Excerpt: Through the Fire: The Age of War

"Where am I?"

Slowly he opened his eyes and looked around. Everything was dark. The floor – concrete, perhaps – felt cold to the touch, and it chilled him even through his clothes. The air was damp and thick with the stench of mildew, though his breathing was the only audible sound. Slowly he sat up and dusted himself off. He felt as if he had been in this place for a long time.

Suddenly the ground beneath him began to shake – a soft rumble at first, but it rapidly increased until the he began to hear the sound of falling concrete. He jumped to his feet as sunlight began to seep in through the tops of the cracks that were forming in the walls around him.

"Is this a basement?"

Large chunks of the ceiling were crashing to the floor as he staggered towards the upward-leading staircase at the other end of the room. But there was a rhythm to the chaos – one he felt he could ride to the other side of the room, and one he could not remember ever feeling in any other quake he had been in. It was as if he was atop a massive ship being battered by the waves of a violent storm. The building continued to crash to the floor around him as he inched forward. More and more sunlight streamed into the room, lighting the path before him.

A sudden shift in the rhythm of the quake sent him flying backwards an instant before a large chunk of concrete landed where he had been standing, sending a plume of dust into the air to be illuminated for a moment by a single beam of sunlight. Again he climbed to his feet as if helped up by an invisible hand. He labored just to maintain his balance, but again he felt a rhythm in the floor beneath him. The beam above the doorway began to buckle under the weight of the building above it – it was now or never for him. He would master this dance – or die trying.

As he stumbled forward, he reached out his hand towards the doorframe on either side of the opening. The instant his hand reached the wood paneling, the shaking stopped. A few more small stones fell from the ceiling behind him, each landing with their own echo, but it was over – he had survived.

He walked up the stairs and looked around the house he was standing in. It looked like something perhaps from the 1950s, with dark yellowish wallpaper patterned with flowers running around the entire interior of the house, with the exception of a few places where it was torn. In the kitchen was an oval-shaped table with four plates on it, each surrounded by silverware and a glass. In the kitchen window was a beautiful white glass vase with a small red rose painted on it. Some of the cabinet doors were open (presumably from the quake), revealing stacks of plates and various other kitchen items, some of them broken.

The house itself had survived the quake remarkably well – far better than the basement had, at any rate, though broken glass littered much of the floor. It seemed no one was at home – had they run outside during the quake? No, the door was closed and locked, as were the windows, although a few of them were broken. In fact it appeared as if none of the things in the house had been touched for quite some time, given the layer of dust that covered nearly everything, though there were a few places where it had been shaken loose.

“Hello?” he called out, but only silence answered him. There was nothing – no life, no voices, not even any noise sound outside.

"What is this place? How did I get here?"

He unlocked and opened the front door and stepped out onto the lawn, though the grass here was at least two feet high. Houses were damaged up and down the street – a residential area of some sort – though there were no people or cars anywhere. It was as if the entire population and moved away; whether it happened all at once or very slowly didn’t really matter. The fact was that he was alone. The houses all looked oddly similar, and they showed obvious signs of wear as if no one had taken care of them for some time. Overgrown weeds and grass sprouted up between cracks in the sidewalks and street, stretching towards the sun as if they were prepared for it to grab them and take them away as well. There was no wind, no movement, no sound.

There was nothing. He still had no idea where he was, much less who he was. He had no idea how or why he was wherever he was. All he knew was that he had awakened in the basement just a few minutes earlier.

“Jonas.” Suddenly he felt a hand on his shoulder and turned, but there was no one there.

"Jonas?" Who had spoken that word if he was all alone? "Yes, I... I remember now. My name!"