BZRK

a beer to dull the dullness of it all.
    “Clearly, I need a fake ID,” Sadie said, but too quietly for Tony to hear it over a load groan as a pass went sailing over the head of the receiver.
    Sadie noticed the jet only after it had already started its too-sharp turn.
    She didn’t recognize it as her father’s. Not at first. Grey wasn’t the kind of guy who would paint his plane with some company logo.
    “That plane,” she said to Tony. She poked his arm to get his attention.
    “What?”
    “Look at it. Look what it’s doing.”
    And the engine noise was wrong. Too loud. Too close.
    A frozen moment for her brain to accept the impossible as the inevitable.
    The jet would hit the stands. There was no stopping it. It was starting to pull up but way too late.
    Sadie grabbed Tony’s shoulder. Not for comfort but to get him moving. “Tony. Run!”
    Tony dug in his heels, scowled at her. Sadie was already moving and she plowed into him, knocked him over, skinned her knee right through her jeans as she tripped, but levered one foot beneath herself, stepped on Tony’s most excellent abs, pushed off, and leapt away.
    The jet roared over her head, a sound like the end of the world, except that the next sound was louder still.
    The impact buckled her knees as it earthquaked the stands.
    Then, a beat. Not silence, just a little dip in the sound storm.
    Then a new sound as tons of jet fuel ignited. A clap of thunder from a cloud not fifty feet away.
    Fire.
    Things flying through the air. Big foam fingers and the hands that had been waving them. Paper cups and popcorn and hot dogs and body parts, so many of those, tumbling missiles of gore flying through the air.
    The blast wave so overwhelming, so irresistible, that she wouldn’t even realize for several minutes that she had been thrown thirty feet, tossed like a leaf before a leaf blower, to land on her back against a seat, the impact softened by the body of a little girl. Thrown away like a doll God was tired of playing with.
    She felt the heat, like someone had opened a pizza oven inches from her face. And set off a hand grenade amid the cheese and pepperoni. The first inch of hair caught fire but was quickly extinguished as air rushed back to the vacuum of the explosion.
    The next minutes passed in a sort of loud silence. She heard none of the cries. Could no longer hear the sounds of falling debris all around her. Could hear only the world’s loudest car alarm screaming in her brain, a siren that came not from outside her head but from inside.
    Sadie rolled off the crushed form of the girl. On hands and knees between rows of seats. Something sticky squishing up through her fingers. Something red and white: bloody fat. Just a chunk of it, the size of a ham.
    Should do something, should do something
, her brain kept saying. But what? Run away? Scream?
    Now she noticed that her left arm was turned in a direction arms didn’t turn. There was no pain, just the sight of bones—her own bones—sticking through the skin of her forearm. Thin white sticks jutting from a gash filled with raw hamburger.
    She screamed. Probably. She couldn’t hear, but she felt her mouth stretch wide.
    She stood up.
    The fire was uphill from her in the stands, maybe thirty rows up. A tail fin was intact but being swiftly consumed by the oily fire. A pillar of thick, greasy smoke swirled and filled her nostrils with the stench of gas stations and barbecued meat before finding its upward path.
    The main fire burned without much color to the flame.
    Bodies burned yellow and orange.
    Unless he had been blown clear, Tony’s would be one of them.
    A fat man crawled away, pulling himself along on his elbows as fire crawled up his legs.
    A boy, maybe ten, squatted beside his mother’s head.
    Sadie realized a different scene of madness was going on behind her. She turned and saw a panicked crowd shoving and pushing like a herd of buffalo on the run from a lion.
    But others weren’t running away but walking warily toward the carnage.
    A man reached her and mouthed words at her. She touched her ear, and he seemed to get it. He looked at her broken arm and did an odd thing. He kissed his fingertips and touched them to her shoulder and moved along. Later it would seem strange. At that moment, no.
    The tail of the plane was collapsing into the fire. Through the smoke Sadie just made out the registration number. She’d already known, somewhere down in her shocked brain. The number just confirmed