Firestorm

A brilliant flash lit up the southern sky. It resembled a huge, glowing, orange ball, hanging above the horizon. They stumbled to a stop, momentarily blinded.

“Karen! Those lights we’ve been seeing the past half hour are nuclear explosions! Let’s hurry!” Jesse grabbed her hand, and after their vision returned, they half ran on down the road.

The orange fireball began to fade until only a faint glow remained. They had no way of knowing, but the origin of the flash was three hundred miles distant.

At 3:00 a.m., they were only three miles from home with Karen exhausted to the point of collapse. She fell. Jesse stopped and tried to help her up.

“Go on without me,” Karen gasped. “Save yourself. I can’t go another step.”

“Get on my back and I’ll carry you,” Jesse ordered, kneeling down next to her. Though slight of build, five foot, eight inches and weighing one hundred and forty pounds, Jesse was wiry and strong.

Karen, hiking her skirt well above her knees, used all her remaining strength to sprawl across his back.

“Hold tight around my shoulders,” Jesse instructed, standing up. “Put your legs around my hips.”

When she brought her legs up, he hooked both arms under them, locking them in place. He partially knelt, trying to retrieve the valise, and then decided to abandon it.

Jesse walked stubbornly and unevenly down the road, blood vessels standing out on his handsome face, indicating the strain. Was it his imagination or could he detect a faint trace of dust in the air?

Fallout! We’re too late! He staggered, appalled by the possibility.

Jesse trudged doggedly on. His pace slowed; he stumbled and nearly fell. We’re too late. We’ll never make it in time, he thought. Jesse took a few more stumbling steps and then pitched headlong.

They were only a half mile from home but Jesse had exceeded all bounds of his endurance; it was 3:30 a.m. Jesse saw a haystack about forty feet away, picked up Karen’s soft, limp body and staggered on until he reached it. He fell to his knees and laid her gently on the ground. In a few moments he burrowed out a space large enough for them both. Jesse placed his helpless wife in a more comfortable position, overlapping her hands tenderly just below her breasts. Her eyelids fluttered and closed, her wan face framed by the tangled, wild mass of unruly red hair. Nature demanded they stop and rest.

We’ll stop five minutes and then go on, he decided, as he lay down and snuggled against Karen.

Jesse again seemed to smell the dust in the air as he drifted off into an exhausted stupor.

At 3:45, a ten megaton bomb made a direct hit on Lexington. It exploded at two thousand feet and in a fraction of a second, the down-town section became engulfed in a two-hundred-million-degree fireball.

Sixteen city blocks surrounding ground zero instantly converted to a white hot, gaseous incandescence in the fervent heat. All matter, including steel and concrete, all became a part of the fireball and billowed upward into a gigantic mushroom which towered fifty thousand feet into the sky. The explosion flattened another nine hundred blocks and ignited everything flammable. Within minutes, all life ceased to exist in the three mile radius as the fireball sucked out their oxygen and devoured it.

Gregory Beall lived five miles from ground zero. Sirens signaling attack sounded almost two hours earlier. Civil Defense workers went from door to door urging people to take shelter.

Gregory chose to stay in his apartment. He watched out a window facing away from the center of town when the bomb hit. The black of night transformed to a ghastly brilliance; the utility pole across the street smoked and burst into flames.

Gregory saw curtains and shades ignite in neighboring apartments; wooden exteriors and roofs flamed from the intense heat. Seconds after the flash, the shock wave hit. A near solid wall of air pressure rushed away from the fireball at two thousand miles per hour. It slowed to a thousand, generating a thirty pound per square inch over pressure by the time it reached Gregory’s apartment house.

The wall of air pushed steel reinforced buildings awry and flattened all the others. Fires, started seconds before by the flash, burned at furnace-like intensity. Apartments collapsed and gas pipes ruptured, adding fuel to the flames. Gregory’s window imploded, the ceiling descended and he raised his arms protectively.

The blast wave fanned fires kindled by the flash ten miles from ground zero and knocked houses flat.

The blast wave expended its force and fires began to lose their intensity. Air, forced away from the center and oxygen consumed by the flames, left a partial vacuum over several square miles.

The brilliant fireball changed from white to red and after three minutes, faded into the sky.

The partial vacuum sucked fresh air back in toward Lexington’s center and converted the entire city into a raging inferno. Smoke and ashes zoomed skyward becoming a part of the gigantic, expanding mushroom.

The rising columns of hot gasses continued sucking in the oxygen-laden fresh air and generated hurricane-force firestorms which raged throughout the city.

All humanity up to three miles from ground zero perished quickly from blast debris, flash incineration and suffocation.