Lost But Not Forgotten [On Hold]

Chapter 1

Jemma's P.O.V

November 5, 2026

Nothing was as it had been. This place our bus rolled through was the mere carcass of a city whose shattered bones once buildings were scattered and laced with taint, dusty gray. Cars which once pumped through her veins had vanished from the streets or were simply left abandoned and dead. Her very flesh scorched alive by the still burning torch of waged war. Her last breaths still hung in the air as a toxic cloud of rising smoke and ash. This city now lay motionless, bloodless, lifeless, and yet stiff as if in wait of the next crippling blow. Her torment was pictured in the faces of her surviving citizens.

She was not the only casualty of this raging battle of past days, for her country as a whole had such a beating. This country, an island, was no longer as it had been--and would never be.

I did endeavor to see clearly through the dust and smoke accumulated over the last ninety-four hours of near constant bombings, but I'd look to see nothing. That which was my home, once my island of white sand and blue sea beaches, clears skies and color filled sunrises was no more. People couldn't walk, none the less breath on the streets without having to choke on clouds of all that is left of our city, flying dust.

I still remember the bombs that crashed through our skies to shatter our lives and woke me from my fitful sleep. That night those bombs were the very same fallen demons that left so many to never return from their place of rest, that buried them so deep. Now I sat on a bus with whose who were spared my whole family and few others, compared to numbers of those lost. All of us now hoped to be evacuated.

I dazed out the window destruction surrounding me. Still, all I could ask was what had I lost? It seemed a self-centered thought to think at such a time, still, that was what I thought. I saw the suffering and horror displayed around me, and felt misplaced. This war was at first so distant to the island as a whole, till it came knocking down thousands of doors, in fact, houses throughout all the land. Then it seemed I was the only one who remained just as detached.

Those who lived seemed to envy those delivered to peace. I felt devoid of such hopelessness others expressed. All that took a direct hit close to me were possessions but none of my family was lost and with that, no hope that I could not regain. And even still secretly I was grateful. I felt dirty with guilt then however of not feeling as the others the pain on the same bus en route to be evacuated. As if I had not earned the right to this bus seat but cheated somehow out of suffering and bypassed the reality of the world outside my window.

We had arrived at our final location, a building once a single terminal airport, where we were to be airlifted out off our ravaged island. The sky was light blue, passed the hovering mass of endless gray . That gray the same color that lay on everything it's thickest coat of the bleak and depressing. I stepped out of the bus beside my mom, who tried to smile looking at me. She too had taken on the complexion of ash, her hair oily and dashed cuts on her exposed limbs and face had smudged blood and dirt together on her pale freckled skin.

In just a day, I marveled under a shadow of grief, she'd taken on the look of utter exhaustion to the brink of near collapse but still stood there and tried to smile at me. I returned what I hoped was at least a glimpse of a smile. All six of my immediate family trudged across the parking lot to the building, as more vehicles of evacuees arrived.

The whole complex seemed completely abandoned and empty from the outside, but that was merely because we were the first of hundreds. The process went so quickly till there was finally a hold up involving some military personnel cutting lines because of urgent necessity. People began to quickly mumble and complain. There was one such person in my ear range, but ten feet away. She was an old bitter-looking woman who resembled a snapping turtle in my mind small, bent over, and wrinkly.