The Unknown Allegiance

| Chapter 17 || Pause in the Insanity... Or Not |

Chapter 17

Pause in the Insanity... Or Not

*First Person Point of View ~ Perseus*

During my initial sweep of the city centre, I only found a few stragglers. They were all in peculiar places, which made sense, seeing as they couldn't possibly get out when the attack began.

Evacuation wasn't something I'd ever seen myself doing back when I'd chosen a job for Career Day at school. I'd always thought that I'd make a great Olympic swimmer or a firefighter, maybe even a marine biologist, but search and rescue had never really crossed my mind. The stragglers were usually alone, wandering and scared, but all easily evacuated. For the exceptions, though, it wasn't so easy.

Stumbling towards my mother's old apartment, blood dripping from a long gash down my leg, I bent down next to every car and scanned every store window, looking for survivors.

I was nearly at the front entrance of the apartment building when I found them.

Two small children in the back of a crashed sedan, the front crumpled around a street lamp. In the front, the people who I could only assume to be their parents were crushed against their airbags, which didn't seem to have done anything to prevent their horrific demise.

Acting immediately, I jumped over the hood and swung around to the driver's side door. The ripped metal dug into my palms as I pried the door off its hinges.

It landed with a heavy thud on the street behind me, startling the children slightly. They looked at me, tears on their faces and snot bubbling from their noses. They cowered away from me, but I wasn't offended. They were terrified.

In the silence of the crisis, I whispered quiet reassurances to the pair of them as I slowly crawled into the crushed vehicle, preparing to pull them out of danger.

"Please be calm," I said, trying to get them to relax, "I can get you somewhere safe. Just come with me and you'll be okay." My hand was outstretched towards them, not reaching any further than I needed. I didn't want to frighten them any more than they already were － if that was even possible.

The boy, maybe seven or eight years old, put himself in front of his younger sister, trying to be brave, though his fear shone through. My outstretched hand remained steady, calm as if approaching a cornered animal, and I waited, still whispering words of reassurance.

Everything around us was in chaos. Small explosions lit the day brighter, but in our world, silence reigned. It was just me and the children, and time froze to keep our moment sacred.

Eventually, the boy nodded cautiously, allowing me to wrap my arms around him and his sister and pull them out of the sedan. They both let out strangled cries as they looked back at their parents in the front seats. Immediately, I spun around, putting my body between their eyes and their parents. They didn't need to see that. No one needed to see that.

Carrying them at a run, We made it a few blocks before something else caught my eye. An elderly couple suspended in a cycle rickshaw that hung precariously from a felled lamp post.

I set the children down, kneeling next to them. "You wait right here, okay? I'm just going to go save those people too. Stay strong."

The boy nodded, his arms instinctively wrapping tighter around his sister as I stood, turning back to the couple.

They held each other for dear life; they seem to be in their late nineties. The guide was nowhere to be found, but I would've preferred to think that he had gone to get help rather than just abandoning the couple.