I wake up. The first thing I notice is that I am hot. I mean REALLY hot. I can feel sharp objects jabbing me in the back and the hard asphalt beneath me. I can sense people running around frantically, I can feel their footsteps through the ground. But everything is silent. No birds chirping in the trees, no one telling me what the heck is going on. I open my eyes.
A building, more like fragments of it, are lying on the ground. The remains are red hot and smoldering, and everything around me is either completely melted or halfway there. People lay unconscious on the rough ground, and police cars sit a couple hundred feet back, assessing the wreckage and deciding when to make a move.
I struggle to sit up, but almost pass out again. Luckily, after much struggling and heavy breathing, I am able to sit up. I wait for the world to stop spinning, and begin crawling away from the cops while they are looking away, knowing that if thxey see me I will be brought for questioning. I try to remember what happened, but I am to exhausted, scared, and hot to concentrate on one thought for more than a few seconds. I need to find a cool place to rest, hopefully supplied with a few jugs of water. I could have drunk them all right now. Of course, I highly doubt that there would be an air-conditioned room somewhere with a sign hanging over the door saying "Welcome freak accident survivors." I do manage, to even my surprise, to crawl into the shade behind a huge dumpster. I sit there for a while, and finally fall asleep despite my best efforts. This will be the last time I see daylight for a long time.
I wake up to darkness and people shouting. Police and ambulance sirens scream in the distance. The voices sounded muffled, as though I was under water and they were above. I opened my eyes to see the screaming people right next to me. I was surprised it all sounded so quiet, and then I remembered what had happened before I fell asleep. The explosion (I only guessed this could have been the cause of the smoldering wreckage) had given me some hearing loss too, although it was only temporary and it was already coming back. I once again tried to remember what had happened to cause the accident, and that was when it hit me. Explosions also caused memory loss didn't they? I thought harder and realized I had no memory what-so-ever of where I was, why I was here, what had happened, and even what my name was. I sat stunned while it all, including the latter, soaked in. I could remember, I eventually figured out, small facts that I would have learned since I was very young. For instance, I knew what every object around me was called, I knew what year it was, and I knew all about explosions. I mean, A LOT about explosions. I knew all the after-effects of explosions if you survived, I knew….. Right at that moment I realized that I was moving. It turned out that while I was hard at work thinking, the people all around me were hard at work trying to interrogate me. Turns out it's not so easy to do that when your victim is zoned out, huh? That moment, when I showed any sing of moving, they plastered me with questions. "What's your name? What was the bombing like? Did you have any significant part in it? What is going on?" That is the exact question I want to ask them! After the initial hubbub dies down, I answer in a shaky voice I can barely hear "I have no idea where or who I am, and I don't know what I am doing here. Can someone help me?" They all looked around confused. Then a police officer comes to the front of the crowd. "Do you have any means of identification on you? A wallet or something?" I feel my pockets and pull out a wallet. He opens it up and glances at something inside. He eyes grow wide, and he passes the wallet around among his posse. A collective gasp occurs. I recognize it immediately. They are scared of me, or something in that wallet. My reflexes kick-in, and I am up off the ground just as his hand slams down on where I was seconds earlier. I leap away and take off. As I am running from the street, I hear the crunch of broken glass underfoot, and can feel the broken shards puncture the bottom of my old, blue converse sneaker and go into my foot, but I don't mind. All I can think of is hiding. Because of the adrenaline rush, my hearing has become extremely sharp, and I hear something soft hit the ground farther back. My wallet! I think. I hide behind an old rundown building, and wait for them to pass. I silently hurry back to the place I think my wallet fell. There it is! In their hurry, they must have forgotten about holding on to it. I pick it up, and look at the I.D. inside. William King, age 24. There is another card inside. It has some sort of encrypted message in it. Then there is a web address. I need to get to a computer. I hurry down the street, being sure to keep in the shadows. I library! This is weird. I need a computer, and there is a library right in front of me! Sounds like some sort of I walk inside, and head to the computer lounge. Sitting down at the computer, I type in the web address on the strange card. The site asks for a password. I struggle for a moment, and realize that I know it. How is this possible? I type in a bunch of random numbers. I website pops up, with tons of news items about recent terrorist attacks and bombings. There is a tab that says Employees. Once on that page, I search around, and find my name. William King. The description says Suicide Bomber, deceased.
The first thought passing through my mind is What?. The second is … Yeah, pretty much a blank. I mean, what would you think if you realized that you were being chased by the cops, a suicide bomber, and pronounced dead? Oh yeah, and on top of that, you can't remember anything about your life! Well, let's see. With one last shred of hope, I run into the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror. And checking the picture on the computer… yup, definitely me. Oh God, this can't be happening. There's a loud smashing sound, and some shouting coming from the general direction of the front desk. "State Police, ma'am. We're looking for a registered suicide bomber, and we have reason to believe he ran in here. Have you seen anybody suspicious lurking around these streets lately?"