Newworld

 

Sample-Prelude

The Holy Fire

 

 

It knifed through the clouds, a silver arrow of smoke and fire. The crowd didn’t see it, but some cringed as if they felt that doom raining down upon them. A gathering of crows on a dead electrical wire looked up at its movement and flash of white silver light and scattered, cawing in fear and in vain.

 

 

The President of The United States stood at his podium on the flat bed of a commercial truck, clenching a microphone and keeping his stained shirt wet with sweat.  His job as Secretary of Veteran Affairs had been his only public office, and prior to that he had been an all-star wrestler and pre-owned vehicle top salesman. He had been seventeenth in line of succession to be president and when Congress and the executive branch fled or disappeared he had been thrust into the position; one for which he was not qualified, had never imagined and one that promptly sent him hopeless into insanity.

 

 

The boy was tied to a pole, waiting his execution. The crime he was convicted of; poaching an apple. He was the only one in the crowd that seemed to notice the missile tear through the clouds. Some in the crowd saw him look up and assumed him to be in prayer. His life was hard enough that he felt no fear; this was just another thing to endure, and he looked at it with more wonderment at its beauty than he did with any trepidation or dread. It was like the faded old pictures of fireworks he had seen. He didn’t understand the concept of nuclear weapons because the schools, when he had been able to attend as a younger boy, didn’t teach such things, but he had once seen a jet plane fall out of the sky. Its burning wreckage had twisted and turned as it fell. This reminded him more of a shooting star. He understood death though, because death was everywhere, every day, and even though he felt that this was what the streak of fire represented, he felt a sense of release flooding his body.

 

The blast was the biggest explosion in the history of the world, because this was no ordinary nuclear bomb. The mushroom cloud roared two miles into the sky in a great cleansing gasp and the heartland, from Arkansas to Boise was swept clean in what was not the end, but the beginning of Newworld.