The ground is warm. It is hard, pressed into my cheek, scratching slightly when I try to move, and it is warm. The type of warm where you know it was hot before. Residual heat that hasn't yet faded but you know it will not cool down any time soon.
I am sitting up. The wind is strong, and it carries the choking smell of smoke and burning plastic. It hits the back of my throat, and if I could I would cough, but to get the air to do so is impossible. All that pours in is more of that smell, and it is in my lungs and my eyes and it burns like acid. I can't do anything but breathe it in, burning lungful after burning lungful. It feels more a part of me than my own skin and bones, sometimes, melding with something I did not know was there and wish I could forget.
I have been here before. I know that. This place is familiar, though I am sure I have never seen it. It is the feel of it that resonates. The hum in the ground, the emptiness around, the utter silence aside from my own ragged and stuttering breaths.
In front of me is a house, and to see it sickens me. What is it doing, still? Stood there against this bleak and dead and empty waste. It is a taunt. It is a memory I no longer have, and my longing for it makes me ill but when I feel I might be sick all that comes up is burning bile.
I do not want to go inside, because I know exactly what I will see, but my legs are moving despite every fibre of my being fighting against it.
The walls are lined with photographs. The faces in them are real, but they are not correct, not anymore. They do not fit the world as it is now. One of them is mine, or it was. No, is. The context is different, though. In these photos there is a life. Sometimes I forget that it is me, that the life was mine and that there was a time before I was in this wasteland.
In the distance, there is sirens again. Even when they do not play I can hear them, wailing and crying, the bringer of yet another damning change to this world. Everything is shaking and joining the wailing sirens is a scream so terrible all I can do is scream with it.
The burning in my lungs is worse, and there is a visceral tearing in the tissue. Something deep in the bones is wrong. I am not meant to be here. I am a relic in this age and part of me knows that and fights to keep up. Skin sloughs off revealing the shiny white of bone that craves itself a new body that might survive in this world. The taste of blood is overpowering and I am still screaming.
When I can finally open my eyes once more the house is gone. My eyes feel clear and sharp, and the only sign of any injury is patches of deep red and blistering skin, desperately trying to heal and failing. I wish that I could die, have this place let me go, but it is insistent that I keep up.
I do not recognise this place, but I knew what it was, and it knows me. It will force me to change with it until I am unrecognisable, and it will never stop.
