Earthquakes and Heartbreaks: ARMAGEDDON OUT OF HERE

Driving through the desert of New Mexico towards White Sands Missile Base I fell asleep. Without her co-pilot, Natalie missed the warning signs. I imagine they were quite obvious since they were kind of important… I don’t understand how in some ways she’s so very bright and alert and in other ways so dumb. Not only had we driven on to private property, we were trespassing on Military land…. on testing day. Whatever that meant. Bizarrely there were no other vehicles on the road, not even dark green military jeeps we had become accustomed to. No people, no roadside wildlife, not even a bird, just a solitary Lockheed SR-71 Stealth Bomber silently patrolling the skies Oh well, at least I might get see the intergalactic prisoners the Government holds there.

I was woken up by the sounds of sirens, not the police helicopter kind, more the ones we’ve heard from World War Two footage of Von Braun’s V2 doodlebug rockets landing on the east end of London. This was weird, why were sirens sounding in the middle of the desert? Crossing a sign pointing us toward the world’s first atomic bomb site, I quickly realised what was going down. We were going down, soon to be engulfed by an annihilating, million degree Fahrenheit ball of atomic energy. From many miles away, an authoritative male voice instructed us via a tannoy that the we had ninety seconds to reach the safe distance from the blast. 25 miles away.

The testing day they warned us of meant nuclear testing day…

Frantically, blankly looking at the map, we were only an estimated 18 miles from where I decided the epicentre would be.

“Drive!” I screamed to Nat. Behind us a car appeared also trying to escape the blast. We both had seven miles to cover in about 75 seconds. I don’t wanna be enveloped by a miniature, man-made star. The one thing in our favour was that if Indiana Jones survived this in a refrigerator, our home was essentially one giant baked bean can.

After just four miles the countdown from ten to our Armageddon began, nine short seconds later the fireball lit up our rear view mirrors.

We were still three miles within the blast zone. At zero I turned to Nat, “If we’re going to burn alive, I best tell you I love you”. She smiled and said “The only thing burning round here is rubber!” She had seen the brow of a hill and put her foot flat to the floor, our RV was doing over a hundred miles an hour when the white flash of absolute energy blinded us.

Then darkness, as if all the light and matter in the universe had been consumed by a New Mexican black hole.

Like a glow-in-the-dark lollipop, the giant yellow explosion turned the cyan sky behind us to navy blue I’ve never wanted to be so very far away from something so intensely beautiful. The atomic fireball was approaching fast; catching us up. I swear I could see an evil grin on it’s flammable face as it prepared to overtake our vehicle and devour our souls.

Motor parts were falling off O.P. as we bumped along the road. There goes our exhaust pipe, a second later it was a mangled mess of liquid metal, like Robert Patrick’s T1000 Terminator merged with the road. It was hotter than a whole jar of Colman’s English Mustard
Our back end was on fire, the opposite of Apollo 11 re-entering earth’s atmosphere. The back window smashed. Still in pitch darkness, Natalie careened us over a small ditch/cliff as a halo of fire entered the back window of our home. It set light to our cabin roof and then like fairy dust, it was gone.

We landed on our side, our home still on fire and skidded along the sand until we silently stopped. Optimus Prime was a little scorched and blackened on the outside but now we know he’s immune to nuclear blasts and radioactivity as well as zombies.

But that’s a whole other story…

Later that night, camped up we realised that O.P. isn’t as hermetically sealed as we thought. Some radioactivity had seeped in and scrambled our DNA, giving us mutant powers. Cool! We possessed superhero abilities. According to Nat, my two are the ability to not come in any human amount of time and making my head burst into flames like Ghost Rider...