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Heat punched at the Mustang, blackening the green paint, covering the windshield with ash. And in one frozen moment, Dustin could see things in that ash. Tiny threadlike worms that wriggled as the hot wind slapped them against the glass. There were other things hitting the car, too. Pieces of charred meat. Pieces of broken bone and burning swatches of cloth.
Dustin’s mind absorbed all of that visual data in a microsecond, and then he drove the gas pedal to the floor and the Boss 429 engine hurled the Mustang at the crowd of living and dead.
By the time he hit the wall of them he was going fifty miles an hour.
Dustin felt himself rising from the seat. He felt the steering wheel hit him in the chest. Saw the windshield coming at him so fast.
So fast.
The fires and explosions, the rockets and bullets, the teeth and hands of the dead—none of that did any harm to Dustin Lee Frye.
In the end, it was the car that killed him.
SOUTH OF THE BORDENTOWN STARBUCKS
Major General Simeon Zetter got slowly out of his command vehicle and watched hell unfold. He and his aides were in the safe zone, outside of the blast area, well beyond the perimeter of violence that the satellites and surveillance helicopters determined enclosed all of the infection.
No one spoke.
No words really fit the moment.
During the drive here from the school, Zetter was absorbing the intel from FEMA, from the White House, and from other sources. Initial estimates of potential civilian casualties were staggering. Four thousand minimum.
Minimum.
More than that were expected.
More than that were likely, perhaps inevitable.
The fireballs from the fuel-air bombs rose like the pillars of hell, seeming to push back the storm. The heat was so intense that it turned the rain to steam.
Behind where he stood, the Black Hawks and Apaches were touching down in the parking lot of an abandoned drive-in movie theater. It had been dangerous bordering on foolhardy to have them in the air at all with a storm of this kind, and they’d lost one crew to a crash. Something he had not yet reported to the president. Now, with these bombs, there would be shockwaves that would endanger all the others.
He heard one of his aides say something to himself, and for a moment Zetter thought it was a prayer. It wasn’t. It was the thing that Oppenheimer had said when the first atom bomb was tested.
“I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds.”
And while fuel-air bombs were non-nuclear, the point was eloquent. Zetter felt like striking the man, but hitting someone for speaking the truth was not the way to survive this moment.
In silence, he endured the rebuke implicit in that statement.
Destroyer of worlds.
Destroyer of lives.
So many people.
The outer edge of the heat wave rolled through the night toward them. It had been greatly weakened by distance and did little more than brush past his face and fill his mouth with a bitter taste. Zetter turned and discretely spat into the mud. Some of the others did, too. A few still wore their hazmat masks.
The heat blew past them and for a moment there was a deceptive stillness, a calm that told lies about the night. Then the rains began to fall again, and the storm winds blew, and the sounds of screams echoed through the night. Car horns blared, faint and muted.
“Sir,” said another aide, hurrying toward him from the communication truck, “you need to see this.”
His voice held a rising note of panic that made Zetter spin around and go running after him, with his other aides in tow. As he ran Zetter turned and spat again, trying to clear his mouth of the acrid, itchy dust from the shock wave.
He felt sick to his stomach, but he decided that it was the shock, the stress, the horror of it all.
In that, General Zetter was entirely wrong.
