Manx- Kids Survive ANFO

  The little girl with the flukeworm mouth had been thrown into the door of a shop on the corner: Charlie’s Costume Carnival! It—she—sat against the door, shaking her head as if to clear it. Vic saw that the white plastic sack of ANFO had, somehow, wound up between the girl’s ankles.

  ANFO, Vic thought—the word had achieved the quality of a mantra—and she leaned over and grabbed the backpack, still tangled on the rear peg. She slipped it loose, hung it on her shoulder, and put a leg over the bike.
...

  The child who had been tossed into the doors of Charlie’s Costume Carnival was sitting up now. She bent forward, reaching out for the white plastic sack of ANFO by her feet.

  There was a white flash.

  The explosion caused the air to ripple and warp with heat, and Vic believed for a moment that it would lift the bike off the road and fling it into the air.

  Every window on the street exploded. The white flash became a giant ball of flame. Charlie’s Costume Carnival caved in and slid apart in an avalanche of flaming brickwork and a snowstorm of glittering, pulverized glass. The fire belched out across the street, picked up a dozen children as if they were sticks, and tossed them into the night. Cobblestones erupted from the road and launched themselves into the air.

  The moon opened its mouth to cry out in horror, its one great eye bulging in fury—and then the shockwave hit the false sky and the whole thing wobbled, like an image reflected in a fun-house mirror. The moon and stars and clouds dissolved into a field of white electrical snow. The blast carried down the street. Buildings shuddered. Vic inhaled a lungful of burned air, diesel smoke, and powdered brick. Then the wavering repercussions of the blast faded and the sky flickered back into being.
...

  She looked back toward the debris field that had been the market square. She needed a moment to register—to accept—what she was seeing. First one child, then another, then a third emerged from the smoke, coming down the road after her. One of them was still smoking, hair charred. Others were sitting up across the street. Vic saw a boy thoughtfully brush glass out of his hair. He should’ve been dead, had been picked up and thrown into a brick wall, every bone in his body should’ve been smashed into chips, but there he was, getting to his feet, and Vic found that her weary mind was not entirely surprised by this development. The children caught in the explosion had been dead even before the bomb detonated, of course. They were not any more dead now—or any less inclined to stop coming after her.

- Triumph: Beneath the Great Tree