Milos Fabrikant followed the Censeur, M. Bisonette, to a trench that had been carved into the cold, bare hillock in front of the bunker.
The snow had stopped. The clouds were high and thinning. The countdown proceeded with a relentless precision, and Fabrikant listened to the numbers unreel from the mouth of a metal-horn loudspeaker. When the count reached twenty seconds, Fabrikant and Bisonette and a half dozen other privileged observers crouched with their backs to the west wall of the revetment.
The light from the detonation was sudden and shockingly bright. Shadows flared to the east. A revision of nature, Fabrikant thought. Silent at first. It was his thoughts that were loud.
Bisonette stood up immediately, cupping his hands around his amber-colored goggles. Fabrikant’s joints were agonized by the cold; he was slower to stand.
The fireball glowed like sunset in the far undulations of the pine forest. Incredibly, the clouds above the blast had been torn open. A pillar of smoke boiled into the sundered heavens.
The sound came at last, a battering roar, like the outrage of the offended Protennoia.
Fabrikant touched the sleeve of the Censeur’s greatcoat. He felt Bisonette’s unconcealed tremor of delight. He is as full, Fabrikant thought, as I am empty.
“We should take cover again, Censeur,” he said.
Bisonette nodded and ducked into the trench.
The wind came next, as hot as the wind from Tartaros.
Evelyn Woodward was blinded at once. The new sun devoured her eyes. Briefly, the sensation was beyond pain.
Then Lake Merced turned to steam as the shock wave crossed the water, and suddenly the window was gone. And the house. And the town.
Clement Delafleur had tried to staunch his bullet wound with the silk lining of his torn pardessus, but he had lost a great deal of blood despite his best efforts. In the time it took Dexter Graham to drive to the Ojibway reserve, Delafleur managed to drag the insensate meat of his legs as far as the door marked FIRE EXIT. From there, his plans were vague. Perhaps to lift himself to salvation. But time was short.
He was panting and only dimly conscious when the high basement windows admitted a column of superheated steam, and the stone walls of City Hall were crushed and carried away above him.
Calvin Shepperd listened to the countdown on a portable scanner, up at the limits around 1300MHz. When the count approached zero, Shepperd stopped the lead car and flashed his blinkers. The signal went down the long line of the convoy: it meant, Take cover. That is, hunker down on the upholstery and turn your engine off. Which he did. His friend Ted Bartlett huddled next to him, and in the back a sharpshooter named Paige. Shepperd’s wife Sarah was seven cars back, riding with a woman named Ruth and five-year-old Damion, Sarah’s nephew. He hoped they were all right, but he hadn’t been able to check. No time to stop. It was slow driving on this old log-truck road, even with chains.
The flash was distant, but it penetrated the cathedral pines like slow lightning.
The sound came later, a basso thunder that barreled out of the troubled sky. And then a hot, whipping wind. The car was buffeted. “Christ Jesus!” Paige exclaimed. Then a series of hard but muffled thuds against the roof, the windshield, the hood. Some kind of bomb debris, Shepperd thought wildly, but it was only snow, huge mounds of snow shaken out of the crossed boughs of the trees. It slid against the window glass, already wet in this unnatural heat.
“Drive on,” Ted Bartlett said as soon as the roar abated. “This can’t be healthy.”
Shepperd started up his engine and heard others revving behind him. Hang on, Sarah, he thought, and put the car in gear.
Shepperd’s convoy reached the abandoned logging camp, which was three tin-roofed wooden longhouses and a potbelly stove, at dusk.
He calculated that this expedition had saved maybe one hundred families out of the thousands in Two Rivers. The rest were smoke and ashes . . . and that was a crime so grievous it beggared comprehension.
But the people with him had been saved, no small accomplishment, and that included a lot of kids. He watched them filing out of the cars as they were parked in a defile between the tallest trees. The kids were cold, stunned, but alive. It was the kids he had some hope for. They knew how to adjust.
Not that the future looked especially rosy. One of his scouts had come back from the south with a road map, and sales of hoarded bottle liquor and bathtub hooch to the soldiers had built up the gasoline fund, in local currency, to a respectable size. But they were marked strangers. Even their cars were strange. No amount of paint or pretense would allow a Honda Civic or a Jeep 4×4 to pass for one of those cumbersome boats the natives drove.
Still . . . the few roads west were said to be lightly traveled (if passable!) this time of year, and if they made it over the unthinkable obstacle of the Rocky Mountains, even if it took until June . . . the northwest was supposed to be wide open, hardly a policeman or Proctor to be seen outside the biggest towns.
He held that thought. It was comforting.
The clouds were gone by sunset. Even the towering mushroom cloud had dispersed, though there was still a column of sooty black smoke, which he supposed was the incinerated remnant of Two Rivers, Michigan, drawn up like a migrant soul into the blue ink of the sky.
Sarah joined him under the shadow of a longhouse roof and Shepperd put his arm around her. Neither of them spoke. There were no words for this. A military aircraft passed overhead—amazing how much those things resembled P-51’s, Shepperd thought—but it didn’t circle, and he doubted they had been seen. It was a safe bet, he thought, that they would all live to see morning.