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The sun blazed in the sky, a glowing crimson disc slathering the city of Hiroshima in radiant hues of brilliant cerise and deep indigo. People were going about their everyday lives. In the streets, children ran around playing a rowdy and somewhat loud sport while their mothers watched from the shadows of the houses, torn halfway between amusement and disapproval. Men worked in the stalls and markets, selling their wares and shaping intricate pottery. These were the people that the Allied Forces had selected as a sacrifice to end the war. Defenceless innocents; pawns in a vicious game played between the great powers of the world. They went about their daily lives, completely oblivious of the horror that was coming their way.

The plane droned as it soared over the island of Honshu, containing within it the most powerful weapon known to mankind. The bomb appeared unremarkable; an ugly mass of dark steel and uranium, but it exuded a terrible aura of cruelty and destruction, and brought with it the cold stench of death. It seemed to dim the very light around it, leaving it cloaked in shadow and darkness. The pilot raised his hand and flicked a red switch on the control panel; a detached, casual motion that signalled the end for thousands of people.

Men.
Women.
Children who would never reach adulthood.
Thousands who would never again see the sun, feel the wind, hear the voices of those they loved, taste or smell another meal. In that single moment, the pilot was God, the power of life and death in his hand. As the malevolent shadow silently hurtled towards its target with cold, unnatural precision, the pilot wheeled the jet around and raced into the distance. People began to notice the sinister behemoth plummeting from the clouds and gathered in the streets of their suddenly fragile city, staring up at the bomb with dread fascination. And then, with a thunderous roar that resonated throughout the whole world, the atomic bomb exploded.

Powerful shockwaves emanated from the point of detonation; an immense pillar of blinding light erupted from the shattered remnants of the steel casing, crowned with a radioactive cloud of pitch black. A lethal rain of metal splinters and searing particles of vaporized steel cascaded from the sky; buildings collapsed where they stood, ripped apart as if they were no more than paper. Waves of fire rippled out in concentric bands from the city centre, burning all in their path to ashes. Great fissures opened up in the ground, the earth cracking under the relentless onslaught of the reverberations shaking the ground. The wind began to roar with deafening volume, overriding the screams of terror that racked the city. The river vanished in an instant, becoming a wisp of vapour that was whipped away by the howling wind. People tried to run from the inferno but were consumed by its inexorable rage. Others were brought down by falling ruins of broken stone or speared by fractured glass. The flames did not distinguish between rich or poor, young or elderly; if someone stood before the fire their flesh was stripped away by the searing heat, their bones disintegrated and their memories instantaneously dissipated as they were claimed by death. Nearby, ancient mountains shook, the very bones of the Earth threatening to crumble in the face of the devastating power that ravaged Hiroshima. And when it seemed the earth would be rent in two and the sky would be torn asunder, the anarchic maelstrom of chaos ceased and the destructive flames extinguished themselves as if they lacked victims and were forced to devour their own essence. The dark cloud of radioactive fury growled as it descended on the city.

***
Hiroshima was rendered a barren, irradiated wasteland of scorched red earth that embodied the true horror of war. Piles of rubble littered the desolate landscape, wreathed in smoke and with the dying embers of great fires smouldering in their shadowed depths. By the river bank, a single concrete building stood, the metallic skeleton of its domed roof open to the elements; a solitary gravestone marking a vast necropolis; a desecrated wilderness that had minutes before been a city bustling with life and colour was now a grim memorial to the thousands that had died, a testament to the devastating power of the nuclear bomb. An acrid stench of molten steel and burnt flesh hung over the city, polluting the air. Here and there, bloodstained survivors scarred with horrific burns crawled painfully out of the buildings into the bleak and tainted land; all that was left of their home. They were not yet dead; but to live was a punishment, for they would be forced to endure the torture of seeing all they had ever known and loved crumble into ruin. They would be choked and burned by the radiation that poisoned the air and seeped into their lungs. And they would lie there in excruciating pain until the Reaper drew the last vestiges of life from their broken bodies and they could at last embrace the sweetness of death.