A Short Story by Greg Stone
© 2026 Greg Stone. All Rights Reserved.
Wilson Latrell, new media journalist, loved nostalgia. The past held sweet flavors to be savored, he mused, as he circled the stone courthouse that anchored the town square. For over one-hundred-and-fifty-years, justice dispensed within the court’s halls served as the guardrails of society. All was good, as God intended, he kidded himself.
Things were not good. Wilson was troubled. Obsessed. He had experienced a mental collapse. His decline had begun when a friend suggested he read the Bible: The Book of Revelation. The prophecy was terrifying. No doubt. But, with its angels and beasts, lampstands, seals and thrones, with its creatures and plagues, Revelation resembled fantasy too much to truly impinge on Wilson’s mind. It did not keep him up at night.
Yet, Revelation was disturbing. The dying. The blood. The suffering. The wrath. The horseman that robbed peace from the earth and made people kill one another. And the other horseman that killed by the sword, famine, and plague. Terrible ideas. Yet they were not enough to have collapsed Wilson’s mind. But he had made a mistake. He had allowed macabre curiosity to take over. Was an Armageddon remotely possible? Was the threat of nuclear war real? Could life on planet Earth be annihilated?
It was the YouTube videos that had crushed his mental health. He had watched as one expert explained, “China’s five megaton H-bomb is three-hundred-times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. That’s if they send only one warhead per missile.” Wilson’s mental health had been further damaged when the expert informed viewers that a nuclear clash between Russia and the U.S. would last a short forty-eight minutes. End-of-the-world Armageddon completed in less than an hour. The long-term results were dire. “Radioactive isotopes raining down on the planet will render Earth inhospitable for a very long time, for eons,” the expert had assured Wilson and the rest of her audience.
The expert’s recitation of facts regarding the blast radii of various devices and her explanation of the difference between fission-versus-fusion weapons had blurred into a dark night of terror. Wilson’s collapse was complete when he had pondered the common assumption: world leaders were sufficiently sane to avoid suicidal nuclear tomfoolery. But that assumption had morphed into dread when he had realized Pakistan possessed a nuke arsenal. Pakistan!
As the sun rose above the square, Wilson vowed to be honest with himself. There was a time when he had considered himself healthy, sane, logical. But now something was broken. This was not a short-lived case of PTSD. He did not suffer from garden variety mental illness. Rather, something buried unimaginably deep behind ancient walls in his psyche had been set loose. His collapse was more, much more, than mere obsession. Something terrible, something that he could not shake, had driven him, this morning, to take part in a bizarre rendezvous. Now he had doubts. Was he a fool for entertaining dire apocalyptic thoughts? Should he abandon the ill-advised plan on which he was about to embark? It was too late…
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