He awoke, slowly, to a warm darkness. He lay on the floor, carpet pressing uncomfortably into his face as he tried to open his eyes. His eyelids, he decided, were still too heavy. So he waited. The heat intensified, the air grew thicker as he tried again and again to push away the darkness.
Finally, light.
He forced his eyes open, the light, blinding. He saw his hand on the floor beside his face, still clutching his old revolver; behind it, the edge where the floor met the wall. He pushed himself up, head throbbing, every muscle screaming in agony for him to stop, to rest a while longer on the plush hallway floor. He took a break to catch his breath as he knelt down on one knee. Looking around, he noticed that the hallway was somehow different than the last time he'd seen it. Still infinitely long, dozens of doors of a dark, polished wood on either side. Still as tacky and needlessly ornate as ever. But the lighting was different. Less static, more orange. The source seemed to be from around the far corner of the hall, where a bright flickering grew ever more ominous.
“Shit,” said Jason. It had spread.
Forcing his body to cooperate, he stiffly pushed himself upright. He spun around to run back the way he'd came before blacking out, but stopped before he could take a single step. There, on the floor before him, lay the body of Sara. The large pool of blood surrounding what was left of her head had turned a sickening black as it soaked into the floor.
“Oh god,” croaked Jason, stepping back. He tripped on his own feet, fell backwards and his tailbone absorbed the brunt of the fall. “I did this, this is my fault,” he began repeating to himself.
He looked down and saw the gun in his hand. Slowly, he brought it up to take a closer look at it. The cold, silver metal was spotless, gleaming as bright as ever. It now sickened him.
With more trouble than he expected, Jason slid the long barrel into his mouth, angled it up towards the brain. This is it, he thought, you have to do this, you have to.
An explosion behind him sent him tumbling forward before he was able to gather the strength to pull the trigger, knocking the gun from his mouth. He landed atop Sara's body with a wet thud and, with a yelp, scrambled back too his feet. Breathing heavier, shaking, he turned around, saw that a huge chunk of ceiling and wall had collapsed, forming a sort of ramp into a bedroom on the floor above. A burning dresser scraped down and came to rest in the hall next to him.
Clearly, the fire had spread more than he thought.
But this gave him an idea. He half ran, half jumped up the chunk of collapsed flooring and pulled himself into the room above. Every part of him ached, tried to tell him he was pushing himself too far. He ignored it. Two of the walls had been knocked down, through which he could see the charred husk of a janitor's supply closet. Most everything was burned black from the explosion, and everything else was still being licked by long tendrils of flame.
And there was a noise. Crashing, breaking, screaming. But muffled, far off in the distance. It must have been coming from outside the hotel.
Jason stepped out into the hallway. Careful to avoid any smoldering pieces of wood and plaster, he stumbled his way around the corner. On his right, a stairwell door was barely hanging onto its one remaining hinge, dangling limply and allowing the noise an entryway into the otherwise soundproofed walls of the hotel. Cautiously, he looked upwards and saw nothing but stars obscured by smoke. Couldn't even see the Earth.
He ascended. The next floor was gone. There was nothing about him but ash and rubble, pieces of what must have been furniture, now unidentifiable among the remains of the crumbling walls. Only half of one wall remained behind him, the rest bombed away.
It sounded like a war.
Gunfire, explosions, glass shattering, metal tearing, people screaming, people hurting, people dying. The lights of their deaths flashed from behind the thick reddish black smoke that filled the city, illuminating the air for a fleeting instant with a cruelly bright white.
Jason peered over the edge of the building. Then feet to the next skyscraper, twenty-eight stories to the ground. Enormous sections of the building's outer walls lay in the alley far down at the bottom. Corpses surrounded the scene.
Jason aimed his gun at the mirrored glass of the building opposite him. Steadied his grip, cocked the hammer, pulled the trigger like he was so used to doing. The glass shattered in an instant and fell in shards to the ground far, far below.
He stepped back, took a breath, readied himself. He sprinted towards the broken window and leapt as soon as his feet hit the ledge. For a moment, time slowed around him. The smoke ceased to ascend, the screams subsided, and the only thing that seemed quite real was the rapidly approaching window as he rose, soared, fell, fell, fell across the alley to the next building.
Half his body landed on the inside, hard, as his legs smacked against the glass pane of the floor below. A large piece of glass that had refused to fall had embedded itself in Jason's stomach as he came down on top of it. He moaned, pulling himself fully onto the hard floor of whatever this building was. Some kind of office, maybe.
And he crawled. On all fours, Jason forced himself across the room to an elevator that lay on the far wall, a mile away from his lowly spot on the floor. Blood slowly and steadily dripped onto the floor, soaking into every article of clothing he had on and leaving a thick crimson trail to mark where he'd been. He reached the door, pulled himself up the wall to push the elevator button before collapsing on his side as a hot pain erupted through his body.
The doors opened and Jason rolled inside. With even more trouble than just a moment before, he pulled himself up on the rail inside the elevator car and pushed the button for the roof. Again, he fell hard on his side. He couldn't determine how long the ride to the top took. It could've been a few minutes or several hours. It felt like days.
Finally, after a large pool of blood had grown around his shivering form, the doors opened again to the roof. He flung himself onto the rooftop as the doors closed again behind him, fighting every instinct that was telling him to simply stop, to lie down and sleep, to die right then and there. His head rose with some difficulty to see ahead of him, over the edge of this building. There was an enormous screen on the opposite side of the street, easily 500 feet across, displaying a bird's eye view of the wreckage. Skyscrapers collapsing, giant craters in the streets, fires and plumes of smoke everywhere, and right there, on one roof over in the corner, was a person lying down amongst the debris.
“Jason, is that you?!” called a voice in his ear. He'd assumed the radio codec in his ear was damaged too badly to function, so sound of Jean sent a final adrenaline rush surging through his veins.
“Jean,” he gasped, standing up. The video feed on the screen, he noticed, zoomed in on him. He looked up and saw a helicopter, piloted by Jean, a news camera mounted on its side.
“Oh, thank god you're still alive. Sara never came back, and neither of you were answering my calls, and I thought that you two must have –”
“Sara's dead,” interrupted Jason, “and I killed her.”
A pause.
“What?”
“And I don't want you to ever forgive me for that. I've already done so much to you. I just need one last thing from you and you'll never have to see me again.”
Another pause. This one longer.
“Alright,” she finally responded, reluctance dripping off of the single word.
“I need you to connect my mic to that broadcasting equipment. That's all.”
With that, he shambled forward, doubled over, to the building's ledge while he watched his television projection do the same. He stood as straight as his body would allow on the very edge of the roof, and took a deep breath.
“I,” he declared, his voice echoing through the city streets, “am Jason Young. And I caused all of this. This battle started with me, and this city is dead because of me. Revile me for the rest of time, make me a ruthless monster who murdered all of these people in cold blood. Because that's what I deserve.” He pointed the gun at his temple. Steadied his grip, cocked the hammer, pulled the trigger like he was so used to doing. The last sound he ever heard was someone screaming his name.
