Fire at High Noon

Fox woke suddenly and silently. Her eyes snapped open but she didn't make a sound or movement. She really hadn't meant to sleep so long but the little girl had been exhausted from trekking through the woodlands in the night. The woods had been crawling with zed, horrifying boneheads whose skeletal heads pulsed with dull bone colored lights. As the morning came she had arrived in the slums of downtown Bravo and slipped under one of the buildings. Now she lay there, terrified.

The slums were silent.

Normally there would be someone, anyone wandering around, hammering on shanties, or a cart being dragged to the trade markets.

There was nothing but silence, not even the birds sang. It was so quiet that it rang in her ears.

The tiny Remnant girl slipped out from under the building, peeking through one of the windows to see five beds arrayed in the small space, with curtains draped for a modicum of privacy. There was a pale banner hanging on the front with black words on it. She couldn't read it but the letters looked stenciled, like the border patrol used. Her mother and father had been on the border patrol, but lost everything when they were “set free” by a law these Downtowners had made. When her mother, Ceanin, died the night before, blood hemorrhaging from her nose, Fox had no choice but to head to town for help.

Looking around on this brisk but sunny morning, there didn't seem to be anyone around.

Fox walked, barefoot but soles thick and callused, down the road towards town. Off to her right was a skeleton hand of steel rising over the trees and twisting towards the sky, the great radio tower. She stopped a moment and looked at it, the beacon that had guided her across the hills towards Bravo. As she watched she heard a sound, a distant and high keening.

The whistle grew louder and something in sky caught her attention, arcing towards the tower itself. Almost as fast as a bullet, a massive object the size of a wine barrel tumbled from the sky into the tower. In a fraction of a moment, barely registering in Fox's vision, the bomb tore through the tower's girders, hit the ground with a concussive whomp and burst into a fireball.

Fox didn't have time to react, the blast flung her backwards and she crashed through a bush as a conflagration ripped through the trees. She screamed and grabbed her head as the sound rendered her ears useless. The explosion subsided with a gout of smoke and fire reaching towards the stark white clouds. Deaf, but alive, little Fox scrambled to her shaky feet. The blast had put her so far away from the road that she was closer to another that wound along the edge of an escarpment lined with cabins. It too was devoid of people.

Fox ran, stumbled, tripping, screaming and crying. She felt another bomb land somewhere behind her, it lifted her and cast her forward, she hit the side of a building and felt her arm snap. A piece of sharp, red painted wood that used to be part of the Logistics Outpost, tore through her hip. She saw a fireball erupt further down the road, leveling houses and casting fire and debris about.

Fox stood, and turned to see another bomb hit a field nearby, ripping a hole in the ground. Another hit a tall battered building near the crossroads. That's when she saw the first person, someone jumping off the porch of the building before being engulfed in fire and shrapnel. She ran towards the crossroads and saw another explosion not far away, the air growing hot and hammering her battered, limping body as an old well-used forge exploded skyward.

Fox ran. Straight down the main road of Bravo as fire rained from the sky. A round saloon off to her left fell in on itself before it's roof lifted off, carried on a roaring ball of fire. The sun was blotted out. Smoke rose everywhere and the little girl screamed and stumbled. She fell in the road and could see off to one side a small loathsome shack with an altar of bones and black before it. Undead were rising from under and in it, pouring forth like a bag of rice with a split seam.

She screamed and turned to run from the sudden horde.

The building too got hit by another round of artillery. The morgue exploded and a burning bench hit the little girl, tearing her leg off and sending her spinning.

She lay on the road, watching a tidal wave of fire sweeping up the road toward her from the direction of the lake. A massive fireball carried the parachute-like outline of a tent high into the sky. The bombs hit everywhere, bursting in the trees high up and showering flaming splinters. The explosives scraped the earth, sweeping towards her with the inevitability of time.

Her vision narrowed and she barely registered the Goliath, spinning in flames, being tossed by a bursting mortar like a rag doll; an ancient copse of trees being scattered like matchsticks by a blast; an old sign with wooden arrows being pulverized to sawdust in an instant.

Everything wood burned.

Fox lay, tears streaming down her face but silent, on a growing island of her own blood.

She whispered through choking smoke one wish as Bravo burned, the Bombs of Star City exploding around her.

“Please, make it stop.”

Finally, almost mercifully, a shell did.

No evidence of a little Remnant girl would ever be found on the day that Bravo burned.