A Cold Grey End: Chapter 1

Chapter One: Nightfall Ends

The night of reckoning was almost upon the city of Nightfall, Nevada. The gentle twilight gave way to an eerie purple glow that seemed to go on forever across the sky. The city’s Civil Alert horn blared throughout town. People ran for their fallout shelters, the streets were empty. In a store in the middle of town a man had committed suicide with a sawed-off shotgun. In the town square, a park with fresh-cut green grass, bike-paths, and a statue of the town’s founder, Adrian Darke, people were gathered in little groups crying and monotonously shouting excerpts from the bible. Complete chaos had enveloped the city with a grip tighter than a vice clamp. You see a man was coming, a man who rode in no car, but a horse, who had many names and only one at the same time, a man wore a hood over his face, a man who was really no man at all, a man named Death.

The Mayor, Jonathen Darke, was sitting in his office in the exact center of town, contemplating the end. He reviewed the paper sitting on his desk:

CONTACT HAS BEEN MADE/TROOPS DISCOVERED/COLONEL ISSACI ZUPHICOUP HAS ISSUED A STATEMENT OF WAR/MISSILES HAVE BEEN LAUNCHED/THE ENTIRE WEST COAST HAS BEEN NEUTRALIZED BY AN E.M.P. BLAST FROM AN UNKNOWN SOURCE/PREPARE FOR SEVERE NUCLEAR BLASTS OF AN UNCERTAIN PROPORTION/END OF EMERGENCY STATEMENT/PRES. FLOORINCE/

That was all it needed to be. A nuclear attack from Northern Russia. Before the E.M.P. blast took out the western US, Darke had been told, they had gotten the missile trajectories. One was on its way to land in the direct center of Nightfall. City Hall. The Mayor’s office. Jonathen did not leave his office. Even if he did, the blast of the nukes would roast him like a Thanksgiving turkey. So he would die in his office.

The roads leaving Nightfall were completely jammed, no matter if you were the king of England, you were going to be stuck. Jonathen thought the people who were trying to leave the city via the roads were the ones who were stupid. If you had any common sense, you would leave through the desert. Either way it didn’t matter. Where would you go? New York? Washington? Ogunquit, Maine? No place was safe. There was a barrage of nuclear missiles heading in our direction. It used to be that a twenty-megaton nuke was powerful. Ha, that was small time. It was once said that man is the architect of his own demise. That can’t be any closer to the truth, if not the straight up truth. With the advance of technology for nuclear energy came the advance of technology for nuclear weapons. These days a single nuclear reactor can power hundreds of cities for one hundred years, and a nuclear missile can obliterate up to 20 cities, if not more.

Jonathen looked out the window, scanning the sky. There they were, those sticks of death. Outside a panic had arisen and people were fleeing their cars and trucks. A trail of smoke followed the missiles through the sky, and in a moments time it was day again, a blinding white light had enveloped the city. A giant mushroom cloud erected itself over the city of Nightfall. The shockwave had blown most of the buildings down, then the afterwave demolished what was left of what the shockwave had failed to obliterate. Time stood still. Fire filled the streets and made its way through the sewers. People were still alive inside the ball of fire. They were running around, like chickens with their heads cut off. Large burning chickens missing their heads. Chickens that had no business being burnt to death in the midst of a nuclear attack. The screams were like that of a ghost, with no body to scream from. This was, from what these people saw, the end of the world. No more busses or trains to take you to work. No more work. No more life.