Impact (40 page)

He stared at his G-Shock and counted down the final seconds.

He reached forwards, put his fingers on the twin release switches.

‘Ten … nine … eight … seven …’

Mix of exhaustion and relief in his voice, like a guy making it home after a long, long journey.

‘… three … two … one.’

One moment
Liberty Bell
lay broke-backed and beached in sand. Next moment she was consumed by unholy light.

Frost sat looking down at her gloved hands. She thought about being alive, the fact of existence.

Gamma flash.

For an instant she could see finger bones, look right through her hand like an X-ray.

She blinked her vision clear.

She ought to duck-and-cover, but the instinct to take shelter was overcome by a compulsion to see the blast.

She scrambled to the top of the dune.

Ten megaton ground burst. Stellar heat. The fission core rose over the desert like a second sun, a dust vortex drawn skywards, blossoming into a vertiginous mushroom cloud.

The monstrous thunderclap of detonation.

The firestorm rushed towards her across the desert. An oncoming juggernaut of flame.

She threw herself against the side of the dune, scrambled and squirmed to get beneath the sand before she was engulfed by a wave of superheated air.

Miles of desert fused to iridescent glass.

Scalloped dunes, shaped by blast-wind, formed the petrified troughs and waves of a frozen ocean. Sand, momentarily liquefied by supernova heat, frothed at the crest of each ridgeline like delicate, glassy foam.

An infernal, smouldering landscape. Gunshot cracks as the crystalline crust began to cool.

A gloved fist punched through vitrified dust. A succession of blows broke an aperture wide enough for Frost to twist and squirm free.

She climbed to her feet. Dust streamed from her flight suit and respirator. Boots slid on silica glazed slick as ice. She struggled to retain her balance.

Heart-hammering asphyxia. She tore off her mask and threw it aside, part suffocated by sand-clogged filters. She bent double, whooped for air.

She caught her breath and straightened up.

She climbed to the crest of the dune, each footstep crunching through a brittle layer of trinitite, and stood looking east towards the crash site.

The mushroom cloud risen thirty thousand feet, a mighty column of dust and smoke blocking the sun, turning day to red twilight.

She stared in awe.

Somewhere, within the cloud, were the remains of
Liberty Bell
and her crew. They had been reduced to their constituent atoms, transmuted to rare isotopes, and were now diffused among the mesosphere.

She tied a bandana over her mouth and nose. A rudimentary fallout mask. One last glance at the thunderous cloud, then she turned and headed for the mountains.

Lacquered dunes glittered red sunlight. Her boots crunched glass as she travelled west across a transformed world.

LaNitra Frost. A solitary figure limping across a crystal sea.

I would like to thank Charles Walker and Katy Jones at United Agents, and Oliver Johnson and Anne Perry at Hodder.

All illustrations by Noel Baker.