And
1
The skyscraper came down in a column of brown-grey dust that swallowed the street whole.
The sound of it arrived a second late and when it did I felt it in my back teeth and my sternum and somewhere deep in my chest.
The shockwave pushed a wall of dust outward in every direction and I pressed my arm across my face and turned my head and rode it out.
Then silence.
Relative silence. The kind that followed enormous sounds.
The dust was everywhere— everything brown, everything obscured, the whole city transformed into a fog of pulverized concrete and debris that reduced visibility to about three meters in any direction.
I went down into it, holding my jacket across my nose, and moved toward where the building had been.
Something moved in the shadow.
The giant, or what was left of it. On its side, partially buried, one enormous tusk driven into the pavement by the impact.
