The eye of the lion

No-one ever knew who pushed the button first, and the truth is that it didn’t matter.

Incapable of silencing the reptilian voice that whispered in the back of his mind, demanding blood and war, man had unleashed the cavalrymen of the Apocalypse, who galloped over the earth with unprecedented rage.

Four fifths of humanity died in less than two hours. Vaporized, burned, destroyed by the shock-waves or buried beneath the rubble. Millions more perished in the following days from the radiation, from their wounds, or simply because they no longer had anything to live for.

The sides involved had destroyed their enemy and also those allied to their enemy along with them, just to be sure. That was what mattered. Of course the enemy had wiped them out too,

and their own allies had been banished from the face of the earth, but oh well, that was the price to pay for the luxury of having no enemies left in the world.

Thirty nations had disappeared, made ashes. Several others were so badly hit that they could not pull themselves together. Radiation, plague, and hunger afflicted the survivors so badly, that few of them were able to withstand the onslaught.

In comparison, the dark ages seemed like days of light and blossoming of the human spirit. Nothing would ever be the same again.

On the night of the final judgment, few words were spoken in that forgotten farm-house in France. We were worn out. We didn’t need much imagination to figure out what was going on in the rest of the world. We’d witnessed the death of Paris, and that was enough. We knew that the world was now a gigantic cemetery.

Sitting in a corner of the house, Cole was trying in vain to tune into a radio station with a battery-operated radio. All the wave-bands were dead, but I think he was doing it to have something to take his mind off what was happening.

“Six million years of evolution...” he lamented to himself. “...Six million years of documented history...Hundreds of years

of science, art, literature, philosophy and religion, obtained at the tremendous sacrifice of thousands of men and women...All lost, lost for ever...”

No-one contradicted him. No-one criticized his tears. We had our own, and they too were bitter.

Mark returned just before dawn, covered in grey ash, looking like a fresh corpse. He went to one of the rooms of the house and shut himself up in it for two days. No-one dared disturb him.

For the rest of that infamous night, and for two days after that, we all stayed in the rooms we’d chosen and talked little, except maybe a couple of words at meal-times. It was as though even the presence of other human beings were a painful reminder of what had happened, so we avoided each other. The business of finding ourselves the target of a group of religious fanatics wanting to annihilate us, was like a distant memory that had dissolved like the light of day.

For three days ash fell ceaselessly from the sky and daylight was a poor imitation of what it had been. Dim and grey like a permanent five a.m., which became jet black after six p.m.

On the fourth day we had torrential rain. It was a dark rain which we knew was silent and deathly, charged with poison from the radioactive atmosphere. We avoided it as much as

possible, but we knew that sooner or later its effects would reach us.

Finally, on the sixth day, the rain stopped and a strange sun emerged from between the grey-purple clouds. It was a sun that for the rest of our lives would remind us with its strange pale yellow light, of what we had lost forever.