Loud coughing can be heard coming from the scene of the burning brick building – loud coughing, the sirens of approaching fire trucks, and the crackling sound of the ever burning flames. Two figures run through the slowly crumbling interior of the tall apartment complex. Their silhouettes darkened by contrast to the extreme brightness of the fire and distorted by the waving illusion of the emanating heat. Even through the low visibility caused by the high intensity of the flames, it is clear from the detailed silhouettes that these men are wearing firefighting equipment. The fire men run one-behind-the-other through a barrage of flames. They move with a purpose, a single destination.
As they get closer to the uncertain destination, the coughing begins to almost completely drown out the crackling of the intensely warm colored flames. They arrive. The man in front runs up to the sound of the coughing behind a door. Being a fire man, he knows better than to touch the door knob. He turns to his fellow fire men and they come meet in a close proximity, face to face. Their faces somewhat clear to each other at this distance, they glance at each other and give an understanding nod to one another. Tom Warden, The thirty-six year-old man in the lead has deep blue eyes and coffee blonde hair. The small and faint wrinkles on his face show his experience, but his confident expression shows his youthfulness. His body is muscular, but not too muscular – what anyone would expect from a fire men. The other man in the back, about fourty years old is Frank Roslyn, a longtime fireman and family-friend to Tom and his family. He has dark brown eyes and dark brown, almost black, hair with some noticeable gray strands here and there. He is a little heavier than Tom, but still fit.

The two men return their attention toward the door when they hear the sound of something breaking or crumbling or falling, or all of those things, and then a scream. Tom takes charge and uses a fire axe he has been carrying with him in his left hand and breaks the door open. He takes a step into the room while Frank waits right behind him. Tom sees a young girl, about 14 years old, with her hand covering the blood pouring out from her other wrist in the back of the room up against the wall and a man with brown hair dressed in a dark grey hoodie standing in the center of the room with his back to Tom, staring at the girl.

“Come with me.” Tom says calmly and confidently as he takes off his helmet as a way to make a connection to the people in the room. Maybe seeing someone who they can actually identify as a person rather than some “robot” in a uniform would give them some comfort.
“We’ll get you out of here, but I need you to follow me and keep your heads down. Can you do that” Tom reaches his right hand out to the man facing the young girl. He waits for a second and then slowly turns his head. He pauses about half way and identifies Tom. Something doesn’t seem right. Suddenly the man turns to Tom and lunges at him. It is fast, but Tom can see the dead eyes of the attacker – the whites of his eyes turned black and the retinas turned white. His skin seems abnormally pale and he has a giant gash on his head with blood covering the left side of his face. The blur of this man lunging at Tom is the last thing he sees and the scream of the little girl along with Frank shouting Tom’s name are the last things he hears … Everything shakes, debris falls from the ceiling, and large flames erupt in the background … Tom blacks out.

Tom awakens a couple of hours later in the burning building –what’s left of it anyway. He adjusts his eyes and sits up to look around. Tom Warden is now sitting in the rubble, the remains of the previously burning building. The entire thing has collapsed and with it most of the fire, the fire in the building that is. As he looks past the lot of the destroyed building he sees another building set alight and another and another and another and so on. His world is surrounded in chaos right now. There are totally burnt vehicles, probably previously set on fire which resulted in their gas tank exploding. As Tom is looking around, completely dumbstruck, trying to absorb the surrounding chaos wondering whether this is reality, a dream, or hell, an explosion erupts from behind him. It was a parked car whose gas tank must have come into contact with the fire.

Startled by this and now hyper aware with adrenaline beginning to flow through his system, he hears the sound of muffled moans coming from somewhere amongst the rubble. He stands up quickly but steadily, trying to detect the source of the noise, then he realizes that, although the moans seem to be muffled and distant, they are coming from only a few feet away on the ground. What Tom sees is only a pile of broken pieces of ceiling and wall on the ground, but under it lies a protruding hand and it’s moving – not much, but it’s moving. Tom hesitates for a moment and then gets closer to the trapped survivor and begins to lift the biggest chunk of the building that sits on top of the rubble.



“Don’t worry buddy, I’ll get you outta there” Tom tries to reassure the victim as he struggles to lift the rubble completely off of him. With a couple of more grunts and a little more force, Tom pushes the biggest part of the rubble trapping the victim out of the way and then proceeds to clear out the smaller pieces.

“Hey … are you okay in there” Tom says to the man as he tries to get him out of his unfortunate situation. As Tom clears more of the debris, he can see that the man has brown hair and a dark grey hoodie. This understandably causes hesitation, but Tom, being the heroic and selfless man that he is, continues to try to help the man.

“Maybe you could try not attacking me this time, eh” Tom says as he clears the last of the debris, but as soon as that last of it is off of the trapped man, he lunges upward at a crouching Tom who gets himself up and away from the deranged and hostile man. The man runs toward him which causes Tom to reluctantly kick the man right in the face. The force of Tom’s kick is enough to knock the man back, but the force of the man running causes Tom to stumble backwards and fall to the ground. The man is persistent. He gets back up off of the ground in an instant and begins running back to Tom who quickly scurries back, kicking his legs and panicking, just trying to get away from the psycho.
He ends up back in the spot where he woke up, running his back into a piece of the building’s wall that had stayed upright. With only seconds before the insane man reaches him, Tom looks around for something, a way out or … a weapon. Tom spots his fire axe lying on the ground only a foot away from him. In Tom’s mind it takes a while to think about it but in reality, he is quick. He reaches for the axe with his left arm and when the man is within range in only a few seconds he swings with both hands. The axe plows into the left side of the man’s face and gets lodged right under his eye. It jerks the man aside and pauses his assault for a couple of seconds, but then he lunges at Tom yet again, seemingly unaffected by the axe. Tom, not sure what exactly he is seeing pulls the axe out of the man’s face and kicks him backward. The man stumbles and falls as Tom quickly stands up and speed walks up to the man before he has time to get up or react, and he lifts the axe over his head steadily before he quickly and brutally unleashes it down upon the man’s skull. It is a fatal blow. The fire axe is again stuck in the now deceased man’s head which requires Tom to put his foot against the man’s head in order to pull it out.

Tom stands still in front of the dead man, looking down at his face. It is here that Tom gets a good look at the man with his pale, torn, and blood covered skin and the inverted colors of his eyes. He is still trying to soak all of this in, from the metal of the city painted with the red and orange glow of spreading fire to the sick demented man who tried to kill him only seconds ago. Another cluster of seconds pass by as nothing but more crackling flames can be heard, and then … Tom hears something. It sounds like the beginning of an avalanche or a rock slide. He turns behind him to look for the source of the sound and sees a far off burning building, similar to the one that had collapsed around him. Pieces of it are beginning to fall off and soon more pieces, bigger pieces crumble into smaller pieces, and in a matter of seconds the entire building is gone, reduced to a pile of rubble much like the one Tom himself stands in at this moment.

Tom waits in his position longer just trying to think of what is going on and what exactly he is supposed to do next. He hears another sound coming from his right. He turns and takes a few steps forward, but is stopped when he sees another person, the little girl from inside the building only … different. She has the same eyes and pale skin as the man from before. Her entire body covered with splats of blood. She spots Tom and begins to moan and growl as she struggles and reaches out for him, but she is stuck under one of the fallen support beams from the building. She squirms in her seat in the debris trying desperately to attack Tom. He just looks at her and then looks at his axe. You’re not hurting anyone. Tom thinks to himself. He turns around and begins to walk away from all of this chaos. Not exactly sure what to do or where to go, Tom needs to get away from this hell hole as he is only certain of one thing. He needs to find his daughter.