The music played on. For almost a day, while the batteries lasted, the fallen CD player spun, the faintly cheerful sound of early 21st century pop music seeping out the dropped headphones. Even that too fell silent, as everything around it had. The only sounds left now were the rustling of a sheet of newsprint skittering across the street and, in the distance, the sound of a stalled car engine as it slowly burned it’s remaining fuel before also going silent.
Theirs was the first bomb to fall. Even while international tensions had escalated, no government believed that it would come to this. Chemical weapons were just too horrific, too dangerous. The threat of mutually assured destruction was simply too great for any political leader to want to even consider it. But when the first bomb hit Greenwood, Delaware, just short of its DC target, this unthinkable nightmare became a reality.
The country, for all its technical sophistication, could only give the county police five minutes warning. They acted as quickly as they could, but five minutes could do nothing for Greenwood, population 648. It did nothing for the mother watching her children in the playground; nothing for the supermarket clerk counting out change; nothing for the young girl sliding the new Britney Spears CD into her CD player. Even the birds fell as they sang. The toxin was well designed and merciful. As the light breeze carried it through the streets, people simply fell where they were standing. The pain, if any, was shortlived. For the few on the outskirts of town, cowering in their basements and cars, death came within minutes as it seeped slowing in through ventilation systems and window cracks. The silence enveloped them too.
A gentle rain began to fall. In the center of the park green, there stood a statue of the founder. Riding gallantly into town on a bronze steed, he now surveyed a field of sightless eyes and motionless bodies. In the dead quiet, it almost looked like he was crying as he sat in the rain.