This is the Way the World Ends by James Morrow

drilling his bowels. It hurt more than anything possibly could, and yet it did not hurt enough, did not punish him sufficiently for failing to bring her salvation home.
    ‘Oh, shit, I’m sorry, George. I didn’t mean to do that. I don’t even want that stupid suit. You shouldn’t have moved. I hope I haven’t killed you. Nickie’s off sledding. Jesus, what a horrible day this has been. Have I killed you? I told you not to move!’
    John slid the Colt .45 muzzle between his lips. He moved it back and forth as if operating a bicycle pump, licked the metal, pushed it tight against the roof of his mouth. Odd behavior, George thought, for a man who has just survived a thermonuclear war. There was a pop. Something coral-colored and soggy flew out of the back of John’s head, and he fell.
    George looked heavenward. A bloated, bellied shape wheeled across the scorched sky. It had a scraggy neck and a beak like the jaws of a steam shovel. Its eyes were yellow, glowing, crosshatched by veins. The beating of its wings, loud and violent as a stampede, raised a wind that stirred the ashes in the pit and heaped them on George’s body.
    He named the creature. Vulture. The mightiest vulture in the world, big as a pterodactyl. It had come to pick his bones.

CHAPTER SIX
In Which a Sea Captain, a General, a Therapist, and a Man of God Enter the Tale
    Lieutenant Commander Olaf Sverre, who could see beyond the horizon, stood in the periscope room of his strategic submarine, watching the Commonwealth of Massachusetts burn down.
    ‘God help them,’ he mumbled, pressing his good eye against Periscope Number One. Each town’s flames had a distinctive tint. Stockbridge burned orange, Worcester violet, Wellesley gold, Newton vermillion.
    The periscope was a wondrous blend of mysticism and know-how. Its lenses were made of beryl, the very substance from which Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century wizard, had fashioned a looking glass that enabled him to observe events occurring a hundred miles away. When Sugar Brook National Laboratory, working under a cost-plus contract from the United States Department of Defense, had aligned these fabulous glass disks according to doodles found in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and then linked them to an array of geostationary satellites, the result was a periscope of infinite range. The US Congress had recently bought the American people forty-two such devices, one for every Philadelphia -class fleet ballistic missile submarine in the Navy. The people were for the most part surprised and delighted by these gifts, and pleased to learn that the people of the Soviet Union did not have any yet.
    Sverre narrowed the focal length, bringing the glowing mass of Boston into view. Confused sea gulls soared through the skies above the harbor. They were on fire. He closed his right eye and opened his left, which was made of gutta-percha. There, that was better, no burning gulls. Each evening Sverre would remove his rubber eye, soak it in gin, and replace it, whereupon the alcohol would seep into his brain, giving him a unique and copacetic high. In these troubled times, it was the only way he could get to sleep.
    Although Sverre could monitor places as remote as India and Argentina, he could not see what was happening on his own ship. For this he relied on his executive officer. ‘Mister Grass,’ he growled into the intercom, ‘bring me a status report.’
    It would take Lieutenant Grass several minutes to reach the periscope room. Time for a drink. Time for two. Sverre yanked a bottle from his claw-hammer coat, poured gin into a Styrofoam cup. Black fur thrived on the sides of his stovepipe hat. Dark, silky hairs sprouted along his cheeks, rushing down his jaw and coming together in great torrents of beard.
    A stanza of poetry jumped spontaneously into his mind. Grabbing a booklet called The MK-49 Torpedo: Repairs and Servicing , he turned it over and scribbled:
    Midgard’s serpent now unfurled
    Its circuit