Chapter ten

Chapter Ten

     Debris washed up on the charred shore of Manhattan. It was dead silent and the only sound was the water washing the shore. It hasn’t been this eerily quiet since 9/11.

     There was not a sound. No cars with honking horns and no pedestrians shouting profanity. No sounds of seagulls. Everything was wiped out for miles. Just about every species was wiped out.

     New York was reduced to ash and rubble. There were a handful of people wandering the streets looking for friends and family. Some people were lying in the streets dying. Some people were huddled next to a carcass of a burning car.

     Airplanes flew above them breaking the silence. When people heard the planes they scattered to hide behind anything that still stood. People hid in the skeletal structures of buildings that remained.

     After a moment the silence returned. Everyone remained in hiding until they felt that the coast was clear. They waited for any further explosions. All they could hear was marching coming up the street.

     People peaked around the corner of their hiding place as the marching grew louder. They saw a large group of men in military attire marching down the streets of Manhattan.

     “What the freak?” someone barked in the distance.

     The militants glanced in the direction of the shout and stopped in their tracks. One of the men in the front yelled commands. He pointed in different directions and the troops spread out.

     The man who shouted came out of hiding with a gun in his hand. The group of militants reacted quickly and shot him. He fell dead to the ground. The militants gathered around the dead man.

     One of them took a small container from his side pouch. He removed a knife and vial from the container. He cut the dead man and removed a piece of skin and placed it into the vial.

     He put the vial back into the container and into his side pouch. Another shot was heard and one of the militants fells. One of the militants pointed at one of the buildings. They opened fire and a man fell from the building. They ran to this man and began cutting pieces off of him.

     They walked through the city as everyone else hid. They stopped at every dead body that they could see. They cut off a piece of skin from each body that they found.

     A mother was hiding with her two children in a building that the militants were searching. As they kneeled over a body, the mother tried to stifle the crying of her daughter.

     Her daughter broke free from her grip. She began to run across the building to go outside. Her mom tried to stop her, but she couldn’t. She shielded her son and hid in the corner hoping not to be found.

     The militants shot her daughter as she reached the other side of the lobby. The militants seemed to yell at each other as they debated whether to approach the little girl’s body. One of them kneeled over her body after a brief debate.

     The mother cried silently as they mutilated her daughter’s body. The militants stood and left the building. They were still yelling at each other as they left.

     The militants quickly left the city after they got what they had come for. The remaining civilians came out of hiding and watched the intruders board their ships and leave.