John Sandford - Shock Wave

They continued running, bent over, up the hill; another hundred yards and Virgil waved O’Hara down, and to a stop. Standing slowly, he looked over the top of the corn, and immediately saw Wyatt walking up to the front of the old farmhouse. He appeared to be empty-handed. Virgil said, quietly, “He’s going inside. We couldn’t find anything in there…”

“If we get right under the house, we could hear what he’s doing,” O’Hara said.

“Let’s get a little closer, anyway,” Virgil said. Now they were virtually crawling, as fast as they could. Another fifty yards, and they stopped, and both popped up their heads. Wyatt had unlocked the front door. There was no porch, so he had to boost himself inside.

Virgil sat down and got his cell phone and called Shrake: “We might have something going. You guys head south on 71. About six blocks out of town…”

He pushed to his knees, watching the house, as he gave directions to Shrake, O’Hara beside him.

The shock wave, when the house exploded, nearly knocked them down.

When the house went, it wasn’t at all like watching a slow-mo, where the building bulges, and then flies apart, or sags, and falls into a heap. The house went like an oversized firecracker: BOOM! And it was gone.

Virgil pushed O’Hara flat, covered his head with his hands, and covered her head with his right arm and elbow. She tried to push away so she could look up and he shouted, “No, no, cover your head, cover your head.”

She looked at him like he was crazy, and then the first chunk of plank landed a few feet away, and then the heavy thunk of masonry, maybe a piece of the old brick chimney, and then all kinds of trash, small pieces of wood and dirt and stone and shingles and concrete, some of it no bigger across than a little fingernail, but some of it the size of a bathtub.

She caught on and curled up, covering her head, and the debris kept coming down for what seemed like a full minute, and may have been. Virgil heard several large pieces land, stuff that could have killed them.

Then it all went silent, and O’Hara stirred and did a push-up, and said, “Oh my God,” just like a Valley girl.

They both got to their knees. Other than the foundation, there was no sign of the house from where they were. The superstructure had vanished. Wyatt’s champagne-colored Prius was still sitting there, but it had no windows.

Virgil stood up and walked toward the house, while O’Hara started screaming into her cell phone. A minute later, Virgil’s cell phone rang, and he absently took it out of his pocket, said, “Yeah?”

“This is Shrake. There’s been a hell of an explosion. That wasn’t you, was it?”

“Yeah. Wyatt just left for the moon,” Virgil said. “Where are you?”

“Five minutes away. Jenkins says he can see the dust cloud. We’re coming.”

Virgil clicked off, heard O’Hara talking to Ahlquist, and then she clicked off and caught up with him. They passed the car, which had been turned probably thirty degrees sideways. The near side had been torn to pieces by shrapnel from the house. Where the house had been, there was nothing but a hole in the ground.

Virgil thought, almost idly, No more spiderwebs…

“Was it an accident?” O’Hara asked. “Or did he do it on purpose? Maybe he figured you had him…”

There were sirens everywhere and the first patrol car blew past the subdivision at the bottom of the hill, coming fast. Virgil was aware that the car looked hazy-that everything looked hazy-and he realized that he was walking through an enormous cloud of dust, which was still raining down on them. O’Hara’s red hair was turning gray with the dirt, and he was sure his was, too.

He took her by the elbow and said, “Come on, we’ve got to get out of the dust.”

She resisted. “What about Wyatt?”

“Elvis has left the building,” Virgil said. “Or maybe, the building has left Elvis. And we’re breathing in all kinds of bad shit, maybe including little pieces of asbestos, or glass fibers, if the place had insulation. We’ve got to get out of the cloud. Cover your mouth and nose with your shirt.”

Using their shirts as masks, they walked down the track to the county road; the patrol car turned into the track, and Virgil waved them off. The car stopped, and they walked down to it, and Virgil said, “Pop the back door, let us in. Keep your window up.”

They got in the back, and Virgil told the deputy about the dust, and then about Wyatt.

The deputy asked O’Hara, “So you guys think he’s dead?”

“I think he was vaporized,” O’Hara said. “I think he somehow touched off everything he had left. It was like… it was like the movies they showed us in Iraq. It was like an IED.”

Virgil asked the deputy to take him back to his truck. As they rode over, he called Shrake and said, “Wait a bit before you try to go up the hill. That dust cloud may be toxic. I’m parked on the highway. I’ll meet you there.”

Shrake and Jenkins arrived two minutes later, and more patrol cars came along, and were waved off, and then a fire truck. Rubberneckers were piling up on the highway, and Virgil sent a couple of the cops to keep them moving. Then Ahlquist came in, and a moment later, Barlow. They stood on the shoulder of the road, watching the dissipating dust cloud, and Barlow said, “If it took out a whole house, that was probably the rest of it.”

“That’s what I said,” O’Hara told him.

Ahlquist asked, “No chance that he got out? That he set off a timer thing, then went out the far side and ran out through the corn to the other side?”

Virgil said, “No.”

Shrake said, “You sound pretty sure of that.”

“I am,” Virgil said.

“Suicide by cop,” Barlow said. “He knew you were coming, and took the easy way out.”

“I think we can go up there,” Virgil said. The cloud was thinning, under a light westerly breeze.

They drove up the hill in a long caravan, with the fire truck trailing behind. They found a hole, but no sign of Wyatt.

“If it killed him, his head should be around here somewhere,” Barlow said, and Virgil remembered what the deputy had said the first night he was in town. O’Hara remembered it, too, and looked at Virgil and nodded.

“Then we need to get some people together to walk the field,” Virgil said. “We had bricks coming down eighty yards out, so if we.. . you know, his head shouldn’t have gone much further than that.”

Barlow looked at him, but nodded.

Ahlquist pointed at a deputy and told him to get some cops and start walking the field. Barlow walked over and looked in the hole, the former cellar. He shook his head. “Damn good thing we didn’t go down that basement. The thing must have been unstable-or maybe it was set to blow if anyone found it.”

Virgil: “You think the bomb was in the basement?”

Barlow nodded. “I know it was. If it had been upstairs, the floor would have been blown into the basement. But the explosion was below the floor, and everything went straight up. That’s why the basement’s so clean. The whole building, including the floor, went out.”

He added, “You two were lucky. You were down below the shrapnel line and partly sheltered by that foundation. About nine thousand pounds of shrapnel blew right over your heads.”

“And you think that was the whole stash of Pelex,” Ahlquist said.

“Just about had to be, to do this kind of damage,” Barlow said. He looked around and shook his head. “I need to get pictures of this. This is something we don’t see very often.”

The cops were walking the field, slowly, looking behind every cornstalk. Virgil got his Nikon and a short zoom, and walked around the blast zone, documenting the effects of the explosion at Barlow’s direction-and Barlow wanted three shots of everything, at slightly different exposures.