Four Minute Warning

Everything that begins will surely end. It’s a Tuesday morning in London like any other. Until it isn’t. Your phone flashes red: THIS IS NOT A DRILL. In exactly four minutes, a nuclear attack will hit the city. Networks collapse. Sirens wail. The countdown begins to tick.

Numbers keep ticking down. 179, 178, 177… and yet every second stretches into a lifetime. In this second instalment of Four Minute Warning, the countdown continues through his eyes: a man trapped between technology’s silence and the memories of how it all began. As a nuclear strike looms over London, his radio hisses with an AI voice telling him what he already knows — this isn’t a drill. His phone stays dead, refusing him the one connection he craves. And with each falling number he is hurled back to the night he first saw her across a crowded bar, the moment that changed everything.

Inside a London home that is a sanctuary from the noise of a city of nine million, a man stands watching the same message scroll across his phone and television: A NUCLEAR ATTACK ON LONDON IS IMMINENT. As the countdown ticks down, he isn’t running. He’s looking. Looking beyond the walls, the trinkets, the framed shirts and photographs, beyond the home they built together. Looking back to the laughter, the lockdown, the yoga mornings and Monopoly nights, the first electric encounter in a Holborn pub.

The countdown ends here. After three minutes of dread, memory, and longing, the final chapter of Four Minute Warning arrives. Longer, deeper, and more devastating than the moments before it, Minute Four ties together everything—the city, the love, the fears, the defiance. This is London at the edge of destruction: a city that has risen from fire and war before, now staring down annihilation with its old spirit of endurance. And this is a man on the edge, embracing his love story.