The blast disintegrates atoms as it spreads out from ground zero. The city of Louisville, the towns surrounding it, the villages outside them, the farms and hermit shacks and public lands stretching for hundreds of miles, felt nothing as they disappeared. They did not even remain as smears on the ground, or a hole in the Earth, they just disappeared in one great and powerful explosion.
Maybe that was too good for them. Maybe they should have felt their deaths and the pain and agony of their last moment of life.
Like she feels every moment she remembers how he died.
Birds scream out of the marshland. The material that once was air, falls from the sky in small flakes of grey ash.
And Ana watches it all, hands still tingling from the power she unleashed. Power she did not even know she was capable of until just this very moment.
She picked here because this was the largest field of wild roses in Evansville.
On his morning jog, he would gather them for her, a dozen at a time, every day from Spring until the end of Summer. He would place the dethorned roses in a cheap plastic vase on the kitchen counter, shower and head off to work. When she woke up she would enjoy their aroma all day taking one rose at a time and holding it to her face until the petals fell off.
She loves this place. She loves that the smell of roses will always remind her of him. Him with his green eyes and his broad shoulders and the little dimple when he smiled his little-crooked smile.
He never laughed, but his eyes would jump and sparkle with joy sometimes and that was good enough.
His job was too tough to smile. He saw humanity at its worst. He wore a badge and a gun and fought to bring society to heel.
He failed and was tortured to death. Now she has to live with what was done to him, what she read in the autopsy report. The report that gave her every single brutal moment of bone breaking, skin scaring, life-ending injury to play with in her mind.
The sky is red and crispy black like a bad burn and it’s like the world East beyond the roses just stopped being. She does not know how many people she killed, she doesn’t really care either. Every single living thing is going pay for her loss and his final moments of pain.
She turns to the West facing the setting sun.
She concentrates on the city of Saint Louis four hundred miles away.
The concussive wave actually makes the roses sway before the sky matches the one behind her.
He did not deserve to die.
And now no one deserves to live.
She turns North and searches for Chicago in her mind.
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