Utopia by LIncoln Child

“For a millisecond, silence. And then, there came a terrific double report; a concussive blast of incendiary color, a sudden flowering of fire—one within another—that stretched out into brilliant pinpoints of light, incandescent red and yellow and turquoise, a hundred tiny suns too bright and terrible too look upon. Warne felt almost violated by light. He tried to rise, but the brutal shock wave forced him back to the floor, where he lay a moment, stunned. Next he felt, or thought he felt, confetti landing around him, falling gently to earth. He lay still, trembling, eyes tight shut, afraid to move.
“For a moment, he could hear nothing, but a harsh buzzing in his ears. AS that faded, other sounds came slowly back: the rolling thunder of the salute as it echoed and reechoed deeper through the halls of C Level; the distant sound of a hundred car alarms blaring out in the employee parking lot. “I can’t see!” Peccam was crying behind him. “I can’t see!”
More sprinklers came on now, water running through Warne’s hair, down his neck, into the hollow between his shoulder blades. And then, at last, Warne pulled himself up the side of the wall, opened his eyes and looked ahead.
The truck lay as it had before, wheels slowly spinning, water trickling down its flanks in spidery streams. The stench of gunpowder and phosphorus hung heavy in the air. Shreds of money lay everywhere, covering the sides of the truck, the floors and the walls, darkening as waster soaked it. The man with the submachine gun had vanished. The truck’s open door was now awash in blood and matter and a curtain of blood ran up the wall behind it, fan-shaped and huge. Warne watched as the sprinklers traced clear lines of water though the crimson."