The last sound heard was a child’s cry. Some say it was simply a hungry infant voicing his demands, others say it was collective cry of our childhood. We all died that nighht, even those of us who lived to see the next morning and the mornings that followed. Humanity died that night but like the last electrical impulses in a cooling corpse we continued to twitch.

For those I have spoken with it was a bomb that brought the end. Travelers, refugees of futility, say that it was a plague. It was both the chicken and the egg. Either a plague frightened someone enough to release the bombs, or radiation from the explosions sparked the genesis of the new disease. It is not our fate to know.

People try to go on. They have slogans and inspirational speeches. Men recited “We will rebuild” while tilling irradiated soil. Woman rejoice in the birth of a child, a child born to die in slow torment from the air that poisons his every breath.

The survivors quietly curse the masked monster that pressed THE button. They cannot accept that it was one of them. Crazy men don’t rule the world. Men who loved their family, their country, and their god did this and they did it in a misguided attempt to protect that which they loved. History has shown us that we will use any atrocity to protect what we believe is ours. It was our own folly to believe that simply owning bigger weapons would be enough without using them.

Now we die. We die from the invisble rays that bombard us and by the microscopic organisms that invade us. We kill our neighbors for what little they have and when that isn’t enough we die by our own hand. Every night contains a child’s cry, but now it is harder to hear. Now the child’s cry is joined with the voices of all that remain. Cries of pain, cries for help, cried that will go unanswered.

December 30th, 2001 at 8:38 pm in Our Fault

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