MAD Men
by Corey Ethan Sutch
"Gosh, well this is awkward."
Alan slowly moved his index finger away from the red button below him, his forehead glistening slightly from a cool sweat. The button of the NanoNuke box gleamed in the sunlight, as smooth and shiny as candy, it was simply begging to be pushed. He resisted this time. His neighbor tentatively did the same, not without squinting to make sure Alan had already surrendered. Their game of chicken ended in forfeit, for now at least.
"Okay, you got me!" Jim shouted over. "You always know I wouldn't really do it, you old fool!"
Alan laughed back, the tone transformed at once from cool hostility to one wholly more friendly. It was now most neighborly.
"I'll tell you Jim, I really thought you were going to this time, I really did!"
"I thought I might too! Just at the end there, I thought you would press it before I was ready.... I let you have it, really! Oh the guys will just love this one! I'll be seeing you at the bar later, yeah?"
"You know it!"
Jerry watched the whole thing below from the pavement in front of the two houses, staring up in confused wonder, his eyes wide and his mouth ajar. All that ran through his mind was here are two adults who are more than willing to blow each other off the face of the Earth, and in a very short space of time, turn each others homes and families into nicely formed craters and ash, out of place in every locale, save for a moon. They didn't actually press the button this time, though. They never did. At least, not yet anyway.
Small mushroom clouds were not a particularly uncommon sight around the increasingly smaller suburban village of Opahi, and special rules permitted the residents to always have one NanoNuke in their possession, for the sake of protection of course. With mutually assured destruction, having a personal atomic weapon kept things a little bit more peaceful somehow, and just a little bit calmer as well. Disputes actually resolved themselves very quickly. Of course, if they didn't, one of the parties in the said dispute wasn't exactly around anymore to continue it.
