A/N: Sorry for the hiatus! Updates should be more regular from here on out.

There was falling, I caught glimpses of a fluorescent light dropping to the floor. I hid my face again before it could land, an instinct that probably saved me as I heard the muffled crash of breaking glass, an explosion of light and cutting that rocketed in the dusty air. I heard more people screaming, and the clatter of footsteps. The ringing of the explosion still lingered in my ears, and I didn't leave the curled-up position where I lay.

I felt a bit of dust enter my throat, and I didn't cough. There was more to think about. That strange electricity still hummed in the air. It was building up now, as if to a crescendo, hissing slowly in my ears, in my brain, in my very core. I knew I couldn't stay here forever. I could feel in my bones that this place would not be allowed to survive. So I just stayed there, wrapped in my own arms and legs, for as long as I could. I didn't want to move, I didn't want to look up until it was really over. After a few minutes, when the world was more quiet, I felt someone try to poke me, thinking I was asleep, making sure I wasn't injured. I muttered that I was fine. I didn't want to hear this person's voice. I was never going to see these people again. Before long, things became very quiet, and all I heard was the sound of my own head.

I waited for hours, but not many. It may have been a trick of my mind, but the ambient light of the room seemed to dim, as if the sun was setting. I wasn't sure what time it was, and I didn't care.

Eventually I felt it. The crescendo was almost reached, and I could barely stand it any longer. My muscles were tense, like they were alive with fire. I felt ready to stand up and run like hell, to scream at the top of my lungs.

In a single fluid motion, I stood up and ran like a shot. My legs felt like they were moving a million miles an hour, as I pounded madly to the door. In the corner of my eye, I might have caught a glimpse of the short-haired girl trying to hold me back, as I shoved my way through the door, and up, up the staircase and out into the hot air. I didn't care.

The air was hot, even though it was evening, like the hot dusty feeling of a generator running in a closed garage. Everywhere around me, my eyes stung and I squinted to see the wreckage of my city. There were smoking craters, piles of burned-up walls and furniture and human bodies. I wanted to puke; I looked up, and the sky was filled with fire. "No! Fuck!" I screamed into the air, but I coughed and nobody heard me. The confused sounds of terror and devastation were too much to sort out inside my mind, but I could tell there was no one else around but me. We were all supposed to die.

And as if to punctuate that awful point, at that moment there was a wave of terror that almost swept me off my feet, a wall of force that knocked me down as it screamed and exploded right behind me. My back felt a terrible, searing heat as the meteor slammed into the school behind me, and I hoped the pain of heat dancing across my back didn't mean I'd been burned by the explosion. I thought I could hear the screams of the people in the basement I had just left behind.

It was too much. After a few minutes I pulled myself back up from the ruined sidewalk I had fallen on, and I just wanted to cry. It was too much. I wondered if my face was blackened with soot as I held back a wave of tears. But I scolded myself, holding back, and I didn't allow myself to leave the fearsome mindset I still had. I held onto my instincts, and my fear.

There was no time for anything else now. I only had one hope of making it through this ferocious holocaust, and that was to listen to the throbbing in my mind, anticipate where I was meant to die.

It thrummed again. Something was close by, about to happen. Without thinking I darted towards the wrecked shell of a house nearby. It wasn't a meteor this time, but another house, on fire, collapsing sideways, engulfing the spot where I had just been standing in a fiery inferno.

I knew that I had to keep moving. It was the only way. I kept going rapidly, purposefully, dodging the places where death was going to be. I kept moving, out of the city, jumping over yawning crevasses in the cracked pavement and carefully making my way around the huge, black billowing craters, which seemed to be centered around places where there would be big masses of people. I was breathing heavily, sweat running down my face, when I reached downtown. The baseball stadium was nothing but a deep, round blackness, pouring out acrid smoke.

I kept going. I just walked, and ran, as long as I could. I rested when I felt like I was relatively safe, but only ever for a minute or two. I would sit down for a quick breather on a scorched fire hydrant, maybe I would pause by a burst-open water main for a couple of gulps of water. But I didn't dare stay in one place too long; I just kept going until I couldn't see the city. My eyelids were heavy and crusted, and I was drawing on my last, hysterical reserves of strength when I collapsed in the open country. It was out in the middle of unbroken, scorched plains, where the thrumming in my skull was quiet enough that I trusted myself to sleep.