Bombshell Read Free Page A

manifesto. She wouldgive them a little of her identity to work with. Her photographic image slowly coalesced as she fled from the scene.
    Three miles to the south, once more she passed within spitting distance of the MacDonald Ranch House. The adobe building had been restored and held in suspension to appear as it did in 1945 when it had been the folksy scene surrounding the final assembly of the mechanism of the atomic bomb. It was dangerous to approach it, moving on a missile route road, leaving boot tracks. Kicking through the mesh of the padlocked screen door and shouldering the weak antique interior door from its hinges, Cash pushed inside. Locating a museum case in the darkness, holding her breath, she crashed her elbow through the glass, casting burning matches onto the maps, photographs, and documents arranged inside it. Raising a flaming match ahead of her, she saw a crude computer-printed sign: P LUTONIUM A SSEMBLY R OOM . A cardboard display of old photographs leaned against the wall. Stacking it on a wooden desk in the corner of the room, she pictured it flaming toward the ceiling beams. Making certain that this was lit, Cash burst from the wrecked door frame, vaulted the low moonlit wall, and sprinted south.
    Away from the restricted roads, she stumbled often, cutting her legs and bloodying her hands as she scrambled across the rocks, leaving thin trails of skin as though she were being ripped up in a coral forest. She navigated with the luminous face of her compass, struggling to work out her distance from the bomb. Her lungs ached in the frigid night air. Looking at her watch, eighty-six minutes had passed. It was time. Finally, she knew that she could stop running and face the remote blackness of Trinity. Ten miles from the blast site, her breath coming in raw heaves, Cash turned to watch her explosion. Nervously, she checked her watch again. In her obsessive plans, she had calculated that this was the same position Doctor Julius Robert Oppenheimer must have occupied as he watched his detonationin July 1945. Then, across the gulf of rust-red rock between her and the beginning of the atomic age, the first flash came.
    After the flash, she watched the mushroom cloud of her own bomb rising, an accusing ghost extending its arms, a bulbous fire head inclining and swiveling beneath the stars. Cash wished that she could have been closer to it, for time to crawl so that she might have watched the Trinity obelisk being blown apart in endless frozen frames. She pulled the heat into her, the smithereens and shrapnel of black lava and pallid mortar ripping through the night air. She wanted to see the dark plaque warp in the concussed night, glowing hot in the blast and smashing into the buckled net of the perimeter fence. It took several seconds for the sound of the explosion to reach her, a punch of pain from the ancient dirt. She saw Warhol’s silk screens of the atomic bomb, death and disaster. Fragments of the obelisk were blown into the dark. Flaming meteorites of tar and lava rained down on the metal shelter. The portable toilets were blasted from the surface of the blast area, their sandbag moorings torn open, some with melting doors sending reeking chemicals into the crystalline desert night. Inside the flames, she saw Valerie again: her lost love, the wired golem waving her gun in a schizoid tornado of typewritten sheets, humiliated, rising out of the silver elevator of her rage toward the failed assassination of Andy Warhol. She shot him. She saw silk screens of electric chairs. These would never hold her. In the freezing dark, Cash was sweating from the fusion of her strange natal wounds with the livid constellation of the new wounds that she was about to inflict on America. Working alone, she would ignite more warning flares like this one, and she would accelerate into murder and shutdown.
    On 5:29:45 am, All Fools’ Day, the memorial obelisk at Trinity was destroyed.

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    AS CASH’S BLAST SPLIT THE