The second wave of jets came over, their roar all but drowning out the stacatto pop-pop-pop of the AA guns. The country had used up its entire supply of ground-to-bomber missiles. The enemy had depleted its store of fusion and fission bombs. Everyone settled for ack-ack and TNT.
The bombs rained down, exploding like firecrackers on a scale model of the ruined city. It always looked that way to Hardesty. Unreal. He supposed it was like that, unreal, to everyone until the one bomb which was too close and suddenly too real compressed the air before its warhead and shrieked earthward, growing and growing and not cutting off the shriek before the sound of the explosion like kids do when they play war and make vocal bomb sounds but terminating the shriek instantly with the explosion and killing you almost before you heard the sound with concussion or flying masonry or fire.
Like that bomb, right now, right there, which picked up a two-story building, uprooting it at the foundation and lifting it slowly into the air in defiance of gravity, then turning it over gently, teaching it tricks before it perished, flipping it carelessly, indifferently, showering a slow downpour of furniture to the ground through the now floorless bottom story and then turning the whole building once more, like a child's block caught in a gale, and suddenly sundering it, breaking the building into large pieces which floated lazily downward, exploding with a paradoxical lack of violence into smaller pieces, and the smaller ones into still smaller, until the whole thing came down, dust and shards now, like a multi-colored snowstorm, beyond the rim of the bomb crater.
Afterwards came the concussion, mitigated by the depth of the crater but still strong, flipping Hardesty across the crater floor. He let his muscles go slack, instinctively knowing there would be less likelihood of a broken bone that way. He tasted blood in his mouth and felt his head burrow into rubble and ashes. He stood up groggily as the all-clear sounded. You had to be cautious. Sometimes the spotters tricked you. Then you went out into the open and the bombs came down again almost as if the spotters and the enemy bombardiers were in secret entente with one another and would later meet in some undreamed of neutral place and share the booty collected from corpses and parts of corpses. It was a dog eat dog world.
The concussion had ripped loose the firing post, which had fallen with the dead man still dangling, like a drunk leaning backwards against a lamp-post, across the woman. She lay there under its weight, her legs drumming, her arms twitching.
"Help me," she called to Hardesty in a feeble voice. "Please help me." She was very ugly that way, with a look of supplication on her dirt-smeared face. Hardesty walked over to her and placed his foot on her shoulder so she wouldn't twitch so, then went through her pockets quickly. He found two five million dollar bills and a handful of small denomination coins, one and two hundred thousand dollars each, mostly. Shrugging his disappointment, Hardesty realized it would be only enough to keep him going a week, and that long only if he spent it frugally. Those were the breaks.
"What else did you find?" the woman croaked through bloody lips.
She would probably live, Hardesty figured. She was only pinned there; she didn't seem badly hurt. Naturally, he changed his residence in the bombed-out city every day, but if the blonde girl were caught and described him to save her own neck and if this woman confirmed the description to receive her share of the ten million dollars in denouncer's bounty, Hardesty might possibly be found. The penalty for jumping the gun or aiding gun-jumping was death. Other citizens didn't have their just opportunity to scavenge.
"What else?" the woman asked again.