He halted, mouth open. “Mister,” she said, “will you help me get on my feet?”
He tried to. But when he reached down for where her arm should have been he felt gritty pulp and looked and it was just coming through her coat sleeve. She saw it, too, and screamed; he could hear her screaming all the way to his own lawn.
He went around the house once. It was on fire in several places. There was no sign of life.
He wasn’t even sure his mother had been at home anyway. She’d said something about having to shop.
To shop.
He spun around. From the heart of the city, a great smoke was rising. Beneath it, lighting its base, was fire. Somewhere he’d read that, in twenty minutes, the fire storm would come. The whole center of the city. You had at least twenty minutes to get clear, but then the temperatures rose with the holocaust. To six thousand degrees.
He thought, desperately, of a car. He rushed to the garage. Its second floor had fallen down and over the four great doors. There’d been a car under the porte-cochere. He ran there. It was burning. Had to get out. Twenty minutes. He must have wasted ten already.
He went fleetly north across the square, through its park, noticing nothing this time, sliding and getting his balance without looking, stepping on stones, boards, bricks, soft things—
indiscriminately.
All Nora knew, for sure, when the ground jumped, was that the atomic bomb must have hit.