THE WARS ON TV reminded the Devil of other wars he had seen. Bigger wars. Not long ago, in Europe. He started dreaming about them, more and more.
The Devil had been a busy fellow during the Big One.
The world had needed a good convulsion, and boy, did he deliver.
He was everywhere.
On all sides, he had commanded and followed. He had crouched in the bellies of submarines. He had wooed sweethearts left behind. He had grown Victory gardens. He had watched from the London streets at night as the bombers bombed and made the great city a rubble pile. And he had ridden with Patton, and dreamed with Patton of the great conquerors and ancient times. He had stood with Patton amid ruins he remembered when they were built new. He liked Patton.
Half of the world had been smashed to rubble, and still the war wouldn’t end. It kept rolling and eating, until the only thing left to do was build a weapon as horrible as the war itself.
One final atrocity. Something they would look back on and call monstrous.
Thing was, it was going to be beautiful, too, and damned if he was going to miss it.
HE DID NOT FLY with the bomb across the sea. He did not want to meet the men who dropped it, or know their names.
On the day they dropped the bomb, he was a Japanese man on a Japanese bridge near a Japanese church by a Japanese river when the warplane appeared in the sky.
There had been one air-raid alarm already that morning, and with the all clear sounded, the people of the city were reluctant to race back inside. They were reticent. Many of them looked up at the bomber once, and did not see it anymore, or wish to.
The Devil thought perhaps he might see the device fall, see it leave the belly of the flying machine, but he didn’t, and it took him by surprise like everyone else.
A FLASH like nine Heavens.
He saw a man seated in a doorway disintegrate and fly away in a cloud of ash or vapor. He saw many such, many instant ghosts, and he saw how the light photographed them on walls, on the sides of a passing—now burning—trolley.
This was what the end of the most terrible war looked like. A sunny day left out in the sun until it brightened beyond meaning.
People were the worst of gods and the worst of animals combined.
Perhaps this kind of violence was the only message they would ever really understand. Something so terrible they would never want to see it happen again. Maybe they would be less warlike now, because they had finally become frightened of themselves.
It would be so human of them, wouldn’t it? To be thrust into goodness by something vast and evil.
Did he feel guilt? A little. Mostly he just hoped it would work, that this would be the turning point the world needed. He burned with it, black-eyed and howling, urging it on: the mighty flash, the shock wave, the firestorm, and the burning river.
Half of the city stopped and was gone. A great crowd of the dead, rising and vanishing almost politely.