Bombshell Read Free

shrouded in wires, a wrecking ball plummeting from a broken chain. She saw the façades of the test cities, artificial worlds that would be built and blown apart: Hollywood suburbs populated with department store mannequins, sidewalk scenes. In the distance, she summoned images of the scientists lying prone in the monochrome dirt, their hands to their blinded eyes as the fireball bloomed, eight miles high.
    The volcanic minerals and jagged burrs of the Trinity obelisk caught the moonlight. The quadrilateral black cone, like a rotten fang, appeared taller than she had expected. The stone mimicked the shape of the metal tower that had suspended the bomb above the earth, an irony that made her want to vomit. It was as though an obscure cargo cult had recreated a rocket with mud and sticks. Approaching it, a distant silver glow falling over the plaque, Cash remembered a photograph she had seen of a family posing before it, laughing. She saw the obliterated tatters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, skin hanging from bones in the flash; and she saw the inexorable burning of Chernobyl. She was repulsed by it, by everything that it represented. If she could find that laughing family, she would kill them. She felt her nerves, lobes, and lymph illuminated with hatred and depthless grief. Her breathing came with difficulty and her eyes began to tear. She tried to picture her mother, but there was no image. Her father was gone also. She had never felt so alone and alienated, confronting the sick phallic symbol of the slow death of the universe. She was afraid to touch it. Shivering, she removed her backpack. Unfastening it, she reached inside for the plastic explosives, the detonator and timing mechanism she had constructed, black and shrouded in wires. At last, touching the point of origin, fingering the mystery of a heat indistinguishable from that of her birth, Cash tracedover the large, raised letters of the plaque: N UCLEAR . She forced herself to embrace the obelisk, wrapping her arms around it as she fixed her putty charges, entangling it in the ivy of her cables. The rough stone grazed her face, bringing a gauzy streak of blood. When she spoke, addressing the monolith, it was strange to hear her voice after so many hours of silence. “ I’ve got you now, fucker .”
    Cash activated the timing mechanism and watched the first digital seconds of its ninety-minute countdown flicker away on the glowing red display. She retreated, scraping her torso along the grit of the crater zone, pushing her knees into the surface. A small metal structure modeled on a half-submerged bomb shelter had been constructed close to the monument for the atomic tourists. It had a shallow roof of corrugated metal with windows that would permit the tourists to look down into the sparkling green maw of the original nuclear blast crater in the same manner in which a glass-hulled boat permits a view of the floor of the ocean. Beside it a wall of a dozen rented portable toilets had been arranged. Cash hurried to the last of these and found it unlocked. The interior had been cleaned in advance of the tourists arriving in the morning. It smelled of domestic disinfectant. In the unlit plastic shell, she pulled her Polaroid camera from her backpack. Hastily, she grabbed for the rolls of electrical tape and the typewritten manifesto sheet she had prepared to leave as her death card. Shivering with cold and tension, she held the camera up before her face to shoot her self-portrait. This she would also leave behind. The flashbulb blinded her. There was no time to wait for her vision to adjust or to try to see the resulting photograph through her night-vision lenses. She shook the photograph in the cold air and blew upon it for a moment. With her teeth, she cut a strip of the electrical tape to fix the photograph to the back of the toilet door, hoping that it would survive, trusting that it would be searched for evidence. Below that she fixed the page of her