The Cold Embrace

The Cold Embrace

The night in the city was going to be especially cold tonight. The sky had been overcast for almost the entire day, leading to a brief although torrential downpour in the mid-afternoon. The streets of the Bronx outside the third-story apartment window that Leonard Jefferson Bennings now looked out were saturated from the July rainstorm and shone with a glimmer he remembered seeing from his bedroom window in Massachusetts many years ago. He wondered if he would ever get to see his childhood home again, and, if he did, would the world of his youth still exist even there? Like the final beams of sunlight of the day, his hope was growing faint as he looked out on what had once been the metropolitan heart of his country.

Leonard turned away from the window, looking back into his temporary residence. It was a simple apartment, three rooms, furnished with trappings of a world that now existed only in memory. Strewn about the living room were such memorabilia as a 1946 Bing Crosby Christmas album, a chess set that looked to be a family heirloom, an assortment of furniture and coffee tables, and a 1939 globe, showing the way the world had looked in simpler times. Leonard could easily identify each country on the globe, a skill greatly useful to a high school geography teacher, and could just as easily identify how few of those countries still existed. South America was still correct north of Brazil, and most of North America was still as the sphere portrayed it. Europe, Asia, and Africa, however, would require the globe to be completely redone. Leonard had studied the globe many times in his short stay in this house, and it never failed to bring him almost to tears.

From the couch on the wall far...

... middle of paper ...

...ump. And then, the infinite fall, broken only by the cold embrace of the Atlantic.

Nineteen minutes since they had left the ammunition room. Leonard floated alone in the water. The other sister had been hit in the shoulder during the jump and had sunk when she hit the water. He was sure he had heard a small explosion on the deck as he fell; Christina was dead, as was everyone else by now. Leonard would join them soon. He could do little more than float with the wound in his side. If the explosion happened, he would be too close to escape. If it didn't, he would drown when he got too tired to float. He looked up at the ship one last time. As he did, a pillar of fire erupted out of it. In the light it cast, he could see the sky had cleared. The morning would have sunlight. He took one last, gasping breath, and sank beneath the waves forever.