was to protect her from the mushroom cloud rising up in the south.

The walls of fire kept advancing, never seeming to kill us. The first one seemed to swallow everything, and from inside we could see the finger of death carving a white hot hole in to the pale blue early morning sky. Electricity arced from the earth to the peak of the explosion, and wave after wave of fire seemed to roll outwards, mocking us with it's absolute endign power.

In a nuclear explosion, one of three things will kill you; the explosion its self, if you are in the kill zone, the fire storm from the explosion if you are within a mile or so, and lastly, most horribly, the radiation kills the rest. It is the vulture that rides in the contrails of death, and I could feel it sinking it's claws in to me before the cloud had risen.

I could feel the radiation turning my thumbnails in to blood red splotches on my swelling fingers, the pressure building and building as the brilliant whiteness overcame me and boiled every liter of liquid in my body.

I woke up with a start, panting. I knew immediately that I had been dreaming, but that white hot image was burned in to my brain, searing my eyes with its ghost. My girlfriend was in the shower, and I stood by the washroom door for a few minutes just to hear the water and catch my breath. We had been dying moments before and now something as simple as listening to a shower on monday morning was healing me.

She didn't answer to my knock so i'm here writing this and for some reason hoping i'm not too late.