Doomsday

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They were going to do it.

They were going to destroy the world.

Kurt Carpenter stared at the TV screen in the back of his limousine and tried to wrap his mind around what he was seeing. Mushroom clouds. Mushroom clouds in the Middle East. A third of Israel, reduced to cinders. She had retaliated with her own nuclear arsenal, of course, and now the announcer was saying that there were five confirmed nuclear explosions in the country that had attacked. Five cities, wiped out. Carpenter leaned back and closed his eyes. He willed himself to relax but couldn’t. How could anyone relax with the end of the world about to take place? He swallowed, or tried to, but his mouth was too dry. “God in heaven.” He clenched his fists so hard, his fingernails dug into his palms. “We’re really going to do it.”

The “we” was all-inclusive, as in “the human race.” Carpenter had long believed that humankind would shoot itself in the head, but he’d also hoped, desperately hoped, that his fellow humans would prove him wrong. “Do we turn back, sir?” Holland was looking at him in the rearview mirror. As usual, the chauffeur could have been carved from stone for all the emotion he showed.

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