The other day my son threw a snowball at me.
It missed me, but hit an old man in the chest. Apparently, the surprise and the sudden freezing cold spot on his chest caused a heart attack. As the old man keeled over, he stumbled into a woman pushing a baby stroller. She lost control of the stroller, and it careened into a busy street. As a city bus bore down on the helpless babe, the driver noticed the stroller in the road and swerved to miss it. The bus cut across traffic, scattering smaller cars left and right and crushing pedestrians - and a small dog - until it finally smashed into the trailer of a semi rig hauling gasoline. The load burst into flames and the trailer exploded into a huge orange fireball that consumed the passengers of the bus. Several of them ran, stumbling, from the site of the explosion, their bodies burning like torches, screaming in pain. The flames spread to a nearby sewage processing plant, where the sewer gases were ignited. At that point, flames spread outward from the plant and engulfed several city blocks. Fire raced through the city sewer system, blasting out through toilets and firing manhole covers skyward with great force. As buildings went up in flames, people began to leap from windows and roofs to avoid a horrible death by fire. The streets began to buckle from the excessive heat, and gas mains began to burst. Explosions flared up all across the city, and more and more neighborhoods went up in flames. When the conflagration reached the local toxic chemical storage facility, various plastics, solvents, and industrial waste products began to burn. Lung-searing, poisonous, and radioactive clouds of smoke billowed up from the facility and spread out over the area. Then the fire tore through the local biological weapons research lab, releasing unknown quantities of exotic, engineered flesh-eating bacteria and nerve agents into the air. The combination of heat, chemical waste, and bioengineered agents caused the dead bodies in the cemetery to rise up and rampage through the city, devouring people's brains. By that time, the problem had caught the attention of the federal authorities. To prevent the entire State from certain destruction, the President reluctantly issued the order to snuff out the raging fire once and for all. A squadron of F-117A Nighthawk fighter-bombers was scrambled and sent to our town to terminate the problem. Two medium-yield thermonuclear weapons were released and detonated over the town. The fire was suppressed and the toxic cloud vaporized.
Hands in pockets and whistling nonchalantly, my son and I strolled casually away as if we hadn't seen anything. Once we were a couple of blocks away and the coast was clear, we ran the rest of the way home.
Whew.
