Everyone Dies in the End #33
Man, what a great day. We picked up another follower. Pretty soon folks will be sending me recipes, just like in Julie & Julia. Sweet! But only if they are for deserts. Get it? Sweet...deserts... On the other side of the movie street, saw a great one this week. The Crazies. Anyone into the post-apocalyptic genre needs to check it out. Back to our adventurers.
Luckily, at least in a sadistic form of the word, Susan, Arty, nor Todd were looking at the blast when the blast, blasted. But you couldn’t miss the sudden flashing, whitening, of the world. They had all seen that when the nuke hit Pope Air Force Base in Fayetteville. That, however, had been 150 miles away. The Bronco hadn’t even reached Charlotte’s suburbs. None of the three were looking directly at the blast, but that wouldn’t matter. They were three miles from ground zero. They were as good as dead.
Susan was in the back seat, still angry at Artemis, sliding six new bullets into her big revolver, hoping that she wouldn’t need to fire it again. Focused on the revolver, head down, the flash surprised her. If she had ever been able to describe the light, she might have mentioned the lack of direction. Although the ManPot detonated behind them, the white light suffused everything. It was as if world had turned brighter, immediately brighter. The flash lasted but a second, maybe two, and then the world returned to normal, at least for a moment.
Susan looked up from loading the revolver, and her eyes met Arty’s. In those eyes was understanding. Understanding that violence leads to this, that she was sorry, and this was completely, irrevocably, the end. A moment later the shockwave struck them.
There are many ways that a nuclear weapon kills its victim. It burns them, radiates them, and strangles them slowly with the residual effects of it alpha and beta particles, but the prime method is the blast from the bomb. With the force of a thousand conventional bombs, the ManPot’s detonation flattened everything within ten blocks of the Best Buy in which it detonated. The bomb’s shock wave struck the three-story Belk Tyler department store two blocks from the detonation, literally disintegrating the walls with heat and blast, fusing the concrete, metal, and three families that resided in the sporting goods department, into molten slag. Cars and trucks within the first couple of blocks were simply melted, smaller buildings simply disappeared. If viewed from above, the shock wave spread like destructive ripples in Charlotte’s urban sprawl. At three-quarters of a mile from the Best Buy epicenter, the shock wave rolled cars like Texan tumbleweeds, the vehicles smashing through walls and uprooting telephone poles. The noise, if anyone would have lived to describe it, was all-encompassing, pervading, white static blasted from ten-foot tall speakers, overlaid with the howl of a tornadoes’ wind.
It was no better when it hit Susan, Artemis, and Todd. In fact, it might have been worse. Those closer to the epicenter had no cognitive understanding of their death. One second they were alive, the next they were not. Perhaps their mind registered a flash of light, perhaps not. But Susan saw her death coming. It was an unctuous, impossibly fast-moving, dirty-brown cloud emanating from the mushroom cloud and emanating fast. The shock wave carried all before it, telephone poles like sticks, Volkswagens like crumpled aluminum foil, huge chunks of concrete like a child’s Legos, and it hit them with the callousness of a man swatting a fly. The Bronco tumbled, glass flew, guns discharged, and Susan, Arty, and Todd died.
Susan
Susan was in the back seat, still angry at Artemis, sliding six new bullets into her big revolver, hoping that she wouldn’t need to fire it again. Focused on the revolver, head down, the flash surprised her. If she had ever been able to describe the light, she might have mentioned the lack of direction. Although the ManPot detonated behind them, the white light suffused everything. It was as if world had turned brighter, immediately brighter. The flash lasted but a second, maybe two, and then the world returned to normal, at least for a moment.
Susan looked up from loading the revolver, and her eyes met Arty’s. In those eyes was understanding. Understanding that violence leads to this, that she was sorry, and this was completely, irrevocably, the end. A moment later the shockwave struck them.
There are many ways that a nuclear weapon kills its victim. It burns them, radiates them, and strangles them slowly with the residual effects of it alpha and beta particles, but the prime method is the blast from the bomb. With the force of a thousand conventional bombs, the ManPot’s detonation flattened everything within ten blocks of the Best Buy in which it detonated. The bomb’s shock wave struck the three-story Belk Tyler department store two blocks from the detonation, literally disintegrating the walls with heat and blast, fusing the concrete, metal, and three families that resided in the sporting goods department, into molten slag. Cars and trucks within the first couple of blocks were simply melted, smaller buildings simply disappeared. If viewed from above, the shock wave spread like destructive ripples in Charlotte’s urban sprawl. At three-quarters of a mile from the Best Buy epicenter, the shock wave rolled cars like Texan tumbleweeds, the vehicles smashing through walls and uprooting telephone poles. The noise, if anyone would have lived to describe it, was all-encompassing, pervading, white static blasted from ten-foot tall speakers, overlaid with the howl of a tornadoes’ wind.
It was no better when it hit Susan, Artemis, and Todd. In fact, it might have been worse. Those closer to the epicenter had no cognitive understanding of their death. One second they were alive, the next they were not. Perhaps their mind registered a flash of light, perhaps not. But Susan saw her death coming. It was an unctuous, impossibly fast-moving, dirty-brown cloud emanating from the mushroom cloud and emanating fast. The shock wave carried all before it, telephone poles like sticks, Volkswagens like crumpled aluminum foil, huge chunks of concrete like a child’s Legos, and it hit them with the callousness of a man swatting a fly. The Bronco tumbled, glass flew, guns discharged, and Susan, Arty, and Todd died.
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