Windkill

Indian burial mounds.

The bunkers reminded Dolan of the Indian burial mounds he saw in Minneapolis overlooking the Mississippi River. Burial mounds with steel doors.

The shock was nearly overwhelming. There must have been enough time between the initial and second explosions for the people in the area to look up and see the growing ball of flame; perhaps an initial intake of breath to scream then oblivion before exhaling.

He neared the gap between two bunkers where another crater, smaller than the first, marked the location of a destroyed bunker.

The concussion wave would have killed these people, slamming them to the ground with the force of a train running at full speed. He could almost envision the concussion wave flash over them as a wall of compressed air turning white as it traveled. The ammunition on rail cars detonated, sending more fireballs into the air, the rag dolls of workers flung to the whim of the forces unleashed.

The shock dissipated and the new feeling grew as he imagined a line of explosions flowing across the valley from the exposed ammunition in front of each bunker. Small munitions and large sending out a spray of lethal shrapnel. Colored blossoms of death.

He could taste the emotion. It was so elemental; he wondered why he had not known it was coming. Walking east, he marveled at the destruction his mind envisioned. This was not something he could imagine. Never, in his wildest dreams, could he known the varying color of incendiaries and explosives. In thousands of stuttering moments, he was seeing what the victims of that horrid day saw during the last fraction of a second of life.

The people at the last explosion had enough time to feel fear. The fear was so great that it had frozen most of them to the spot as death approached as a concussion wave followed by a fireball. Fear that watched trains weighing tens of tons fly like kingpins, and buildings dissolve into the onslaught.

Dolan could feel himself in the concussion wave, voices disappearing from the din in his mind as he approached the final cataclysm.