Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse

IV

Among Mortimer’s books were science fiction novels, some of which supposed the details of the apocalypse. Mortimer had selected these with wry irony. Popular methods whereby the world would snuff it: aliens, collisions with comets or meteors, plague, nuclear holocaust, robots rising against their masters, various natural disasters and so on and so on. Mortimer’s favorite: space bureaucrats demolishing Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

No single thing had doomed Mortimer’s planet. Rather, it had been a confluence of disasters. Some dramatic and sudden, others a slow, silent decay.

The worldwide flu epidemic had come and gone with fewer deaths than predicted. Humanity emerged from that long winter and smiled nervously at one another. A sigh of relief, a bullet dodged.

That April the big one hit.

So long feared, it finally happened. The earth awoke, humped up its spine along the San Andreas. The destruction from L.A. to San Francisco defied comprehension. The earthquake sent rumbles across the Pacific, tsunamis pounding Asia. F.E.M.A. immediately declared its inadequacy and turned over operations to the military. The death toll numbered in the millions, and nothing-not food nor fuel-made it through West Coast seaports. The shortages were rapidly felt across the Midwest. Supermarkets emptied, and no trucks arrived to resupply them.

Wall Street panicked.

Nine days later a Saudi terrorist detonated a nuclear bomb in a large tote bag on the steps of the Capitol building. Both houses of Congress were in session. The president and vice president and most of the cabinet were obliterated.

The secretary of the interior was found and sworn in. This didn’t sit well with a four-star general who had other ideas. Civil war.

Economic spasms reached the European and Asian markets.

Israel dropped nukes on Cairo, Tehran and targets in Syria.

Pakistan and India went at it.

China and Russia went at it.

The world went at it.

It was pretty much all downhill from there.