The Murdered World 19

Angel carried himself to the bed before the strength left his legs. He sat there, blood running down his chest in rivers, trickling from the stumps of his fingers like tears. He watched as the rocket’s flame became one more light among the many jeweling his glorious city at night.

His kingdom. His empire. His Miami.

In a beat of Angel’s gradually slowing heart, it was not there anymore. There was only white. And the glimpse he got of that whiteness burned Angel’s eyes from their sockets.

***

Christina pulled Emma along until she ran with her, not bothering to pull up her dress, though she hardly noticed the pang of her bouncing breasts in the rush of flight. They ran through the third floor, down to the second floor, where an errant guard trained his gun on them but stopped himself from firing just in time.

“Why are you topless?” he asked before Frank came down the stairs behind them, his Browning up and firing, taking the guard in the forehead and nailing the shrapnel of his skull to the wall behind him.

Emma screamed, but she kept moving, and they descended to the first floor.

Emma couldn’t keep up. The roller-coaster sequence of events had left her no energy, no strength, and her hand slipped free of Christina’s pull. Christina looked back to see Frank scoop Emma up. She could only offer him a quick smile before running on, to a fireplace in the study—ironically one of the few things in the house that wasn’t scorched at this point.

There were wall sconces on either side of the fireplace. Christina pulled on one and the fireplace rotated, a secret passage, a stairway leading down into the earth.

Frank didn’t like being underground. Not since the spider holes of Afghanistan. It felt too much like going into the bowels of Hell. But that wasn’t something he had to worry about this time.

Hell was coming to them.

***

A new sun rose from the midway point of Runway 26R in Miami International Airport. It was born out of a crater that spread five hundred feet in all directions; at its center, it was seventy-five feet deep.

The sun carried up with it the Airbus A320s, the Boeing 757s, the private jets, the cargo planes, the baggage handler carts. There was no place for them on the ground anyway. The sun was six hundred yards in diameter—it stretched across two separate runways.

The steel that made up so much of the airport didn’t just melt, it was evaporated in twenty million degree heat—the same temperature at the center of the sun.

One mile away, the Brazilian paintings at the Clima Art Gallery were in flames.

Two miles away, the trees at a park burned and the grass was singed into nothing

Three miles away, a swimming pool boiled away from four thousand degree temperatures.

Everything that could burn, burnt. The blacktop of the roads was vaporized. Statues survived only as skeletal, molten shades of themselves. Car tires went up in flames, as did the upholstery inside the automobiles, not that it was noticeable when the gas tanks exploded.

Four miles away, the heat rays from the detonation stabbed through windows and ignited whatever they hit.

For seven miles, man and animal were burnt to a crisp. At the Hilton Bentley in South Beach, some of the guests and staff might survive to have their third-degree burns treated by skin grafts. At the La Quinta Inn, eight miles away, they received second-degree burns. The hotel manager choked on the fumes from the heat flash melting his coat.

Eleven miles away, many of the five hundred residents of Fisher Island, including Oprah Winfrey, were blinded by the sight of the heat flash.

Twelve miles away, at the Eden Roc Beach Resort, the night-swimmers were lucky enough to get off with a severe sunburn. If they’d been wearing more than bikinis and banana hammocks, they would’ve had more protection from the unforgiving incandescence. As it was, they had to count their blessings—at least it wasn’t a nude beach.

Three seconds had passed since the new sun was born. It was greedy. It quickly claimed the sky, erasing the stars, turning the black to a shade of orange that could only be found at the center of a pyre. It silenced every car horn, every song, every conversation, every heartbeat with a resounding sonic boom.

The sun climbed high on a stalk of sundered ash. It had not yet separated into the mushroom cloud that would hang over the flattened city for hours to come. For now, it was an amoeba, come to show the bustling metropolis how small it really was.

It grew rapidly… an ocean of fire that spent years contained within a warhead and was now allowed to flood the world. It ate up the roads, the buildings, the people. Like a bored child, it threw the planes it gathered out into the night. They fell like darts, some with their wings seared off by the sheer chaos of the windstorm blown ahead of the explosion. Then, like a glutton picking up a stray piece of food from the floor, the explosion came for them. Some didn’t even land before they were burnt out of existence.

At over two hundred miles per hour the hurricane winds and the all-consuming flames competed for wounds to inflict on the rubble, the dust, the ashes. There was precious little left after the first great wash of light that almost mercifully left many blind, unable to see what came next.

For fifty square miles, the shockwave leveled everything in its path. The population’s lungs ruptured—their eardrums burst—and they were shredded by shrapnel as the city they call home became one enormous IED. For five hundred miles, glass ceased to exist except as flying shards and sharpened dust.

The streets were cracked into powder; what wasn’t washed away by the wind was boiled into rivers of molten tar. Water pipes exploded with steam. And almost all the population of Miami was converted into black carbon smoke. Sent upward like spoils of war with the new sun, up thirty thousand feet, above the rain clouds that would otherwise wash them away, to catch the high-altitude jet streams that will spread this black smoke over the northern hemisphere.

From space, it looked as if the Earth has simply split open and started to bleed. Not all of the one hundred and twenty thousand people who died contributed to the harvest, but many of the three hundred and eighty-two thousand who were injured donated scraps of clothing, peeled skin, or burnt hair to the cloud.

Those tons of radioactive particles were fallout; black rain that would come to fall on Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach within the next few hours. Rot from the death that Miami had died.