Free Bombshell by James Reich

remake her flesh, to violate the soft atomic code of her skin.
    As flames gathered in her stove, she thought of the wildfires that had threatened Los Alamos nine months ago, the wildfires that she had set in solidarity with her remote Ukrainian Amazon sisters who had started fires in the forest regions of Russia, the forest lands where fallout from Chernobyl had settled. The ash from these new fires was dispersed as far as Moscow, where a gray pall descended upon Red Square and the lurid minarets and bright bricks of the Kremlin. The people continued to work and shop, wearing white cotton masks across their faces. They were not told immediately of the origin of the ash and what the sickening smoke might contain. Broken only by thunderstorms, a nuclear autumn had come to Mother Russia. The reportage of the so-called wildfires only briefly expressed the fear that the spreading blaze could agitate 1986’s contaminated earth, and that the fallout could be revived by the burning winds, before that imagery was suppressed. Here, Cash reflected, was a continental militant strike achieved with nothing morethan one box of matches and favorable weather. At Los Alamos, nuclear materials were stored under tarpaulins in the open air. Even from forty miles away, from the slag heaps of Madrid, Cash could watch the fires consuming fir trees in columns of flame and closing in on the site and its drums of radioactive waste. She did not want the fires to reach the corroding barrels of plutonium, only for a blast wave of panic to rinse the landscape. Yet, if they did, she was prepared. Death was coming to America, inexorably, by generations of poison slipping from radioactive topsoil into the Rio Grande, from the gentle glitter of strontium clouds, and from the creep of cesium in young bones. Or it might come suddenly, carelessly. Perhaps it could not be stopped. And as much as she set her will against it, she knew also that she embodied it. She was, as she thought of herself, the atrocity to conclude atrocities. There would and must be deaths, but not yet.
    According to Valerie Solanas:
    â€œBoth destruction and killing will be selective and discriminate. SCUM is against half-crazed, indiscriminate riots, with no clear objective in mind, and in which many of your own kind are picked off. SCUM will never instigate, encourage, or participate in riots of any kind or any other form of indiscriminate destruction. SCUM will coolly, furtively, stalk its prey and quietly move in for the kill. Destruction will never be such as to block off routes needed for the transportation of food or other essential supplies, contaminate or cut off the water supply, block streets and traffic to the extent that ambulances can’t get through or impede the functioning of hospitals.”
    It was evening before Cash felt well enough to work on the improvised rocket-propelled petrol bomb she had intended to launch, and shefound herself too depleted to make even the short journey to the north of Santa Fe that she had imagined. Cash called her petrol bomb the Harry K. Daghlian Jr. Memorial Rocket, and it was to be launched at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Area G facilities. It would shriek above the trees and across the barbed-wire fences, leaving a comet’s tail of bright green sparks. Where it crashed, the gasoline would ignite and start a fire close to the plutonium barrels. Attached to it would be a small metal canister. This she intended to survive the fire, but to be discovered by forensics investigators almost immediately. Inside the canister, shining from the scorched earth, agitating the leaching radiation in the dirt, they would find a Xeroxed photograph of Harry Daghlian’s radiation-burnt palm and his wretched fingers. She had little sympathy for Daghlian, a man who had irradiated himself in one of the deathly waves of 1945. He perished from radiation poisoning after dropping a tungsten carbide brick upon a plutonium core at Los