Koyannisqatsi. World out of balance the Hopi's had termed it. Now the cycle seemed to be coming in full circle for if ever the world was being thrown out of balance it was now. Not only the outside world but also my world. I put my booted feet up on the rail running around the front porch, my legs clad in faded denim jeans, a sheepskin coat buckled to the neck. My breath came in jagged bursts of steamy clouds in the frigid air, the hot cup of coffee gripped in my fist barely warming the skin holding it in the almost zero temperature.

Out along the fence line several shaggy coated horses snorted white clouds of horsy breath at each other, suddenly breaking into a frantic bucking and kicking to show their distain of the bone chilling cold they were forced to endure. Further out cattle nosed the snow-covered ground for the last scrap of hay tossed out the day before.

How many days had gone by, how many weeks since that inferno in the desert had consumed the others and me? It came back like a bad dream, the scorching heat and sound and then the shock wave, the little mosquito hawk of a helicopter being barely flown as it was. Flown by a guy with less than a hundred hours in an entirely different sort of helicopter trying to muscle the little bird from falling from the sky. Tony Baseball did a great job, managing to crash land in a dry lakebed near a bunch of trailers housing a batch of legalized prostitutes of Nevada.

The girls came flying across the desert sand, already spilled out of their love shacks by the terrifying blast on the horizon. They wore the weirdest assortment of nightwear I could ever remember seeing. We were pulled from the wreckage by the arms and legs, our skin bruised, burnt and broken. Luckily none too serious, the Persian princess had what appeared to be a broken arm and Jilly had a badly sprained knee but the Cajun kid came out without a scrap. They stood in the predawn morning watching a new sunrise out of what had once been Las Vegas, the desert returned to a prehistoric vista of scorched earth and sand.

It was not until later I found out the full extinct of the terribly blast in the desert. Almost eighty percent of the population killed or wounded, over seventy thousand visitors also killed or maimed. The stock market took a nosedive, gambling stocks wiped out with the loss of some of the worlds largest casinos. Recession had set in within months, the tourist industry rapidly grinding to a halt, flights going only one quarter filled to resort destinations.

The story went on and on, the doom and gloom sayers all screaming, "I told you so," like they knew for sure exactly what was about to happen. Flip a coin in the air and on each toss claim "Heads," you are bound to win sooner or later. Sure it was probably inevitable someone or something would manage to detonate a low yield atomic weapon near or in a major population center sooner or later. That didn't take a rocket scientist to predict but the awful fallout both physically and mentally on a shell-shocked population was a new level of horror. ......(cont)