Critical Mass by Whitley Strieber Page B

lifted by this new wind and carried toward the red center. Mr. Pip writhed and yapped, hit a roof and bounced in gravel, then went rolling on, limp and sleek and silent.
    The blast-effect cloud rose into the sky, lazy, flickering with internal disruptions, supported by a roiling column of deep red. The flash that had blinded eighteen thousand and the gigantic crack that had deafened a hundred thousand more had left the city in darkness. Toward downtown, all that was visible was blackness—a huge, starless darkness shot through with suggestions of flame. All was chaos and surprise. There had been not the slightest warning. One second, one life, the next—this.
    Captain Mike Waldron’s neck and left arm and shoulder tumbled through clear air. His plane, just sixty-three feet into its roll down the runway at Nellis, was burning and exploding, the rest of Mike Waldron stewing in the cockpit.
    From out beyond Buffalo Drive and from the direction of Nellis, when you looked toward downtown you would see the shape of the blast-effect cloud, and you might understand that this was an atomic aftermath, that a nuclear bomb, and a substantial one, had been detonated here.
    Farther away, fifteen or twenty miles, it was entirely obvious. From here, the cloud was clearly defined, a weltering horror in the light of the moon.
    At Nellis, the flight line was on fire. The USAF Warfare Center struggled to get its communications back on track, but the building was burning and would need to be abandoned if fire crews did not come within minutes. They would not come, though, not within minutes or even hours, or at all. They would never come.
    Just two emergency vehicles were operating, one with a full crew of six, the other with two. They worked the flight line, foaming burning airplanes. Inside Nellis’s hangars, most planes remained intact. The four training missions that had been under way when the detonation took place had all crashed in the desert, victims of failure due to the bomb’s electromagnetic pulse, which had destroyed even hardened electronic circuits over a 180-square-mile area centered on the blast, and damagedmany more, much farther out, especially those of planes at higher altitudes.
    At this hour, there had only been the two commercials incoming to McCarran, and none of the distant fliers were fatally damaged.
    Aboard United 221 out of Seattle for Denver, the copilot was slowly recovering his vision. He did not know what he had seen—it had not appeared to be on the ground, though. He had perceived it as a flashbulb going off in his face. It had seemed as if it was inside the cockpit, and his initial reaction had been to declare an emergency.
    Seven minutes later, there had been significant buffeting. The plane’s radios now crackled with pilot chatter, as everybody tried to figure out what it had been. There was amusement in some voices: “Looks like they’ve landed,” “I’m not reporting any UFO. . . .”
    But then, on 221 and American 806 and Alaska 43, silence fell. There was too much light down there. Captain Baker of 221, who had been looking down when the flash took place and had not been affected by it, said into his radio, “Las Vegas is burning.”
    In the parts of the Las Vegas metropolitan area that had not been destroyed, there were 73,000 private homes on fire and 2,613 businesses. There were 381,000 people with third-degree burns outside of the blast area itself. At that moment, sixteen thousand more of them were actively on fire, frantic beyond words, screaming, staggering down streets or running, torches all.
    Inside the blast area, the outright death rate was 87 percent. The unfortunate few who remained alive were for the most part maintenance personnel in basement areas. They were either trapped in absolute darkness, screaming, feeling along the floors of rooms now tangled with broken machinery, or struggling to find their way using flashlights or emergency lighting. Many had received fatal