by Budge Burgess

Created on: June 16, 2009

Johnstone and MacIntyre were running towards me, two men with lumbering, clumsy gaits, bare silhouettes against the clouds of dust and smoke, like images emerging in a Hollywood movie. There was something two dimensional about them, some absence of depth to the scene I was witnessing.

No. They weren't running towards me. They ran past, over to my left, ran on to be absorbed into the dust and smoke and haze. I could smell the burning chemicals in my mouth, could taste the blood in my nose, and, somewhere to the far periphery of my vision my eyes could hear the ground squealing. But, above all, underpinning everything else, was the booming in my ears, the relentless booming, a deep red colour, diabolically syncopated, keeping beat with the choreography of the two men's pounding feet. Was it them I was hearing, or something else?

There was sky above, a pale blue revealed through the wisps of smoke and dust. Smoke and dust, smoke and dust. Above and around. But there was nothing beneath me. I was floating. I had no sensation of being in contact with the earth, with anything solid. I felt like a little pocket of mist, a consciousness evicted from the physical world to drift and think and speculate in space without the inconvenience of gravity or corporeal being. I wasn't even a watcher, just an observer, floating, floating, floating.

Johnstone and MacIntyre disappeared, but the booming continued. My eyes seemed to be fixed, to be peering relentlessly down my nose. I couldn't move my gaze, couldn't change my field of vision. Neither could my mind focus on anything other than the scene before me. I was the lens of a closed circuit TV camera, fixed in place, simply recording what passed before it.

Dust and smoke, swirling, like a child's kaleidoscope, but without its symmetry, without the colours. Dust and smoke, swirling and swooping, like ink stirred into still water. I was choking on its taste and smell and the sadness which echoed within it. Why didn't Johnstone and MacIntyre come back? Why hadn't they seen me? Smoke and dust, dust and smoke.

And then it cleared for a moment, and I could see the underside of a vehicle, tipped on its side. The rear corner of a vehicle painted in camouflage colours which merged with the smoke and dust, the rear wheel hanging awkwardly, not turning in contrast to the spinning, swirling hurricane of dust and smoke.

The wheel. Not revolving. Twisted. Its tyre hanging in shreds. And behind

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