Vivid (BoyxBoy) {Pipe Dream: Book I}

Chapter Eight: Everlasting Light

A/N: What is this, two chapters in one day!? Hmm...sort of got momentum at the moment so I'll try and get as much written as I can while I can :3

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Chapter Eight: Everlasting Light

We clamber our way through the once dead silent city. Now awash with bullet barrage and the screams of the dying and so called glory. The loud jets and helicopters from overhead poured gunfire with blood spewing shrapnel and debris, lighting up the sky with a haze of orange glow with an intensity that threatened to melt the stars. The pungent scent of entrails and burning flesh fill my nostrils as I want to gag, my uninjured hand is pushed hard against my mouth before I vomit.

My damaged hand clings as tightly as it can to Anne, we became each other’s life line in this mess of sound and vivid fire. A bomb falls to the sky, a ways off from us but I am not at all comfortable as it plummets down. The world shudders while the first of I’d say many, mushroom clouds that light up the sky and rain death.

Anne began to take the lead on me, pulling me along the back streets, knowing where to go to avoid any and all confrontation as we run after Markus. My grip was slippery with the blood that’s travelled down my arm but Anne keeps a firm grip on my sleeve. She was silent, her eyes forward. I could tell that she was trying to swallow down her fear.

This glory of war that everyone talks about. I don’t see it here at all. I see faceless shadows yelling and screaming and dying. I see no comrade as one has his leg blown off and his friends run in the other direction, only to be shot in the head. Just who is who out there?

“He’s gone down there!” Anne pulls me out of my thoughts, pointing towards something that looks like it was a shopping centre. Breathing heavily, I realise by the way my lungs ache that we’ve been running for way too long. I have no idea where we are.

As we go through the smashed front doors, I saw it was impeccably dark in here. There were a pair of escalators in front of us that lead straight down and the floor swallowed up by the darkness beyond. A glass railing with gold lining once parred the gaping hole that was always in the centre of these types of places. The shops that lined the sides were sad and broken with glass everywhere and dust collecting that we were disturbing.

“This way!’ Anne tugs me down the unmoving steps. Of course down. Let’s go down somewhere practically pitch-black that has God knows what down there. As my feet hit the solid concrete surface of the next floor, it was met with a wet, splashing sound. Water. The entire floor was flooded. I can hear Cody not too far behind who let out a grunt of surprise as his feet also hit the water.  At first, my sight was met with a wall of darkness but slowly I begin to see that it was a dim walkway. Anne pulls me down along, so sure of where she was going while I was blindly stumbling behind her.

Anne didn’t let me time to inspect my surroundings. Down the passageway, there was adimly lit area up ahead. As we came upon it, it was a spacious area that would have been the food court. It was like a massive empty ballroom now. The ceiling was damaged and a huge gaping hole looked up at the moonless night but still managed to be illuminated by starlight and the hellfire razing in the distance.

In a small corner, I see Markus and immediately run up to him as he clutches at his shoulder, his eyes wide and almost feral, like he didn’t recognise anything around him anymore. The last time he was like this…

“Markus,” I call to him, stopping just a few metres away.

“Make it stop,” he whispers to himself. “Make it stop!’ He repeats the sentence over and over, more and more panicked. Almost like a rhythm, speeding up. As he did, he clutches at his head, digging his fingers griping his hair. “Make it stop!” Over and over.