Jimmie wondered what to do. He talked with his friends Woody and Gus and, tired of the doom and gloom news, the increasingly belligerent threats from China, North Korea, and Russia aimed at any country daring to speak up about those countries’ international crimes, the three young men drove up to Cape Flattery for the long weekend. They caught and ate a few fish, drank up most of the ample supply of beer they brought, replaced the alternator belt on Jimmie’s pickup, plugged Woody’s twelve-volt pump into Jimmie’s cigar lighter and inflated Gus’s spare tire, which he had forgotten to do before leaving home. They also enjoyed being away from the noise and commotion of the city.
By Monday, the boys’ enthusiasm for preparing their own meals and swatting mosquitoes began to flag. That, coupled with the dwindling supply of beer and the need for two of them to get to work early the next morning, launched the trio on the not-quite-five-hour drive home. Four hours later, they passed Port Douglas and continued down the coast toward their homes a little above the speed limit on the busier and more heavily-policed road.
The three vehicles had just reached Wangetti with Woody in the lead, when all saw a bright flash in the sky in front of them, as if the air itself were on fire, and Woody braked hard. He managed to stop on the narrow shoulder, and the other two stopped behind him. All three climbed out of their pickups and gathered on the passenger side at Woody’s rear bumper.
“What was that?” Gus asked.
“I don’t know,” Woody replied, “but it was so bright that everything else looks dark.”
“Will you be OK to drive?” Jimmie asked.
A loud “Boom!” and a gust of wind almost strong enough to knock them down delayed Woody’s response. “I think so. It’s prob’ly like somebody shining a flashlight in your face on a dark night. I can already see better than I could a minute ago, but…ummmm…do we want to go where that was?”
“We won’t know until we get there,” Gus offered.
Jimmie suggested, “Let’s leave two pickups at Clifton and take one up to the lookout. We can see the city from there.”
Woody said, “We might not be able to get to the range road or Smithfield at all.”
The other two nodded and grunted their agreement, and Jimmie added, “We’ll just have to see.”
A brief discussion, including a short argument over whose pickup could get the three to the lookout fastest, led to the trio doing as Jimmie suggested and in his pickup, “because my dad’s binoculars are already in my pickup.”
The three did reach the lookout. Although they could not have known about the thermobaric weapons used, all saw the results: from the mudflats to the rainforest-covered hills, the entire city looked like a sea of flames.
Gus expressed everyone’s thoughts: “None of us is goin’ to work today.”
Grey Sparrow Journal 