Babayaga

“Oh damn—” Jake started to speak but his words were interrupted by a big, strange crashing and small yelping sound, as if an oak tree had fallen over a dog. Then there was silence. Will stayed on his knees, uncertain of what he should do next. Finally he looked up over his shoulder and found a stranger standing above him, awkwardly wielding a heavy branch in his hands. At the man’s feet lay Jake, crumpled up on the wet field, his suit splattered with mud, his skull neatly caved in.

“Is he dead?”

The man nodded, with a shrug.

“Gee, thanks,” said Will, slowly picking himself up off the ground. He put out his hand. “My name’s Will. Are you French or American? Français ou américain?”

The man shook his hand and seemed about to answer when an enormous blinding white light flashed out and exploded across the landscape, engulfing all their surroundings. The man, the broad field, the distant trees, the whole world, completely vanished. Will tried shutting his eyes to block out the blinding, burning glare, but he had no way to stop the fierce light; his nerves felt scalded and raw as his panicked consciousness was shocked to a bright expansion point from which he was sure he would never return. The only bleak reassurance he had was that he absolutely knew what this was, the moment he had feared for years now, the great A-bomb annihilation. Someone had done it, the button had been pushed, an arrogant prime minister, a prideful president, a crazed stupid admiral or a lethally offended premier, it did not matter, some arrogant son of a bitch had launched the ballistic missiles, from Washington, Moscow, 10 Downing, or out from the bowels of one of the new nuclear submarines, it did not matter; the preemptive solution to every global conflict had landed, and all the wars being waged on the planet, every battle, every argument over justice or injustice, from the greatest of moral struggles to the most petty kitchen debates, conflagrations over the borders of oil nations to ornery grandmothers haggling over the price of thimbles, none of it mattered now, like the sun-scorched scorpions on the shores of some distant Bikini atoll, which had all been irradiated into an iridescent nothingness, it was over. Talk about the meek inheriting the earth, this once proud species, who had risen out of the jungle mud to overcome the mythical dragons of fire, serpent, fang, and talon, who had built spired cities, cleared continents, and were poised to conquer space itself, had been defeated, ultimately, by the fractional split of the tiny atom. All this flashed across Will’s tumbling mind as he spun deep into the shrill, screaming abyss. An inexorable vacuum pulled at him, swallowing and sucking him down toward a nodal nothingness. And then it was over.

VII

Witches’ Song Nine