In the minutes it takes for your eyes to adjust the surface’s light you come to realize that, god, this IS it. The end of the world. You take it all in, you shouldn’t be able to smell anything through the shirt but the overwhelming miasma of an all encompassing rotting death hits your nostrils. You can only imagine if this shit hit your skin, you can see..flakes in the air. Flakes of something. The burnt soil looks like it’s breathing. Certainly not what you had in mind, you thought it was just standard bombs being dropped, this doesn’t line up.
What the hell did they do?
Looking around makes you realize the gravity of your situation, staring through the inches of dust already coating across your goggles you can see an inferno on the horizon in the distance. Right in the middle of the woods behind these houses. You take a look at your surroundings, muffled roars of gluttonous fire and screeches of rusting metal in your ears as you stare on.
Your old house was completely decimated, no tears spilled there.
Your neighbor’s place is mostly in tact, the door battered from its hinges.
There are two plumes of black smoke merely a couple feet from the hatch, there’s that dead giveaway, one comes from the wing resting precariously close to your solar panels and the other comes from the hulking mass of scrap that’s landed atop the tool shed.
But the centerpiece of this train wreck is right in front of you, Michael, impaled on your son’s favorite tree inches from your door. The tire swing sitting next to his discarded helmet, a metal pang sounds with each drop of blood that drips down onto it.
There’s no doubt about it. He’s dead. Tree straight through his organs, arm chopped off. You hope he didn’t live to feel it. You stare into the dead soldier’s eyes, swollen and bloodshot.
You find it tragic, it’s not every day a man dies so close to home. You don’t know how to feel but you know one thing.
Michael certainly isn’t what you expected either. That’s no military uniform that you’ve ever seen. Every second in this shithole raises a question.
In the minute you take to look at the corpse you can’t help but eye up his gear, his respirator, survival first, it’s practically trashed. The eyes are shattered, too many dents and bangs, covered in blood, and who knows what he’s breathed into it. There could be something salvageable I’m there somewhere but you’d rather hit the shed.
You examine the rest of his gear. Plate carrier is demolished. The whole tree’s running through it, plane shrapnel to boot. Communications device on his shoulder is kaput. Knee guards look dinged up but could come in handy. But..what’s this.
In Michael’s holster you spot a gun. You can’t help yourself.
