57
For days Carly tried to remember what the fireball had looked like, but she couldn’t. The flash had been too bright, the sight too shocking. One moment fire and runners on Steve’s tablet and a wall of fire marching across the landscape. The next? Nothing but white.
In that instant, the sky outside the Firehawk’s windshield had lit like daylight. The evening dark blasted away for a moment by an impossible brightness.
Beale had had them hovering well north of the ridge and low, placing them two miles from the blast center, and they’d pulled back all of the ground crews as well. For a long moment, the clouds of ash and smoke above the ridge had been brilliantly lit from within, shining like an evil beacon in the falling night.
Then the darkness had returned.
The shock wave arrived sec
