The Observer: Seeing / The Observer (ePub)

The flash of nuclear light blinded a billion people, but for Dennis it blinded something deeper, more personal, a conflict between duty and family.

His childhood had been forged from wartime commands by a father who had himself lost his soul in Germany. The cruelty of injury had led Dennis to a more placid life than the hoped form military existence. Yet deep down he craved to serve, in whatever way he could. Thus, as the seventies drew to a close, he had joined the Royal Observer Corp.

It was an organisation as British as it sounded and with a purpose so naïve, so stupid even, it epitomised the futility of cold war madness. We had to protect, we had to survive, as the pamphlet said. And Dennis was determined to help achieve that.

And so the sirens came, and the missiles fell across the entire world, blanketing his country in fallout and grief. Dennis and his corp friends however had sat out the war in their concrete bunker hidden in the green English countryside. They had done their duty, watching the bombs explode and reporting the details to a headquarters which itself had wintered and failed in quick succession.

In a handful of hours, duty ceased and in the ashes of its existence Dennis saw the idiocrasy of it. Around him his friends had died or deserted, leaving him the sole survivor, waiting for the fallout to subside and to be able to emerge.

And as that day approached, with the radiation dropping, his attention turned to his family, surely still alive and covering in their quint village, awaiting their hero's return.

He had watched the war, now it was time to see the aftermath.