John Birmingham - After America

And then the bomb detonated.

All ten of them did at the same time.

The four buildings flew apart as though constructed of honeycomb and icing sugar. The blast atomized massive slabs of thick gray concrete, blowing them outward, removing a significant supporting structure from the overall building, which began to collapse in on itself with a volcanic roar. The three special operators were four blocks away, high in a residential tower, but Milosz could feel the destructive power of the strike in his very guts, under layers of Kevlar and ballistic plate.

"Goddamn," Wilson hooted. "Didn't I say that'd be sweet?"

Gardener placed a pair of binoculars to her eyes and smiled.

"When you want the job done, send a grunt. When you want it done properly, call the United States Air Force. The best is yet to come, gentlemen. Observe. This is a little trick we learned from our jihadi brethren."

Milosz watched where she pointed at half a dozen undamaged buildings out of which hundreds, maybe a thousand or more enemy fighters were now fleeing. Lieutenant Colonel Porter frowned as he banked his plane around and lined up for the incendiary run.

It didn't seem fair that the first time they'd been allowed to get medieval on these cheeky little fuckers, the weather had shut down any chance of him enjoying the spectacle. Indeed, he had to wonder whether this next phase of the mission was even worth bothering with, given the wet conditions on the ground. He waited, expecting orders to scrub, but the radio link to Fort Lewis remained silent.

"We have good uplink data for the second package," his weapons officer reported.

"Release on my mark," said Havoc. "Aaand… mark!"

Hundreds of incendiary bombs fell away from the cavernous interior of the fuselage, whistling down toward the streets of Manhattan, where the survivors of the bunker buster attack had flooded into the open to escape what they thought must be an inevitable second strike. As Milosz watched, a strange and unexpected sick feeling churning his stomach, the swarm of antlike creatures pouring into the streets around Rockefeller Center were suddenly consumed in a volcanic eruption. Hundreds of firebombs rained down on them, ringing the pocket of the city into which they had been carefully penned by the fighting of the previous days. Vast, apocalyptic rivers of flame, hundreds of feet high, poured through the canyons, washing over the tiny creatures below, wiping them from the face of the earth.

Even at this distance from the carnage it sounded like the end of the world. An epic rip in the fabric of things as the world tore itself asunder and the flames of hell came gushing out.

"Is very much like Dante's Inferno. Or perhaps Towering Inferno. Except down on the ground," said Milosz.

Technical Sergeant Gardener put an arm around him and gave the Polish commando an unexpected squeeze.

"You're quite the poet, aren't you, Freddy?"

Texas Administrative Division Just a minute or two before Miguel had been riding over flat, dry ground, but his horse was now splashing through a wide racing stream, a filthy torrent befouled with the churned-up mud and manure left in the wake of the herd. To his right, only dimly visible in the ferocity of the storm, two thousand head of cattle plunged wildly through the rising water, bellowing their distress and unbridled terror. Riders added their cries to the caterwauling din, Sofia among them.

He was wild with fear for her, which was made worse by his utter powerlessness. The flood had come up so quickly and the storm was so intense, he was completely cut off from her on the other side of of the panicked, stampeding herd.

"Come left, come left," he yelled to D'Age, who had surged just a little ahead of him.

There was slightly higher ground out there. But the Mormon was too far ahead, lost in the savagery of the tempest. The valley channeled the worst of the storm's power right over them, and in its folds strange, contrary twisters and sudden shifts of wind direction did their worst to disorient him. How would Sofia be coping? Was she even still alive, or had she been swept from the saddle and trampled already? The one thin hope to which he could cling was the memory of her and Trudi Jessup spurring on for slightly higher ground before the worst of the storm hit them. Trudi was a good woman, he knew. She would not let any harm come to Sofia if she could help it at all.

Dark shapes peeled off the herd as cattle bolted in all directions, driven mad by their panic. Miguel could feel Flossie's terror in every twitching sinew and muscle. He began to ease her away from the black, heaving mass of the stampede, leaning her toward the slightly higher ridgeline he knew was somewhere to their left.

But the water piled up beneath them with shocking speed. The flood had started as a stream down at her fetlock and risen quickly. As they attempted to escape the churning rapids, they plunged into a trough, the roiling gray ice water suddenly splashing the horse's flanks, soaking in through Miguel's boots and pants. He felt the powerful mare lose her footing once or twice as the water threatened to sweep her away. A lesser rider might have dug in the spurs or whipped her with a crop, but Miguel leaned forward through the howling squall and laid his head down by hers, patting her straining neck, squeezing with his knees, reassuring the animal that he was still there and still in charge. He was the master of her destiny. Not the storm.

The roar of the torrent was huge now, a crescendo overwhelming all else. The rumbling thunder of the stampede was gone, washed away by the white-water rapids. Miguel thought he might have heard human screams once or twice, but so cut off was he from his fellow riders, so perfectly isolated within the fury of this instant hurricane, that he could not tell whether he alone survived at that moment.

Flossie struggled and wrestled against the flood, gaining purchase with her hooves, then losing it, then finding a foothold again. Just as it seemed she might tire and succumb, Miguel felt her connect with solid earth again, somewhere down below the rushing water, and with a titanic heave she launched herself up out of the death grip of the flood and onto the slight rise.

"Go, girl, go, go," the cowboy cried, urging her on.

The great beast, the finest of his mounts, repaid his faith in her, pushing onward and upward, finding a small, gentle ridgeline submerged beneath just a foot of water.

He reined her in then lest they plunge into greater depths again.

A longhorn appeared out of the white squall, bawling with fear, charging for them. Before Miguel could turn Flossie around, she saw the danger and veered, increasing her speed. He could see that a collision was inevitable, though. The steer was going to broadside them in just a few seconds.

Miguel acted without thought, whipping out his saddle gun and blasting the animal in the head. It roared with agony and outrage, half its face torn away by the Lupara, but just as it seemed as though momentum might carry it into them anyway, the beast's front legs buckled and it tumbled end over end, a thousand pounds of muscle, meat, and bone crunching into the ground, throwing up a massive fantail of floodwater.

Miguel felt his bowels tighten and shudder with the shock of near death. The horse whinnied her alarm but had sense enough to thread herself quickly around the airborne steer. She found good purchase on the small rise and galloped on. Miguel thought to rein her in, then decided to trust the animal's instincts. She was probably better suited than he to surviving this.

On they raced for a few minutes more, Flossie following the natural rise of the land and only once or twice plunging into unexpected depths, drenching them both again. Miguel kept his head down and his attention focused on the remains of the herd to his right. He strained with all his might to make out some sign of his daughter through the violence and chaos, but there was nothing. As the wind and rain finally began to abate, it became clear that few of the cattle remained. The hellish squall faded back to a hard downpour, and finally he was able to see more than a few feet in any direction. A river now ran off to his right, a violent, roiling dark brown flow in which floated the carcasses of dozens of dead animals, most of them cattle but also a few horses, some still saddled, and one sheep, bloated with gas, its four legs pointed skyward.