Every wooden house for two miles began smoking. And tombstones in Restland glowed dully, as if to announce the awakening of those they memorialized. In that second part of a second.
The plutonium fist followed:
It hammered across Front Street, Madison, Adams, Jefferson and Washington, along Central Avenue and rushed forward. The blast extinguished a billion sudden flames and started a million in the debris it stacked in its wake.
Under the intense globe of light, meantime, for a mile in every direction the city disappeared. In the mile beyond, every building was bashed and buffeted. Homes fell by thousands on their inhabitants. Great institutions collapsed.
The fist swung on, weaker now, taking the lighter structures and all the glass, the windows everywhere, hurling them indoors, speed-slung fragments, ten million stabbing daggers, slashing scimitars, slicing guillotines.
Invisible, from the dangling body of light, the rays fell.
Men did not feel them.
But atoms responded, sucking up the particles of energy, storing them greedily to give them forth later, in a blind vengeance of the inanimate upon the yet—alive. Men felt the fist, the heat, but not the unseeable death that rode in swift consort with the explosion.
River City, from the Cathedral on St. Paul Street to the water, from Swan Island to Willowgrove Road, a mile-sized are, with all the great skyscrapers it contained, was nothing. A flat place, incandescent.
Green Prairie, from Washington to the river, from Slossen’s Run to the tip of Simmons Park, was gone. Forever gone. A vapor in the heavens. Plains restored, strewn with indecipherable rubble, with deadly fractions of nothing.