As the city began to wake around me I plugged into the energy field surrounding me. The field had been more powerful at night, solar radiation seemed to dampen it a bit. The energy field was still immensely powerful, certainly powerful enough for my purposes

To get a better view of the city and to be closer to dropped bomb, I walked up to the bridge and sat on one of the stone spans, couched in invisibility. Extending my consciousness upwards, I listened to the radio waves and radar pulsations.

Although tuned into the airwaves, I silently watched what transpired around me. The bridge became a hub of activity, as people began traveling across it and going to work, as civilian clerks in the Castle or at the Shima medical clinic down the road.

A group of children trooped past me and towards the firebreaks on either side of the Aioi bridge. They were supposed to continue tearing down homes and building the fire breaks. I hoped for their sakes and for the sakes of the other innocents I could stop the bomb.

One little girl did a double take as she passed where I sat shrouded in an invisibility aura on the bridge span.

At 7:10, according the wrist watch of the Japanese scientist whose body I wore, the air raid sirens sounded over Hiroshima. A single plane circled once over Hiroshima and left.

This plane was the STRAIGHT FLUSH, the scouting plane for the bomb plane. I heard a bit of their conversation whenever they were struck by radio waves either from radio stations or from radar. There was a huge cloud cover over Japan, yet just over Hiroshima, there was a rent in the clouds some ten miles wide.

Sunlight shone down through the rent and upon Hiroshima like a beacon of light from heaven. The fliers took this as a good omen that God wanted them to blast the Japs. They sent a coded message, "Advice: bomb primary target"

At 7:31 the all clear sounded in Hiroshima. I felt some measure of sadness and impotence when I saw a Kempei Tai patrol leading ten of the escaped American Prisoners of War back to the Castle. They were quite brutal in their treatment, several of the men seemed to have been beaten severely. I wished I could do something but needed to reserve my strength.

At 8:00 I heard a great commotion coming from the grounds of Hiroshima Castle as many of the 40,000 soldiers stationed there began their morning calisthenics.

At the opposite end of the Aioi bridge I saw a flamboyantly dressed officer riding a white stallion ride towards the bridge at a gentle trot. He would soon cross the bridge and pass directly in front of me.

At 8:13 I felt the radar pulsations in Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters pick up three large enemy planes, heading west from Saijo towards Hiroshima. They were about ten miles away.

At 8:15 Hiroshima radio throbbed through my ears announcing that the three planes were over Hiroshima.

I saw them diving towards the ground.

The flamboyantly dressed officer was halfway across the bridge, still trotting leisurely.

On the fire lanes, supervisors blew on their whistles warning the children working outside to seek immediate shelter.

One of the airplanes dropped a deadly seed.

Throwing caution to the wind, I dove into the energy ocean and let it carry me over the edge. The power ripped away my invisibility and I shone with St. Elmo's fire.

The horse saw me and reared, the rider spun and grabbed its reins to bring it under control.

My mind dove into the falling bomb. I could do nothing about the radiation but I saw that there was a slight chance I could stop the bomb from detonating. The bomb was equipped with several fail safes and my understanding of the bomb's workings was almost nonexistent but there was a chance.

Once all the fail safes had been triggered the detonator was activated, the detonator was built much like a gun. A charge of gunpowder would propel an uranium slug down a fifty two inch barrel at nine hundred feet per second. As the slug traveled its short trip down the barrel a small device of polonium would emit neutrons starting a chain reaction in the uranium slug. The activated and charged uranium slug would then slam into a ring of uranium and create atomic explosion.

Using all the power at my command, I encased every particle of gunpowder in the bomb casing with a telekinetic shield and did not allow one electric particle to reach it.

I also surrounded the bomb itself with a telekinetic shield which would cushion its landing.

The bomb fell with a tremendous subsonic whine.

At 8:16 nine foot long bomb plunged into the fire break, leaving a huge impact crater. The force of the impact traveled back through the energy field and slammed into my brain with the concussive force of a sledge hammer against my skull. My mental grip on the bomb shattered.

Blackness descended for a second. Pushing the pain aside I resumed my mental hold on the bomb. The concussive shock had torn away my powers.

The officer on the white stallion screamed and charged me, cavalry sword flashing in the early morning sunlight. I was quite visible and my skeletal head atop a body wearing a bloody smock must have looked demonic.

Drop-kicking the officer off of his horse, I stole his mount and urged the white stallion into a gallop towards the bomb crater, determined to reach it before anyone else could monkey around with it.

I would have to finish disarming the bomb by hand.

While riding towards the bomb a tingle crept across my brain as the bomb's radiation revived my powers to some extent.

The chatter of the American planes overhead tickled my ears. "Little Boy was stillborn. Repeat, Little Boy was stillborn" This code informed their home base that the bomb was a dud.

At about 8:17 I arrived at the bomb crater seconds before anyone else, although some children were running towards the thing. Despite the impact crater's size, the bomb was still intact, thanks to my force field about it at the time of impact.

Jumping off the horse, I slid down the baking hot dirt of the impact crater. Tapping into the city's energy field, I felt only a trickle of the vast power I had experienced before.

The field had not changed, I had. I was aware of it pulsing in a vast ocean of power but I could only hand dip out of it. Channeling a bit of energy into my fingers I plunged my fingers into the black and green metal of the bomb's skin and ripped the casing open. After tossing the torn metal away my hands plunged towards the bomb's innards but a large rock smacked into my right hand breaking it.

Foolishly, I turned and was hit with another large rock, this one careened off of my skull and broke my concentration.

The little girl who had spotted me as I sat on the bridge stood at the lip of the impact crater shouting down at me.

I felt her power strongly then, she was linked to me by my blood. I do not know how or why, just that she was. She called me an Ini, a demon, and rained stones upon me. Ducking a stone thrown directly at my eyes, my borrowed heart skipped a beat when the stone hit the open bomb casing and sparked the gunpowder.

The uranium slug slammed its way down the barrel. Using all of the minute mental energy I could muster I placed a barrier between the uranium pieces. Ignoring the constant barrage of abuse and thrown rocks from the little girl, I concentrated on keeping the uranium pieces apart. The chain reaction had already started so I siphoned the excess energy into myself, making me glow with a radiant blue aura. Shutting out the world I pushed the uranium pieces even farther apart as the chain reaction increased.

A particularly large rock hit the base of my neck, popping me from my borrowed body.

For a split second my powers cut off. It was a split second too long.

The activated uranium slammed into the uranium ring.

Instead of wasting time attempting to stop the inevitable explosion, I concentrated on saving the one life that I could. My mental shield reached out and covered the little girl, I dove into the energy field hoping to somehow bring in the little girl and shield her from the effects of the bomb.

A pinprick of purplish red light, with me at the center grew hundreds of feet wide. The energy field around me was swept aside as a tsunami of energy crashed upon me.

My eyes saw only white light. A second of immeasurable pain and my eyes and brain melted, my spine and vocal chords sizzled away and my skull bones charred into carbon dust. I became ash, ashes which were vaporized into atomic nuclei, yet I remained conscious and aware.

As the nuclear explosive force obliterated me I held onto my consciousness. In the center of the explosion, in the fission fissure, many things became clear to me at once. You could say I had an explosive insight.

On that day in 1870, when my partners killed me I had ceased to exist as a physical being. My mind, my soul, my will had unconsciously used the radioactive forces in the air, earth and water to make myself into a being of energy. I had never been tied to my body, I had become what many people mistakenly call a ghost. It was only superstitious attachment and a deep dread of dying which had bound me to my body.

On that day in 1870 I could have left my old life behind, I could have left this world and wandered the cosmos, exploring the universe in all it's glory. Instead, I had dreamed small, I had thought only of revenge and had lost my chance for enlightenment.

In the lingering second after the explosion, I knew that I still had options to continue my existence as an discorporeal energy being or save as many innocents of Hiroshima as I could.

By using the explosion's own energy I could, if not prevent it, alter it so that the casualties would not be so high. My consciousness, the energy of my very being would fuel this process which would strip me atom by atom to nothingness.

The child I held in stasis sobbed, opening a floodgate of my memories.

My four partners and their associates, all their faces contorted in the agonized deaths I had gifted them.

Hundreds of bodies lying on the ground, the bountiful harvests of my ambition and callousness, the massacres at Little Big Horn, Wounded Knee and a dozen other sites of carnage I had manipulated into being.

There came before me a parade of men whom I had beheaded and whose bodies I had stolen for mere conveyances.

The photographs of Treblinka, Belsen, Auschwitz and other death camps, which I had unwittingly caused.

Finally I became aware the destruction that went on at that very moment.

From the impact crater outwards for the distance of a mile, everything was vaporized. Some 120,000 people vanished in the blink of an eye. Flash fires started at the distance of five miles, everything combustible in that range, including living flesh, burst into flame. Screaming, living torches ran through the streets, through an inferno of miles of flaming buildings.

The shockwave leveled buildings as far away as ten miles. Thousands more would die as the buildings crumpled.

All told, of the 320,000 people in Hiroshima barely ten thousand survived the blast. Most of these would die of radiation poisoning in the days to come.

Reaching out with my consciousness, I felt Captain Brann near the Army airfield. He was burnt alive, his skin a living pyre yet he did not die. My blood link which had strengthened him, given him youth and vitality, now kept him alive as his flesh was incinerated, enveloped in a unquenchable fire. He would slowly die over the course of

several days as the flames, moving at the pace of a coal fire, charred and cindered his tissues to ash.

Gathering my will and strength, I encased the vast burning energy at the core of the mushroom sun inside my being. The heat was hotter than the core of the sun and I felt as a man dropped into molten metal must feel, only I did not vaporize, my agony continued, growing with every second.

Channeling the energy, I pushed the inferno in on itself and thrust upwards. I cannot describe the physics of what happened, since there are no formulas to explain it, besides it was impossible by any current theories of physics.

While containing the explosion, I pushed it upwards away from the ground.

Slowly the explosion rose and in doing so it contracted. As the explosion collapsed upon itself, the core grew hotter. To prevent another fission reaction, I siphoned more of the excess heat into my consciousness now composed of energy waves and particles. The excess heat devoured my energy as my dampening kept the heat from expanding.

I noticed something peculiar, as the explosion slowly rose the devastation reversed.
 

Slowly the disintegrated and burning buildings faded back into being as they lad been before the explosion. Atom by atom vaporized human beings reappeared. It was a film running backwards and developing all at the same time.

I was not so much negating the effects of the explosion as I was reversing them. As the explosion moved upwards, energy collapsed in on it, including the temporal energy which Einstein had theorized but never isolated.

Time moved backwards as the explosion moved upwards.

As I pushed the explosion upwards, the core shrank even more rapidly, the core burned ever more hotter increasing the rate at which I was being destroyed.

At a eight hundred feet, I had to eject the little girl, Fushida Eiko from the energy field, although I maintained enough power about her to shield her from the explosion. She lay there unaware of anything transpiring, since she had been taken out of the temporal loop earlier she would find her self standing in front of Shima Hospital without knowing how she had gotten there.

At a thousand feet above the ground, my energy, my being was shriveling away, the scorching torture nearly ripped away what little control I retained. Yet I strove onward and upwards, feeling more of myself obliterated with every inch the bomb explosion rose.

Each of my atoms destroyed was stripped of its energy and bonded to the fission reaction before becoming annihilated, feeding the very explosion I fought to contain. The agony was unbearably and exquisitely intense and yet, so seductive. I wanted to give into the pain, let my consciousness be consumed, consecrated and consummated by the atomic flame in one last resplendent burst of being.

Although certainly overheated, I did not succumb to passion, my mind's particles continued flaring into a brilliant scintillas before vanishing forever into entropy. A living string of firecrackers, I hoped I would finish my work before the final pop.

At fifteen hundred feet I knew I would not be able to lift the bomb high enough to prevent any damage at all. I hoped that it would be high enough for damage to be minimal.

At sixteen hundred feet my cohesion faltered, my mind was literally becoming scattered and lost. Desperately, I used the girl's mind as template and as an anchor, holding myself together just a bit longer.

At seventeen hundred feet only a few flecks of me remained, the bomb's energy was just too vast, it had annihilated almost every particle of my being.

At eighteen hundred feet all but one particle of my being had flared into oblivion. Using the girl's mind I melded the residue of my consciousness into hers and gave the bomb a final push.

At eighteen hundred and ninety feet I was entirely annihilated. Only the ghostly imprints of my consciousness in the girl's mind sustained the shield about her.

The explosion I had held in check burst forth anew. It was now once again 8:15 a.m. My final thought is that I hope that somehow, some way the girl will remember me.

Below me, a baby cries in a familiar trumpeting wail.

Distantly, I hear three planes fly away.

Go to Section Six

All the material on these web pages or any other material relating to the character of El Head are copyrighted by Dennis E. Power ©1997 Dennis E. Power. All Rights Reserved.
Character of El Head ©1996 created by David Rush. All Rights Reserved.
 All of the persons, places and items on the El Head pages are imaginary. Any resemblance to any existing place or product is done only for purposes of fictional verisimilitude and should not be taken as an endorsement of said product or place.
Any resemblence to any person living, dead or somewhere in between is merely coincidental.

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