Exposure.

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All I could hear was the crumbling of concrete and the collapsing metal structure above me, men yelling in desperation and agony. A sea of pandemonium and fear that echoed through the concrete corridors and could have continued for miles and back again.
Only then could I recognize the alarms blaring, the red flashes in the room.
I could feel the panic, smell the sweat and adrenaline from the horror of each man who bolted with everything they had to the one exit they could find.
But some of them couldn't run, couldn't stand, couldnt move, and simply stared.
They lay battered and broken on the floor, crying out for help, for relief, for their mothers.
The quiet ones lay relieved, let off easy as scarlet blood spilled and pooled on the floors around them, their flesh melted and sloughed off their bones as they burned alive in the fires, peeling away like pages of a book.

The ringing in my ears began to clear away, and I looked up from the mutilated bodies, to the wall. The industrial lead and steel reinforced wall which had been simply torn open like tissue paper.
Smoke billowed up into the sky from below, where the remains of the floor under my feet blocked the view.
Chunks of concrete and metal crunched and scraped under my boots as as I carefully stepped back from the hole in the wall.

I saw one of the other men that cluelessly stepped towards it instead, I watched him look down into the pit that once held the now molten reactor core, flame and smoke blazing upward from the hellish inferno below, like a volcano erupting. A ghostly blue ray of light shone through the ash and smoke, shooting up into the sky from the very bottom of the core like some kind of laser beam.
The longer he stood there, gazing into the light, the weaker his legs became. They began trembling under his weight.
I couldnt help but wretch in horror as he started changing before my eyes.
His exposed skin began to redden and dry, saliva dripped from his mouth, and his hands started to shake.
I knew there was no saving him, but I continued to scream at him to step back from the hole.

It was far too late.
He turned back to me, and the face which I saw would haunt me forever.
He looked up at me, eyes meeting my gaze. still in the way of the overpowering blue light, his now dark violet skin began to retract, tightening around his bones like a vacuum seal.

His eyes which helplessly stared into mine, already bloodshot and wide, sunk into his skull as he began to mummify right there on the spot.

His hat blew off his head, followed by every hair follicle on his scalp, floating up into the sky with the sparkly blue particles that rose from the pit below.

He opened his chapped mouth, his tongue bone dry and cracking.

"R-Run...!" A ghastly, hoarse voice erupted from the bottom of his rotting gut, before the entire carcass fell to the ground in a dusty heap.

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