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Without Remorse
It’s three minutes past noon, and Arthur Delancey Ramses sat on the overlook, watching the road. The crisp spring air offered him little respite from the day’s unseasonable eighty degree heat. Arthur picked up the radio from between his feet, and looked at it. It’s a complex piece of equipment that ran him about six thousand euros to custom make.
But it was worth every cent. He felt the weight of the radio in his hand, appreciated its mass. He flipped the main switch, and he bringing the radio close he calmly stated “I am Arthur Delancey Ramses, and I do this of my own free will.” His message was broadcast over the emergency alert system of the United States, on every television station and radio broadcast, in every household. Then Arthur pressed the green button.
He saw the blast a second before he felt it. The temperature and air pressure rose, causing him discomfort. Ten miles closer to the blast, and he would have suffered a severe sunburn. Closer than that, and his skin would have erupted in flame. Then he heard the sound. It reached him at the same time the real heat did. Even at this distance, the concussive force shattered windows, and was more than enough to bring Arthur to his knees. It was the sound of fifty million dead, sixty million gravely wounded, and twenty million missing. It was the sound of glass ripping through flesh, seared bone, and a crater a quarter of a mile deep.
It was the sound of one megaton nukes detonating in midtown Manhattan, downtown LA, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, and Washington DC. It was the sound that would define three minutes past noon for every subsequent day. These were the echoes, the deadly reverberations of a new world order. At ground zero, its would be a smell of democracy freshly washed in the blood of tyrants and patriots, and the smoldering blackened divots that had replaced the nations eleven most populous and important cities were the emblems of its flag.
Even out as far as Arthur was, the wave of air pressure from the New York blast had driven back the cloud cover, letting the noontime sun shine down in all of its resplendence. Survivors might’ve called it ironic for such a beautiful sight to have been caused by such a tragedy; the heavens had opened up in a ball of flame. But seated on this rock, Arthur appreciated its glory. To him it appeared that the eye of god had opened up, and below had spread the fires of his wrath. And so the deed was done. He put down the radio and stood up. “The centre cannot hold, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned,” he announced, and began to trek back to his motorcycle at the bottom of the hill.
There was still much work to do. He would head to Detroit to claim his crown and his kingdom; an able bodied leader in a time of crisis and uncertainty. He was certain that he would be well received. Some would be hesitant, of course, to praise someone of his methodology, but there was no denying that he had done a great service in releasing them from their weighty past. No longer were they bound by the constraints of their government or of Wall Street, now they could be true Americans, true pioneers.
The bombs had been Russian, made by the very same architects whose Tsar Bomba had set off a reaction equivalent to 1% of the sun’s daily output. For Vladimir Putin the cold war had never ended; it had only taken a two decade hiatus. And so when Arthur came to Putin on the eve of the new millennia, he was immediately instated as head of the Uncle Sam Is Dead codename: USID project. He had been ideal because as an ex-KGB nuclear specialist he had the knowledge, the wherewithal, and the lack of moral compass to do the deed. Working with their Chinese allies they amassed a network of spies, and set to work preparing for Day Zero. With an arsenal of top notch weaponry and funds aplenty, the project had taken just under a decade to set up. © 2008 Eugene Aarons-Cooke
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