Holes in the Sky

  “ Where is his room at?!,” Jack exclaimed, jetting from door to door, slinging each one open with such force it bounces off the wall supporting it. “ Where the hell is dad’s room, Mary?!,” Jack yelled again, at his sister. With a cigarette clinging onto his lips, ruffled hair, and a few days of growth, the average person may think that Jack was a junkie of some types, when really his life had been riddled with so many obstacles it had been affecting his appearance. Mary, a slender girl, with short hair just below her ears, sad eyes, and an overall distinguishable anguish beyond them, “ I don’t know damn it! The bomb dropped less than 3 miles from here, what makes you think Dad is even still alive?!,” she stammered on the last syllable…”live.” The thought that her father could actually be dead began to sink in and a single tear rolled down her face.
           

There were IV stands, morphine bags, bloody scalpels and surgery supplies strewn all across the floor. The chaotic melody of stampeding feet was the only audible sound heard throughout the entire hospital. This was the year of the beginning of the war, millions dead, and even more injured. Jack and Mary, though in their mid thirties, were only children of war. Desperately seeking from room to room for their father who had been sent there only days before. No doctors. No nurses. Everyone had seemed to evacuate and the dust and debris from the explosion had still not even settled. Jack reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, worn out photograph of happier times with his father and him, smiling as hard as they possibly could. The moment the camera caught was the moment Jack longed to have lasted for eternity. Now those people in the photo were different from his father and him, and yet they continued to stare into Jack’s eyes, trying to tell him the truth, that his father was dead.
           
            “ In here, In here!!! I found something!” Mary screamed. Jack came rushing into the room, with hospital beds sitting upright against windows, as to protect from the impact, medical tape, scissors, bloody gauze, pens, paper, empty pill bottles, and half empty bags of Demerol and morphine littered the floor. “Dad?!”, Jack questioned, “Dad, is that you?” A shadow of a man wept in the corner, with the clinking of glass to tile and the swishing of some sort of liquid in a bottle. “Jack, Mary? The hell are you two kids doing here?” he said. “Don’t you have any idea what happened?! Why are you even still alive! No one could have survived….survived something so awful.” Jack’s father began to go on about how he had survived the blast. About how he watched dozens of staff and patients burn alive outside, and how he had survived by locking himself in the morgue.

“ I couldn’t do anything. Everything melted outside, their faces, their bodies just became one with the floor.” His voice cracked. “ I couldn’t help them! I tried to open the door but it was sealed closed! I couldn’t help them!” he repeated that phrase over and over, took a swig from his bottle and suddenly – “ Oh no! “ Jack screamed. A loud, stinging siren sounded off, “ What is that? What do we do?! “ Jack cried. “ Run like hell, boy,” stammered his dad. “ Not without you! “ Jack yelled while throwing his father over his shoulder.

            Catching a glimpse out the window, Jack sees a mushroom shaped cloud rising toward the heavens. He takes one last look at Mary, then to his father, before every window is shattered and nothing but heat and debris smother them all. Jack is dead. His father is dead. Mary stumbles out of the wreckage, surprised to be alive, she has radiation poisoning and only has moments to live before her skin begins to melt off piece by piece, and it’s at this point that she wishes she would have died with her brother and father. Hair comes out in clumps, she begins walking to an unknown destination, before she finally collapses to her death.