Kat Wythburn
I was pulling shards of glass out of my hands when I saw the eruption of green light across the City.
The street I had been moving along had been quiet, just a narrow cement path winding its way to what I thought was another Deadzone, flanked by two immense skyscrapers wrapped in opaque glass windows, reflecting off of each other and making it a bit of a struggle to see too much detail. I was tranquil, the City was respectful, and similar to how two lovers can be sitting in opposite sides of the room, we were intimate, yet apart.
And, like after spending some quiet time with a partner, the City decided to become bitchy far too fast for me to figure out what was happening before it was over.
All I can attest to clearly was that all of the windows of both the buildings blew out all at the same time in a shrieking roar, throwing me off my feet with it's impact. I'm fortunate that the razor sharp shards didn't slice me apart, instead they mostly just knocked me to the ground, and then threw me back up again. I was flung away from the middle of the street, and driven off to the side of one of the buildings amid the sound of wanton destruction. Clawing my way forwards, I clasped desperately at a newly exposed girder from the side of the building to keep from being dragged back down into the deadly center of the street, the impact site for so many newly created knives. I was so startled that I didn't scream or cry out. Besides, if I had, I would have died shortly drowning in my own blood, there was so much glass in the air. I had kept my back turned to the street, protecting my face from the worst of it. There was a silence, and it seemed as if all of the City had spent all of it's accumulated rage and noise in a single (literally) shattering climax. I small trickle of blood rolled its way down my cheek, hesitating briefly at my chin, before continuing to fall down onto my somehow undamaged vest. Thinking it safe, I let out a shuddering sob, and then another. I still couldn't hear anything, and when I tried to speak, I couldn't decide if the violence had torn the voice from me, or if I had lost me hearing. Blinking heavily, I pawed roughly at myself as my gaze swept across my body, assessing the damage.
I knew then that the City was playing some sort of game, because none of my clothing had torn, and my backpack, other than sporting a few more pinprick holes than it had moments prior, was looking no worse for wear than it had before roughly a ton of broken glass pummeled me.
My hands, however... I was thankful that I could still open and close them, and that none of the arteries or tendons in my wrist had been torn. Beyond that, I struggled to think of a time when they had looked worse than this. The skin had been mostly flayed from them, and minuscule shards had embedded themselves in me, creating hundreds of tiny welling pools of pain, and feeling a thousand times bigger than they were when I shifted my hands around. Groaning with the pain, I shifted my weight and began to cascade down a pile of the glass into the middle of the street, away from the buildings. I rolled slightly, and ended up on my back, with my bag cushioning me from the piles of damaged glass beneath me.
More glass from high above the buildings continued to rain down, though now they were little more than glimmering streams of dust, trickling from way up in the sky and pooling directly at the sides of the buildings.
At this time I started to be able to hear things again, the cawing of the crows, perching themselves in the busted window panes of the buildings, grooming themselves and laughing at me for not being smart enough to fly away from the disaster that had thrown me around.
I stumbled to my feet, the deadly ground shifting beneath me. I heard the crunch of the glass under my boots, and when I spoke, it was in a husky voice, clear for me to hear,
"fuck this shit."
Then, louder again.
"Fuuuck. Thhiis. Shiiit."
Looking up at the now empty window frames of the two buildings, I saw some crows nodding their oil feather necks at this wisdom.
Grasping my thankfully intact canteen, I opened it up with my teeth, and poured the water onto my hands, rinsing off the worst of the blood and glass.
I closed up the canteen, standing at the bottom of a small valley formed by the broken glass, the debris sloping away from the center of the street.
Nodding my head, I continued to mumble invectives to myself and my corvid audience as I stumbled down the street, moving at roughly the same pace I had been previously.
The street made a sharp right turn, with the flayed open buildings hemming in the broken glass road. Lowering my hand to my pistol, I began to fumbling open the holster as I turned the corner.
I now saw that the alley emptied out into a spacious thoroughfare with smaller brickwork buildings lining the street and elaborately worked metal lampposts standing at attention at regular intervals.
I relaxed for a moment, and took the time to pick at some of the worst glass shards still in my hands as I studied which way to go.
After a beat or two of this silence, a blistering sheen of green light erupted from down the street, distant, yet not so distant that I wouldn't arrive there in time to snag something.
Nodding to myself, I began to jog towards the fading light, ignoring the murder of crows that lazily trailed after me, landing on the lampposts as I passed them.
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