Trapped, hardly sensing as a special phenomenon the blast itself, Kit picked at the split glass of a window in his car. Bricks fell in on him but the illumination increased. Frantically, he pulled in more bricks. By and by he had a hole through which he could worm his way, hands first, tossing bricks aside.
Behind, he saw the supermarket. Smoking. Here and there, in the no-man’s-land look of it, things moved. He faced around and gazed up. The mushroom cloud, boiling with what seemed cubic miles of colored fires, was spreading out. Its edge was even with the far corner of the square.
The houses near by were shattered, some smashed Hat. His: own, he could see, across the empty square and the lawns—where trees lay prostrate, their boughs still heaving—was wrecked.
Why, he wondered, was the square so empty? Then he looked again and saw the bundles of clothing, the blackened things, the charred people, the dead and the still-moving dead.
His horror mounted. He heard bricks slide and scrambled away from the buried wreck of his car. He decided he would have to walk across the square. Have to.
It was hard going. Things—just things—had dropped into the place—and, he soon realized, things were raining from the hot, spreading cloud. Part of a piano fell down and then a dead pooch hit and rolled and something like a stove lid rang on the hot asphalt. He entered the park. People were opening the doors of cars, hanging out, gasping. The ones on the ground were black. Or red. Or both. With holes, meaning mouths.
A woman in what he first thought was a red sweater, vomited, sitting up straight in her car, vomited all over her own windshield. A man got out of a car that was upside down. He fell and didn’t rise.
A door in a house opened and another man came out. A short, broad-chested man. He said something like, “Owowow-owowowowowo,” and began to run down the sidewalk, toward Kit, who stepped aside. Between the sounds he emitted, the man clicked as he ran. Every step, Kit saw, left a blood-gob on the flagstones. He saw the reason. Both the man’s feet were gone and he was running on the ends of his shinbones. That was why he seemed so short. He went a good ways, perhaps a quarter of a block, with his arms up and his fists doubled, like a track runner, and then he fell.
Kit thought of not going to his house, of going in the other direction, away from the expanding cloud. It was darkening the sky now. It looked exactly like the Technicolor newsreel shots; a bit darker, perhaps.
He began to trot. He slipped on somebody’s blood, recovered and hurried. A young woman, a pretty young woman with bright blue eyes and blonde hair sat up, right in front of him.