The City Sleeps in Flame

The sight before her eyes was horrifying.

Everything was hidden by the cloak of night and a layer of thick, black smoke and the only thing cutting through it was the flames as they leaped from one building to the next. Fire had always terrified her, but seeing it in such a large amount, destroying the city she had lived in since she was born, wasn’t as bad as the sound.

She could hear the scream.

People were in those buildings, and in the streets that lay in a dejected maze below them, now trapped by a fiery prison. And their screams rang pure in the air, practically drowning the cackling of the burning wood, metal, plaster, rubber, stone. The sounds of sirens on the trucks that were supposed to be coming to save those people had faded long ago. The scene unfolded before her was chaos, and it couldn’t be controlled any longer. Yet the smell was even worse.

Burning flesh was something she had never thought she’d smell.

But yet, underneath the suffocating smell that was the smoke in general, there it was. It wasn’t like burning metal, which she had smelt when her toaster oven caught on fire the year before. Wood smelt wonderful when it burned, which wasn’t the same for flesh. No, flesh had a foul odor that couldn’t be described in words. She had tried, but nothing quite captured the stink of human while it burnt slowly to a crisp.

Out of everything, though, the thoughts were the worst.

Those people down in the city were in pain, and seeing the ones they cared about in pain. If, by some miracle, they lived to tell the tale of this disaster, they would never be able to get the memories from their minds. Then there was the physical pain that would be sure to come along with whatever injuries they had sustained.

Yes, it was the thoughts that were the most terrible thing of this night. Taking a deep breath, the young girl let a single tear escape from her stinging eyes, leaving a slightly paler trail down her cheeks that were stained a charcoal color from the flames that had engulfed her home. Her family.

She turned to the boy beside her, her eldest brother, the only other survivor of her family. A stony expression contorted the familiar features on his face, and she barely recognized him as the carefree teenager from only a mere twelve hours earlier. Her hand was held out now, waiting for him the take it. He did, and they took one more look at the destruction in front of them, before turning towards the horizon. They had a long walk ahead of them.