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block away.
    With them were unfamiliar faces. A couple in their late twenties with two
young kids in tow followed them in, along with a man in his mid-thirties who
was clutching his baseball cap in his hands and wringing it with nervous
agitation.
    ‘Welcome, welcome,’ said the Reverend, donning a thin smile and
straightening, the shards he’d collected up scraping to the back of the dustpan
as he did so.
    The group were all staring at my sandwich board as I stood between the
pews with the broom in my hands. The man with the cap stared at the words a
moment and then vomited into his headgear.
    ‘The end isn’t nigh, it’s here,’ commented John darkly.
    ‘And now,’ added Fran with a sigh.
    ‘Do you know what’s happened?’ asked Peters.
    The couple nodded, the gesture limited by their chins.
    ‘Nuclear war,’ stated John.
    Peters stared at him in shock. ‘Nuclear war,’ he repeated in a whispered
horror.
    ‘The TV carried a report.’
    ‘Before the electricity went out,’ said Fran.
    ‘The electricity is down?’ asked Peters, adopting his common habit of
repeating what others said.
    She gave a nod of confirmation. ‘There’s nothing on the radio either,
apart from static, that is.’
    The smell of bile wafted to me from the baseball cap as I stood watching.
I was filled with a growing sense of power. For years I’d wandered the streets,
looked down upon by everyone, seen as unhinged and avoided where possible. I
knew the Reverend had only taken me under his wing out of pity, but now my time
had come. The words on my sign had borne fruit, as I always knew they would.
    ‘Why are you smiling?’ asked the little girl who was clinging onto her
mother’s hand as she studied me.
    Everyone turned.
    ‘God is speaking to me,’ I said.
    Her brow furrowed and she glanced around the interior of the church. ‘I
can’t hear Him.’
    ‘No, but you can see what He’s done,’ I replied, glancing to the empty
window frames to my left.
    ‘That was the bomb,’ stated the girl’s brother, a few years older and in his
early teens.
    ‘And who do you think is responsible for sending it?’
    ‘The Russians or the Chinese,’ he replied.
    I shook my head. ‘No, it’s God.’
    Peters frown at me before looking back to the group. ‘Don’t worry, son,’
he said, the boy looking fearful and confused, ‘God had no hand in this. It’s
all our own doing.’
    ‘It could have been the North Koreans,’ said John.
    ‘They’ve have itchy button fingers for a while now,’ added Fran.
    ‘Didn’t the news report say anything?’ asked the Reverend.
    ‘Just that we were under attack,’ said the father of the children, his
face angular and clean shaven.
    ‘Someone must have started it.’
    A silence drew in and a few glances were exchanged.
    The church door opened and Old Bud Turney limped in, his bunions acting
up again. He scratched at his grizzled beard as he wandered up behind the
others, wincing and inhaling between his teeth sharply every time he put weight
on his left foot.
    ‘Where are your crutches, Bud?’ asked John.
    ‘I don’t need them things. I’m perfectly capable of walking without
them,’ he said defensively as he came to a halt. ‘I see the windows blew out
then.’
    Peters nodded. ‘But you’re all still very welcome.’
    The doors opened again and a group of around ten people entered, not a
face amongst them that I recognised. My smile grew. I knew that no matter how
hard they prayed, their pleas would go unanswered. The end had truly come at
last.
    Within an hour the sun was gone, choked by an expanding cloud of fumes
and dust that churned in the sky above Yonkers. Within two hours the church was
packed with people, all the space on the pews taken and many reduced to sitting
along the edge of the aisle or at the back. There were plenty of bowed heads
and the whispers of numerous prayers were woven into the background murmur of
chatter as people conversed with each other and looked