Geoff North - How the World Ends

The world was minutes away from having its ass kicked. The planet’s most successful and dangerous species was set to eradicate everything, and they were helpless to do anything about it. When ten to twenty thousand nuclear weapons are primed to use on any given day for more than half a century, it’s only a matter of when it will happen, and which crazy fucker presses the first button.

Jacob Heez hadn’t grown up during the Cold War. He was still a dozen or so years from being born around the time Reagan was demanding Gorbachev to tear down The Wall, and the Soviet Union was collapsing like a house of cards. Jake remembered the stories his father had told him of how it had been when he was a little boy growing up into a young man during the late seventies and early eighties. He told Jake of the recurring dreams, of bombs dropping in the wheat fields, and the billowing mushroom clouds that rose into the grey skies of his teenage nightmares. Dwayne Heez would wake in a cold sweat and cry, terrified that one of those times he wouldn’t wake up—that the nightmare would have become a waking reality. Jake’s father told him these stories because he believed those days were long gone, and he wanted to instill in his son a sense of what the world was like in its most frightening times.

But Jake’s old man had gotten it wrong. He forgot to account for the fact that history had a tendency to repeat itself. The Cold War blew back in with a vengeance. It was no longer simply cold; it was frozen, and there was no chance of a thaw. Jake’s twenty-first century Cold War era had become an Ice Age of old paranoia and new mistrust. There were fresh players—North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, and India to name just a dangerous few. Some of these countries had gone to war, and there had been limited nuclear exchanges between the more radical governments. The world had managed to hold on. People continued going to work and going to war. Their relentless pursuit of over-populating the globe and killing their neighbors continued.

Jake was a farmer, like his father before him. He wasn’t all that involved with the world around him. He was more concerned about the five thousand acres of that world he owned. But his father had taught him to keep an eye on current events. Those old talks of how things were had stuck with Jake. He watched the news, and though there was little new about it, he remained aware.

Earlier that morning, Jake had listened to the news on the television while he ate his breakfast and prepared for ten or twelve hours of back-breaking fence repair. Most of it went unheard. It was the same thing day in and night out. People thousands of miles away were threatening to obliterate each other, and after listening to that same bullshit his entire adult life, Jake had developed a way to block most of it out, as he was certain almost everyone else did.

Perhaps that’s the problem , he thought, as another six-foot long pole was pounded into the ground with his sledgehammer. Maybe we have to stop blocking so much out and start doing something about it. He removed his work gloves and wiped the sweat away from his forehead with one of them.

What kind of lesson am I teaching Nicholas by ignoring the problem? He looked north, in the direction of the Heez farm house over three miles away, where his five-year old son was undoubtedly now out of bed and running about in. Mandy would be awake now as well, chasing after him and trying to settle him down long enough to eat a bowl of cereal. He would be asking where his dad was, of course. Mandy would be explaining that Daddy has work to do, and that if he was a good boy, he would see him again in a few short hours for lunch.

Jake grinned, imagining the exchange. He inhaled the crisp morning air deeply and looked up at the sky. One word kept coming back to him from the news. Imminent. It had been plastered in big red letters on the bottom of the television screen. The media loved using words like that: Devastating. Looming. Tragic. Desperate… Imminent . The more frightening the headline, the more apt viewers were to sit up and take notice. They scared the shit out of people and kept their ratings up. The smile dropped as his thoughts darkened once again. What kind of world have we brought him into? All was blue and clear above, but looks were deceiving. It was a dangerous, scary world to raise a kid in. It’s what his father had told Jake’s mother years before, and what Dwayne’s father had likely thought decades earlier during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Same worries, same shit, from one generation to the next. There had never been a good time to raise a kid into this world, and there never would be.

Jake replaced another worn post with a new one and put his tools in the back of his pickup. He jumped into the cab and headed south where another quarter mile away a dozen or so more rotted posts waited. He would head home after that and have an early lunch. The wiring could wait. Jake wanted to see his son. Maybe he would bring the boy back out with him in the afternoon. They could spend a few hours together and talk.

Jake saw a jet contrail through the windshield. He slowed the truck to a crawl and peered up at the cloudless sky. He spotted a second one off to the left. There wasn’t much unusual about jet trails in the sky, dozens of planes travelled overhead above the Canadian prairies. They flew east to west and west to east twenty-four hours a day, picking up and depositing people all over the country from Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and the bigger cities out east.

These white streams were different. They were running north to south, or south to north, Jake wasn’t sure which. Another trail appeared off through the right edge of the windshield. North to south , he thought, with a sickening lurch in his stomach. This third trail was much lower than the others, and Jake was almost certain he could see a bright orange spot at the head of it. The orange spot vanished over the horizon and a fourth and fifth trail suddenly appeared higher above.

This isn’t happening. This can’t be fucking happening.

He brought the pickup to a halt and staggered out, not bothering to put it in park. The truck rolled on for a few more feet, but Jake no longer cared. His eyes were jumping from contrail to contrail. They were appearing magically overhead, streaking across the sky, back and forth, north to south, south to north, as if an invisible child’s hand were painting lines of grey and white on an immense blue canvas.

I need to see Mandy… I want to be with my son.

Jake’s needs and wants would go unfulfilled. He couldn’t operate his legs, both arms hung limp at his sides. All he could do was watch as the missiles continued their terrible arcs in the sky. There was a deep rumble growing from somewhere behind him, he could feel the soil beneath his feet begin to shake. One of the awful trails appeared directly above him, pushing ahead of it a blazing yellow point of light as bright as the sun. The light was moving incredibly fast towards the southeast.

Jake tried to comprehend what city was close enough to obliterate from the weapon’s low trajectory. This is Canadian farm land. There’s nothing here for miles worth destroying. Winnipeg was almost two hundred miles away to the east. This thing was headed almost straight south. It would reach its target in the next few moments. The only other center of notable population was Brandon, a town with less than one-hundred residents. Why would they want to wipe out Brandon?

Perhaps the missile was intended for Minot, North Dakota. Jake remembered his father telling him about the US missile silos located there. Maybe that’s where this thing was headed—to atomize the American weapons before they could even clear their hidden bunkers. It was going to run short of its intended target—much shorter.