Flash Mob
an excerpt

Oh God—the father thought, but he did not have time to finish it.

5:16.

There was a white-hot flash, and this was the last thing the father and the hot dog vendor and thousands of others saw. The last thing the boy saw was the ketchup stain on his father’s tee-shirt, and the last thing he smelled was his father’s sweat and the ghost of his aftershave.

As thousands of people were swallowed by the nuclear sun that birthed on Turner Field, the boy’s mother was still in the arms of her lover in Savannah. She did not love him, but she knew her husband knew about him, just as she knew about his secretary, and this brought her a savage satisfaction.

All of the other people in Atlanta were still doing exactly the same thing they had been doing before World War III started for the United States of America.
They kept up until the aftershock hit, and the ones that survived would remember what it was they were doing when the sideways rain of fire came. A few, distanced from Atlanta and Turner Field, would lift their heads to the east and listen, as if they had heard a faraway cry.

The boy never knew what would happen in the war, or about who survived and who did not, or even who was responsible. For the boy, it did not matter. He had lived his short life knowing very little about how the world worked, and he knew even less about the people in it. He did not know about his mother’s triumphant affair or his father’s shame. He did not know the hot dog vendor’s desperation.

He died not knowing these things.

In the end, the boy would lose his name and become one of the anonymous dead, a statistic, fallout preventing any kind of personal identification. Turner
Field began as a stadium and ended as a tomb.

And after October 23rd, 2078, there would be no more World Series, not for the Braves, not for the Mets, not for anyone, not ever again.