❝What happened to you?❞
❝I lost everything, including myself.❞
▲ △
Skye was losing her battle to the world- the world that had already lost its battle to the dead. Her memories haunt her by day and her guilt curses her by night. But when she runs i...
heyo mayo, get ready for the rollercoaster. song: Battlefield by SVRCINA +
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SKYE
Dead.
Atlanta was dead.
It was all ashes of metal and rock; ruins of defeat and destruction. The buildings were dead.
As we climbed out of the firetruck, our weapons in hands, our eyes wide in lethal expectance, a humbling sensation dropped from the silent skies of the city and cloaked our small group as everyone gazed at the dead metropolis. My hands were like ice- ice frozen over and over again- as they trembled and my axe dangled between their nimble fingers and palms. Each breath that left me did not seem real as I simply observed.
We were standing in an extended, upper grounded parking lot a few miles from the hospital we were going to retrieve Beth. Beneath our feet, down a hill and within the area of an intersection containing stores and restaurants, the surrounding dark streets screamed ghost town. The pitch pavement was scattered with papers blowing like leaves along water, traveling into grimy, molding cars with doors left open, over bloody limbs and intestines lying on the sidewalks, onto the windows of the empty stores coated in dust. Filth filtered the air and it looked as if Death had walked the streets himself, breathing his curse over every inch of Atlanta.
This used to be your home. I thought, feeling absent to reality. This is where you grew up. Went out to eat. Saw movies with your parents. Hung out with Gemma. Walked the streets. Now, it's dead... just like everything else you once had.
"Hey." A low voice pulled me out of my daze. I blinked as I glanced over my shoulder to see the comforting face of Carl.
"Hey." I responded, stepping back from my heavy observation of the city.
"You good? You kind of zoned out. You don't want to get too out of it when you're in the open like this." Carl murmured, his lips parting slightly in thought as he glanced around at the destruction towering above and littering the streets around us. "I understand why you would though..." He added once he got a full glimpse of Atlanta's desolate state. "This...this is a sight."
"It used to be." I whispered with a melancholic taste on my tongue.
"Come on!" Abraham yelled, but not too loudly. "We're burning precious daylight. If we're going to make it to Grady, we need to start now."
I tore my gaze from the broken city and shuffled along with the rest of the group. I still gripped my axe in my hand like it was the only thing keeping me alive. My knuckles, white and shaking, contrasted against the deep brown and burgundy stained handle. Something deep within me was waking up- anger, hurt and fear all at once.
