Critical Mass by Whitley Strieber Page A

hair and the infinity of love in her eyes had inspired them to make another child, and pleasure wracked them as a single wriggling spark of Bruce and all that he was found its way into Caitlin’s wet folds.
    There was laughter, then, and the unnoticed hum of a plane passing low overhead, then disappearing.
    Mike Waldron leaped into the cockpit of his F-15. Jimmy and Tuck were already running it up.
    In among the folded limbs and warmth of the Moores, the new electricity stopped. Death came to the new person three seconds after life began.
    From Nellis Boulevard to Rainbow Boulevard, Las Vegas was now burning. The Bellagio, at ground zero, had been transformed into a heap of lava gushing smoke. The rest of the Strip was an inferno—and, in fact, a firestorm like this had not been seen on earth. Not even Hiroshima and Nagasaki had known such destruction.
    This was the most malicious single act in human history. One instant, life. The next, fire.
    Most who died from the blast had no awareness. They were alive, then not. Many would remain entirely unrecorded. Some would be left as shadows in the ruins, on walls here and there that remained. Shadows raising their arms, shadows not.
    All who had awareness saw the same thing: a sheet of white fire, like a gigantic lightning bolt slamming directly into your face. There was sometimes pain, but mostly not. Death came in the form of details: “my dinner is on fire”; “the slot has a short”; “the curtains are burning”; “my skin is gone”; “my throat, face, eyes, tongue hurts.” Only the first hundredth of a second of death would be recorded. Across the second hundredth of a second, the temperature of the body would rise from ninety-eight degrees to more than two thousand degrees. Destruction that violent carries with it no sensation at all.
    Las Vegas is a busy city, busy at night, and there was traffic on all the highways, some leaving, some entering. Vehicles within the blast area were thrown like toys, some of them to altitudes of a hundred feet, their occupants screaming, confused, mostly blinded by the furious light, their eardrums shattered, feeling extreme, incomprehensible lurches, hearing nothing, their feet jamming their brakes.
    From afar, the front wave of the blast appeared to be filled with sparks, each of which was a dying, confused person.
    Beyond the blast zone, on all the highways coming into Las Vegas, on Interstate 15, on 95, on 595, there were long lines of stopped cars, and in the roads and on the roadsides, wandering in the fields, stumbling, falling, were the occupants. All who had been facing toward the city had been permanently flash-blinded. Many of them were on fire. Around them and onto them there fell more fire, in the form of burning ceilings, bodies, clothes, carpets, vehicles, sheets and mattresses, chairs, slot machines, tables, telephones, fans, bricks, roller-coaster rails and a train like a great smoking centipede full of strange, insectoid figures: the skeletons of the riders.
    Hearing the tremendous noise of the disintegrating city, the blind uttered high, singing wails such as one hears when a forest in Java or Borneo is set alight and the apes catch fire.
    They were not human now, not in the intricate depths of this much terror. The blind did not understand why they were blind. They did not understand their pain, did not know why they had been driving one moment and now were wandering in a field or along a roadside, some of them crawling now, feeling along, crying names: “Jenna! Jenna!” “Bill, where are you, Bill?” “God help me! God help me!” Their voices joined to the great roar of the collapsing buildings, the only sound that remained after the cracking blast had died away.
    Half the city still lived, the half that had not been vaporized.
    Wind blew toward the fire from all directions, setting up a banging of shutters, a hiss of trees, and the wail of eaves. A terrier called Mr. Pip was the first creature to be