Bombshell Read Free Page B

LAST HOUR BEFORE SUNRISE, IN confusion and disbelief, almost hesitantly, sirens groaned and howled across the infertile hills. She listened to the scrambling of jeeps and helicopters and saw the febrile web of searchlights gathering and blazing across the site. Alarms sounded across the wasted canyons. Blast doors sealed the Virgin Galactic spaceport and flashlights scanned the billboards and the concrete facility, illuminating the machines that had been used to construct the runway. Pressing herself between two rocks, she drank a pouch of orange juice and gagged as she sucked rations from another foil packet. She needed to run again. A helicopter passed directly overhead, its rotors coating her in loose dirt. It seemed that it did not detect her. It had begun. Through the dawn, Air Force firefighters fought to extinguish the brush ignited by Cash’s explosives. Small piñons flamed like twisted effigies in the rising sun. Forensics crews in HAZMAT suits waved Geiger counters at the scene of smoking lava and twisted metal where the monument had stood. They studied the smashed glass of thecrater shelter and examined the scattered plastic toilets. Cash had made the decision to escape the desert and the region of White Sands Missile Range by retreating to the Southwest, rather than scraping north toward Highway 380, where she would almost certainly encounter more roadblocks and roving military police. Instead, she made her way toward I-25, the Rio Grande, and the town of Truth or Consequences. The route would be fifty miles to the interstate, retreating across bleak terrain, keeping herself invisible among the red and black rock formations, the furnace of day and the freezer of night. She planned to cross the river where it narrowed to the north of Elephant Butte and hitch the final stretch down to Radium Springs and her motorcycle. Sometimes she would hear a distant military jeep, the barking of a dog, or the transit of another chopper investigating the scene, looking for whoever had penetrated and attacked the site. These attentions buzzed like flies around an open sore.
    April 2, 2011. The Trinity bomb site was not opened to tourists. The earliest buses were turned back, and all others canceled. Cars were halted before Stallion Range and permitted no further. No one would sell hot dogs. No one would pretend to be caught in a blast for cameras. Cash reached the Rio Grande at early evening. The final blood red swell of sunset gathered and poured into the canyon as she descended, and the darkness enwrapped her once more as she lowered herself toward the sound of water. Early April was too soon for rattlesnakes, but the rocks and scrub were themselves barbed enough to bite at her combat fatigues. The trees along the lip of the vermilion-lit crevasse recalled a strip of atomic blasts silhouetted against the oncoming night. When the stars penetrated, she saw them reflected in the river, bright as fuel rods, their radiation pulsing through eternities of decay, lethal forever. For a moment, she thought that she heard voices, yet as her ears sought the sounds, she discovered coyotes calling one another along the opposing watersides. The river grew louderas the shale and mud slipped beneath her boots. The sides of the canyon spread blank black walls between her and the rising moon. Cash forced herself down and the freezing river stole her breath, stiffening her lungs and slowing her muscles as she fought to swim with the pack on her back and her clothes becoming dead weight. Water flecked and then poured into her windpipe as the current hauled her down. Cash began to drown, kicking weakly and reaching blindly into the nothingness that swallowed her. She coughed water into water. Silver bulbs exploded. Suddenly, she was caught on a hump of stones. Twisting and contorting, she found herself kneeling, vomiting across a shimmering mosaic of rocks. There, Cash lost consciousness.
    When she awoke, she had lost two hours, and she guessed