It’s the day after the bomb went off, and the walking wounded have stopped coming in.

“I count three twenty two, doc,” says Sean, this guy who’s been helping out. The afternoon sun gray on his gaunt face. Still in his pinstriped rep league softball uniform, grimy and stained. Wolverines scrawled across his chest in flowing red script.

“Naw, naw,” says Larraby. “Gotta be more ‘n that. Comin’ in all night, right? Right doc?”

“I don’t know,” I tell them.

All night and well into the morning. The oozing trickle of haggard refugees along the arterial roads. Flayed by the three-thousand degree flash. Tattered skins hanging in capes the colour of overcooked bacon. Or macerated by flying glass. Pulped by blunt-force trauma. The ones with eyes hanging out on yellow stalks, drooping on their cheeks like wilting peony buds. Lurching with their heads tilted way back so they could still see. As if frozen in the act of craning their necks up at the towering cloud.

Or worse, clutching their abdomens. The shock wave, how it reached inside the body. Not an outward mark, but organs pummeled, twisted.

Moaning, always moaning. A hoarse Gregorian chant, dozens, hundreds of them shuffling, coated in the blood-caked dust.

They’ve stopped coming because they’re dead.

A bunch of us waited to receive them in the BlockBuster plaza parking lot. Arranged them in orderly files, under my direction. One patient per parking space. Heads to heads, feet to feet. Patients, that’s how we started referring to them. Dribbling Gatorade in their blistered mouths. Bottled water, Sprite. Answering their whispered pleas with whispered lies. Rescue’s coming. Alright now, alright. Rolled up jackets under their heat-scaled heads. Red-black lizards hissing their last.

Row upon row. Gently interred by tufts of ash drifting down. The fires all around,  confining us here.

Sean keeps singing Casey Jones. Or Truckin’. In time with the languid dry shuffle of his cleats on the dirty asphalt.

“Grateful Dead,” says Larraby. Scratching his bare chest, blurry do-it-yourself tattoos rippling over washboard ribs.

“Some of these folks,” I croak. “I’d be grateful.” We’re trudging between still rows of them. Still except for the breeze struggling through their hair, smelling of burnt metal.

“Damn straight,” Larraby agrees. “Shock wave hits you so hard, your belly opens up like a zipper, man.” Taut wire in his voice, ready to snap.

This young man, maybe thirty, maybe six feet tall, no more than a hundred and thirty pounds. Obsessed by the shock wave. His wiry limbs jerk as he scuttles along, as if the blast still ricochets around the inside his skull.

“What are we?” he asks. “T plus eighteen hours?”

“Nope,” says Sean. “Way more, dude. Been two sunsets, two sunrises.”

“It happened yesterday,” I say.

“Doc’s nine-by-nine,” says Larraby.

Larraby, who I didn’t know yesterday. With whom I’ve shared shocking intimacies. Scuffed workboots, jeans, ratty mullet. Who speaks like an astronaut on comlink with Houston control. I saw him strip off his shirt, bundle it under the head of a woman without a face. Seems a hundred years ago.

“Been two days,” Sean insists.

“I’m telling you, it’s only been one sunset, then sunrise this morning.” I watch Sean bend his head to light a cigarette. Bloody lip prints on the butt.

“Okay, doc, okay,” he sighs, clearly unconvinced.

“Check your watch, why don’t ya?” Larraby quips.

We snicker. Us, and a bunch of others perched along the curb under the sign. Four Corners Plaza, it says, steel skeleton squealing in the hot wind. Our snickers swelling to laughter. Laughing more than we should.

Call it post-traumatic humour. Every watch bought it in the explosion. Too finicky for the hard-scrabble realities of nuclear warfare.

All of us, blind to time. The bomb obliterated the fourth dimension. Cars, computers, radios, iPods. Anything digital, anything linking our twenty-first century minds with what we’d thought of as reality. Toasted.

One day, two. Might was well be one or two centuries. Honest with myself, I’m not exactly sure it happened yesterday. This morning’s sunrise my only reference. But I cling to my belief, digging in my fingernails.

That’s right, yes. Last night. I walked out to pick up a DVD. Walked here. Time to kill, I told my dog. Can’t even recall his name. Bichon frise, that tidbit I retain. I know I’m in shock. Know it, but it does nothing to unlock my brain.

The plaza squats atop a long sloping hill. From here, I can see what’s left of my neighbourhood. Smoldering charred heaps. Far to the south, the city smothered under a black smoky shroud.

“So exhausted,” I mutter, sinking to the brown grass verge beyond the curb. All night on the gritty pavement, unyielding aches have crawled up my limbs into my chalky mouth.

“You done good, doc. Real good.” I don’t even know this one’s name. A long-haired headbanger with lots of silver jewellery and facial piercings.

Sean hawks up some snot, spits out a glistening lump of clotted blood.

“Uh-oh,” Larraby groans.

Sean only shrugs. As if Larraby just told him his softball game has been cancelled. Held off on account of fallout. “Bummer,” he chuckles, joining in with Larraby’s twittering laugh.

Soon we’re all laughing again. Real jocularity too, none of the maniacal tears you see in disaster movies.

I crawl over to Sean, tell him to open up. Press my thumbs into the corners of his mouth, stretching it into a crooked grimace. Smoke drifts out. His gums are bleeding, staining his teeth like he’s been sucking on cinnamon hearts.

“Hopeless, doc?” he asks as I retreat. Can’t be more than twenty-five, he looks like he’s seen the ass-end of sixty.

“Nothing’s hopeless,” I say, but he catches my drift. Forty-eight hours at the outside, he’ll be incapacitated by internal bleeding. Connective tissues dissolving.

All around us, invisible, odourless, the poison drifts down. A Medieval plague caressing our bodies. We are too callous to respond with sensation.

The headbanger kid stretches his ropey arms, making devil’s forks, thrashing his blonde hair. “Electric funeral!” A screeching tremolo. “Electric funeral!”

I realize this is what passes for singing. “Enough to wake the dead.” And finally, I’ve crossed a line. A few sniffles and the laughter ceases.

Pillowed humidity, the bright overcast of late August. The desultory tinnitus of crickets.

Stretched out over two acres, our patients displayed like pinned insects.

I lie back on the dry grass, squinting into the white sky. Thinking of my sister, remembering the dissembling birthday message she left on my answering machine. What, four days ago? A week? First I’d heard from Rose in years. “Hey Josh, um, it’s Rose! Bet you didn’t expect me to call. Well, surprise. Was gonna send flowers. . . but hell.”

A crow wheels down, an animated flake of soot. Born in fire, even its squawks burns hot.

Nothing is real. Nothing but gravity gripping my bones hard to the soil.

“Hey!” somebody screams. “Get! Get away from her!”

The crow leaps up, snickering. Knowing it will return for seconds.

“Um. . .” Rose breathes in my ear, and I actually turn my head. Her face contoured to the sole of Larraby’s boot. “Call me, Josh. Call.”

Larraby and Sean join  together in a dreadfully off-key version of Sugar Magnolia. It breaks down when they run out of lyrics.

“That crack, man, the crack,” Larraby gushes. Back to the shock wave. Needing to fill the quiet. “Twenty clicks away – I mean twenty minimum, right? Still knocked me on my ass.”

My guess, it went off somewhere between here and downtown. The distance that spared us for the aftermath. Automatically, my tongue probes the crevasses of my lower teeth. Waiting for that warm, coppery flavour.

“Huge bat breaking,” says Sean. “That’s what it sounded like.”

“Thunder,” says a woman in her twenties with lanky blonde hair. Before the translucent blisters, she’d done her best to look like Britney Spears.

“A snap,” I suggest. “Like. . .”

Like the iron scourge of God, I think. Exactly like that.

“Hold on, hold on,” says Sean, waving his bloody cigarette. “The cloud went up first.”

“How could the cloud even exist before the blast?” Larraby scrubs his nose. “I mean, c’mon!”

“Sound’s slower than light. Right? Right doc?”

Brilliant violet radiance silently filled the sky, blotted out the clouds. I saw my shadow flicker, stretch like a dark muscle over the sidewalk. Lightning, I thought. Just for a second.

The screams of those facing the explosion. Eyes seared by arc light.

I turned to see the fireball. Less a mushroom than a blinding orchid. Rolling, gesturing. Hideously alive, reaching for me. Then pulling away in horror, ploughing into the stratosphere. A scorching blast rumbling through the earth. Drilling into my chest.

“It’s okay,” the lanky-haired woman croaks. “There’s no radiation, eh? Wasn’t no nuke. Wasn’t no flash.”

“Piss off,” Larraby scoffs. “I saw the flash.”

“Me too,” somebody else says.

Sean keeps quiet. His hollow face, weighing the truth of it. Working to convince himself the woman is right.

“You’re daft,” I snap. “In denial.” I don’t even know if I’m excoriating the woman or Sean.

“No need to be nasty,” says the woman.

“Nasty!” Larraby snorts. “Let’s be real, baby.”

“Ain’t no baby!” the woman shouts. “Ain’t your baby neither!”

Then I realize – the gaping eyes I took for vapid. She was one of the ones facing it. She’ll face it forever. That thought seems very funny to me. This woman, posed for eternity against the shadowless atomic glare.

Now I hear the rumble of diesel engines.

People out near the road are getting to their feet. Pointing. A few waves.

“No.” Sean’s mouth is a red wet smear. He rolls over onto his hands and knees, collapses.

This is Sean’s best attempt to stand. Rasping laughter escapes me.

Trucks are pulling up all along the road. Khaki ones, canvas-backs. The meaty smell of diesel exhaust, so similar to that of burned skin.

Larraby is laughing too. Squinting, baring his teeth. Even pointing.

“Ya bastards,” Sean burbles, but he’s in on it too. Body heaving.

Figures hopping down from the trucks, spreading across the parking lot. Dozens of them, shouting. A distant pop of gunfire.

Soldiers with guns in green radiation suits and breath-fogged gas masks.

I see their erect fingers on the trigger guards.

They are among us now, rousing us to our feet.

A gleaming mask tight against my cheekbone, the features behind the misty glass atomized. Inches from me, but screaming.

“You’re safe, you’re safe! We’re here to take you out!”

Steel knuckles in rubbery gloves pinching under my armpits, hauling me up.

Larraby’s belly laugh, a grimace of pain.

Two soldiers drag off Sean in a swirl of dust.

“Doc,” Larraby chokes. He’s got one on each arm, hoisting him like a sack of concrete. “Doc, what’s on the way?”

A soldier levels his gun at my head. “You a doctor?”

“Where are you taking him?” I point into the cloud of dust that swallowed Sean.

“Stand tall, brother!” Larraby screams, toes of his work boots furrowing the dirt under the sign that says Four Corners Plaza.

“We got hunnerts of wounded,” the soldier is shouting in my face. “Few clicks north.”

Trapped in my mind, that image of Sean teetering, on his knees. A shadow scorched into concrete.

I need to catch my breath, to inhale.

“He laughing?” shouts another soldier.

“Not a doctor,” I wheeze. “Just a florist.”

“Fuckin’ dentist’s better than nothing,” barks my captor.

Oh, no. Oh, my lord.

Another soldier takes my legs.

“Them?” I manage to say. Our patients. Our specimens.

“Can’t do nothing for them, doc.”

Already calling me by that name.

Pasted on by the ambulatory dead.

The soldier’s respiration, panicky in my ear.

I don’t know what all the fuss is about. Hilarity gallops through my chest.

I can’t breathe.

Joe Macchiusi won 3rd place in the Adult Short Story Contest from the Words Alive Literary Festival.  He won two hours with a professional editor, Carol Carter from Beyond Spellcheck, publication in the Pen & Pixel and Words Alive web sites.