by Tim O'Dell

Created on: June 08, 2009

Hugh picked his way over the seared, burnt, blasted rubble. He turned his head to check on the rest of the team. Fernie seemed to be peering into a hole in a nearby wall; maybe she had found a clue, although he thought it unlikely with the piles of debris lying round. Bazza was lumbering his way behind the rest of the group, as usual. Mickey was ribbing Chaz, as they sorted through some of the broken bricks on the road. He turned back to look at the city. The skyline was skeletal. The twisted, shattered, cremated buildings stood like reminders of a youthful beauty that had wizened with age. Yet the city had still been vibrant, living, dynamic, until yesterday. He sighed and walked towards the jagged opening in front of him; an opening into a space that was dark, forbidding, black.

Fernie bit back the emotion as she picked up a charred bone. It looked like a child's femur. Why had this happened? She wondered to herself. To destroy a whole city, in the name of some freedom campaign, was sheer, blind, stupid lunacy. Did they really think the answer lay in, so-called, dirty bombs that did this kind of damage? Despair nearly overtook her as she remembered her grandfather's stories about Hiroshima, and the aftermath of what had been loosed there. She looked around at the charred furniture, the scorched, blackened, charcoaled doll that lay, abandoned, beside the remains of the Wendy House the child had been playing around. Fernie felt so angry. She wanted to find the psychotic maniacs that had done this, and make them pay for their crime, if they weren't dead already. She looked at the shadows on the wall, etched, for all time, by the neutron blast that had killed the people they belonged to. She could see a mother and daughter, frozen in an attitude of play. Then she caught a flicker out of the corner of her eye. Movement where there should be none. Horror.

Bazza heard the brief scream before it was cut off. He looked around; nobody else seemed to have heard. He considered. Screams meant someone was in trouble; the only people alive were the investigation team. It had been a female scream, so it must have been Fernie; he was closest. Run, run, run.

"Rubbish." Chaz said, giving Mickey a friendly punch on the arm, as they knelt in the road lifting rubble. "I'm not daft."

"It's true." Mickey replied, shrugging his shoulders. "Apparently, you can feel the skin being ripped away when the bombs filthy, like this one."

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