Lt. “Mr.” Gorgonsen alighted from the wreckage of his exploded enemy with the lightest foot he knew, but it was no match for a disgruntled, panicked, violently confused group of American soldiers. Guns were going off everywhere. Birds were falling from the sky. He could feel something at his heels, something closing down from above.

Gasping, gagging on sand or fright, he began to strip off his clothes as he ran. He abandoned his jacket, his trousers, his underclothes, his socks, even his body armor. He ran naked through the hot strobe of the desert, terrified to his toenails, unable to stop. He dodged the falling bodies of pigeons like they were ghosts of the grenades he had thrown, aiming to take him down with the decisive blow of instant karma. He fled the thought of the dark dogs chasing behind him, cursing the footprints left in his wake, daring them to explode upon contact, no matter what contact it might be. He felt the darkness shudder and swell, threatening to swallow him forever in the mistake of a lifetime.

The crazed Lt. Mr. had no idea what he had done, only that it felt disastrous. He had no respect nor concept for intuition, but somehow he ran on in the certitude that he had done something wrong and the wrong one had died as a result. He made his escape in naked anguish, growing smaller and more frightened with each step, despite relative distance gained.

The cloud above him would not go away no matter how far from the base he got. It would not stop its roiling, horrible motion. It seemed to follow him through miles and miles of impossibly unchanging desert.

His legs hardly worked by the time he found it. A half-destroyed, smoldering shell of a car over in the ditch of something that could hardly be called a road. The front end was completely blown off and the blackened seats inside were curled to nubbins and the killing felt fresh enough to taste, but Mr. was unable to feel anything but his fear and so he went into the still-intact back side of the thing, where the remains of a trunk held some boxes of food and clothes. He hastily donned the long, traditional robes of some deceased stranger, took a carton of dates, and continued on his way, running in stagger-spurts like an open wound.

Five steps into his sprint, the skies opened to a distressing spaciousness, a lack of bird mass which defied logic and threatened the terrified man’s already-taxed sense of reality. Looking up wildly searching the sky for information, Mr. stumbled bleary-eyed toward the dubious promise of a life in exile that somehow didn’t end with a million birds of doom raining feverishly upon his head.

And then, there it was, and there they were. A dragon, soaring its numinous serpentine omen across the whites of the atmospheric eye. It roared deafening silence and breathed the fire of feathered soot. Too heavy for flight and too light for gravity.

Mr. dropped to his knees and threw up in his date container.

The dragon coiled a dark figure eight and spun back on itself in layer after nauseating layer. The dance in the sky meant many things to many people in that very moment, but to Lt. Mr. Gorgonsen, it meant one thing: the End Was Near. And, more importantly, he had started it.

There was nowhere to hide, but he would keep running until he found hiding people among whom to be anonymous.

There was no atonement, but he would continue fleeing its wrath through his every move.

There was no Apocalypse, as it turned out, but he would continue to live in it for as long as he could see.

-**