Shift Work
I knew that within the hour—no, within the minute—I would be extremely busy.
The twelve crew members of the Enola Gay bomber were completely unaware of my presence. I walked between them as they checked and re-checked to make sure that everything was running smoothly. “How many would be taken with this drop?” I wondered silently. If I had voiced my thoughts, they wouldn’t have heard me anyway.
To them, I am invisible, odorless, weightless, nonexistent. But to the thousands that I would soon be harboring into their final resting place, I am very much alive and visible.
But only once they are not.
The Pilot of the Enola Gay carried twelve cyanide pills to distribute to his crew in an emergency, and each person on board carried a handgun on his person with which to swiftly deliver a bullet to the head if worse came to worse.
But worse would not come to worse. Not for the crew, anyway.
The time had come. When the payload was released, the nose of the plane jerked upwards, free of its five ton burden. Knowing that the crew would survive, I followed “Little Boy” down through the air.
I actually beat it to the ground, not that it ever made it there in the first place. Its fuse was set to detonate while it was still in the air so that the range of destruction would be at its peak*. Standing on the compressed dirt, I stared up into the sky, watching as it screamed downwards towards a city filled with innocent women and children.
This thing the humans had made especially to kill their brethren…disgusting.
The explosion was like nothing I have ever seen before. A flash of light five times brighter than the surface of the sun in cooperation with a blast of 5000 plus degrees Fahrenheit blast began the carnage. It was as if Hiroshima was an orchestra, and the conductor decided to end the song early. Every person within five hundred yards was instantly whisked from this world. The ones who were closer to the bomb were the lucky ones; they didn’t suffer. Their bodies were vaporized by the extreme blast of heat and radiation. They didn’t even get to see the flash “Little Boy” produced. The further away the victims were, the more gruesome the deaths became. Some were charred as their internal organs literally boiled away. For some, the only remains left behind were the black shadows of soot that showed exactly where they had been when the blast hit, permanently imprinted into the few walls still left standing. Clothes were burned into the skin. Buildings were blown apart, leveled instantly. Men, women, and children alike perished unceasingly in this monster’s wrath. Shock waves roared through the air, furthering the extent of destruction. I severely underestimated the power of this atrocity.
When the light dimmed and the beast died, a strange silence settled over what had been Hiroshima. I couldn’t understand why everything was just so quiet. Shouldn’t there be screaming children searching for their parents? Where were the crying women who suddenly found themselves without a husband? Why weren’t there even any forlorn pets who had somehow managed to withstand the blast? The silence seemed louder than the explosion. It banged against my eardrums, pounding without a comprehensible rhythm. Even though I do not feel physical hurts, this overbearing silence could have almost been considered painful.
But then, as the victims’ souls began to shimmer into my vision, the gruesome truth hit me like a sucker punch to the kidney.
The silence was so overwhelming because there was no one, nobody, nothing left to make any sound.
I doubled over, pressing a fist to my heart and squeezed my eyes shut against the sudden wave of emotion that shuddered through me. I was in intense pain, but not bodily hurt. This was a much different kind of pain, a deep, mournful throb that shot through my heart and smarted my soul. I had never experienced a situation with so many sudden deaths on such a large scale. I had been present at all of the world’s previous battles, none of which had shown so many casualties so quickly. I never could have imagined something like this had God not warned me what was to happen. Even with the knowledge of what had been coming, nothing could have prepared me for the sheer extent of destruction presented before me.
Being the angel of death has never been the most pleasant job in the heavens, but this was just sickening.
For me to be able to harbor the earthbound souls into heaven, they must first accept their bodily death. Most of the time, their acceptance involves them seeing their lifeless body. As gruesome as that sounds, it is often necessary. I shook my head in disbelief as the souls of thousands of people wandered through the wreckage, searching for their remains. I raked my fingers back through my hair at the thought of the task presented before me.
How could I show them their remains if there were no remains left?
The black aura of impending death swelled around those who had been unfortunate enough to survive the initial blast, and I wished I could save them the horrible torment of radiation sickness. However, I knew I must first ferry the souls of the dead to the heavens before I free the living from their drawn-out deaths, for wandering the earth as a lost soul was a torture far worse than a prolonged bodily demise.
God had warned me what was to happen, prepared my mind—in a sense—for the job I was obligated to do. Where my head had known all of the statistics, my heart was left vulnerable. Swallowing back bile, I stepped up to the nearest wandering soul as a black rain began to fall. Thick, hot, and sooty, it showered even more radiation upon the poisoned land, sizzling as it hit the charred earth.
And to think, this horror, this ceaseless torture, this instant and absolute destruction would happen all over again in three days in another town filled with innocent women and children—Nagasaki. I knew I would see no respite until each victim of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” had found his or her place in God’s kingdom. And that, I knew, would take not weeks, not months, but years.
I was in for a long shift.
*--...while minimizing the amount of nuclear fallout and not creating zone that would be radioactive for centuries.
Oh yes, and all of the facts and figures are correct. ...I did this as part of a research paper over the topic. sweatdrop
