Male

He could remember being at the party. There'd been drinking, dancing, fucking.

There'd been a bomb.

'A bomb. Yes, we remember the bomb. It made a pretty ticking sound. Tickity tock, tickity tock...'

But before that he remembered a woman, beautiful and elusive, she wouldn't give him her name. Simply smiled at him, took him by the hand and led him towards one of the bedrooms.

She'd lain him down on the bed, and then darkness had taken him.

' BOOM.'

In an instant the blackness become white, white became red, red became agony.

'Then the fire..'

He could remember that, could still feel the ghostly heat of it on his skin as his nerve endings had been destroyed. He could feel the searing pain of it as he had struggled to breathe, suckling down nothing more than superheated air.

But everything else, any little thing that tied him to who he may once have been was gone. His clothes were ash, his shoes, wallet everything save for a single gold star he'd been wearing on his shirt, now melted and fused into the skin of his collar bone.

He lay there, buried beneath the rubble for who knew how long, clinging to life by the less than his fingertips. The weight of the rubble above pushed down on him, forcing the last vestiges of air from his already scorched lungs with an agonising wheeze. As he tried to fill them, he only succeeded in sucking in dust and forcing a crushed rib further into his chest.

As he began to despair, the rubble heaved above him, and he though this was it, the moment where the weight of it inevitably came crashing down on him. He welcomed the release, mentally opened his arms and embraced it.

'But she embraced us.'

The chunk of rubble pinning his arm had been thrown skywards. The one pinning his leg lifted as if by some **** of magic. In his delirium, he thought he saw a set of long crimson nails beneath, lifting the concrete upwards by hand.

Through eyes filled with grit that he didn't have the strength to wipe, he saw a silhouette loom towards him through the haze, feminine he thought, but he couldn't see details against the amount of dust cloying the air.

He felt his broken form rising from where it had been thrown, felt himself lifted from the carnage, and thought the time had come to meet his maker. To die.

How right, and how incredibly wrong he had been.