Prologue - Part One

John had been gazing into the inferno that was once the proud city of Dublin for the last couple of hours. Relaxing on his lawn chair made of tough plastic with his feet on an empty crate of booze he uncapped another beer, giving out a mild hiss in comparison to the loud roar of the blaze in the distance. You don't know how loud a city fire is until you hear it, the air nearly shakes with the heat. That and the explosions. Glass and wood breaking inside of large buildings, concrete structures buckling under the stress, it really makes a lot of noise.

This is the fifth day since it happened, in five short days everyone has gone nuts, it'd be funny if it wasn't so tragic. The first day was what you would expect, planes falling out of the sky into oceans and fields. Cars suddenly stopping causing massive loss of life in crashes worldwide. The internet and television failing to function. The weird thing for John was that he had been driving his truck back into town at late hours when it just broke down. He had done the usual procedure, curse for five minutes at the engine and then take out your phone to call for a lift. The only problem being that his phone was dead.

John had waited on that road trying to stop someone for a few minutes before he gave up and went back into his truck. He was in the cab seat of his six wheeler, stressing out that he was going to miss all of his deadlines when he heard it. An earth shattering bang, it was coming from behind him and the light from the explosion had lit up his whole cabin. In the rear view mirror he saw a massive fireball in the middle of a field off the motorway, maybe a few kilometers away. The wreckage could be seen after the initial burst of flame and revealed the structure of a plane, it was a large passenger plane.

Doing what any reasonable human should do John gazed at the fire for a couple minutes, saying nothing, before reaching for his phone and promptly cursing his own stupidity. 'I wonder if I should go over there and see it up close, it'd be pretty stupid to die from another fuel tank exploding but I doubt any of them remained intact after the initial crash and explosion', John thought while exiting his truck. Walking across the motorway into the second set of lanes John Strode towards the still burning wreckage.

After crossing a couple of fields John saw the spectacular mess in front of him. Pieces of metal were jutting out of the ground everywhere, the fuselage was split in four irregular pieces, one of which was a good bit away from the fires. The tail seemed to have broken off before the impact and was over fifty meters away from the rest of the wreck. John walked over to the tail section of the plane to see a fairly disturbing site. Babies, children, women, men, all still strapped into their chairs and still wearing their oxygen masks. Most had blood leaking from their mouths, noses or eyes but some also had chunks of metal lodged into their bodies. The smell of fuel overwhelmed everything else and without his eyes John would be almost unaware of the veritable horror scene composed of the bloody mess that was once the passengers on this plane. If anyone is still alive in that compartment it was debatable as to whether or not they would want to be.

John was feeling a series of emotions, disgust, distress, fear but most of all he felt curiosity. He climbed into the frame of the plane to get an even closer look, being careful not to stand on someone else's scattered organs. When he heaved himself into the cabin he had snapped a sheet of thin metal and had caused fuel to begin leaking from a large tank underneath the passengers. 'It's a good thing there's no fire over here', John thought to himself. In the Cabin most were obviously dead, not much point in checking someone's pulse if their heart is on the floor in front of them along with the rest of their chest cavity. Checking each pulse john made his way through the cabin. He had felt a few faint pulses but they were from people with no chance of survival, having too much blood loss or too much organ damage from shrapnel. John heard moans coming from the back of the cabin and he quickly turned to face it, ignoring the human mess in front of him.

The moan belonged to a brown haired woman who seemed to have little external damage besides a few scrapes and a lot of bruises. John approached the woman carefully, it would be stupid to slip and impale himself. She was falling out of her chair and the only thing stopping her from colliding with the chair in front of her was her seat belt. Her hair covered her whole face as it draped over her. John pushed her back into her seat and tried to release her seat belt. After a minute of trying he took a pocket knife out of his back pocket and started to cut the belt. The belt snapped back when it was cut sending the woman falling forward. John quickly dropped the knife and grabbed her. After picking his knife back up and putting her on his back he climbed out of the wrecked cabin with her.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

'She's still warm, I can feel her breath on my neck, that's a good sign. This reminds me of that time I carried my brother home after he got so drunk he totally lost motor function. I wonder if it's bad luck to pick girls up in plane wrecks', John mused to himself.

The scene outside had disturbingly not changed much at all, no helicopters, no sirens in the distance and not even a bird nor bat could be heard over the crackling flames. 'There must have been hundreds on that plane, only one survivor. I wonder how this woman survived a plane crash with so little injury, I'm no doctor but I don't think it should be possible. I can't really see any damage but there might be broken bones, internal bleeding, I have no idea'. John focused on the condition of the woman as he cleared the wreck and made towards the edge of the field.

John laid her down on the uneven grass using a bump in the field as a makeshift pillow, she seemed to be semi-conscious and awake enough to murmur and moan in distress but not quite there enough to actually open her eyes or process anything. John sat down and once again began contemplating his situation when a burst of flame spat a hunk of metal from the main wreckage to the tail end of the plane. The metal then proceeded to spark on landing and cause a new explosion, the entire tail end of the plane blew up hardly two hundred meters away from John and the unconscious woman. The blast knocked John off his ass and onto his back as pieces of shrapnel flew over him.

Level up x3 

John pushed himself back up, utterly speechless at what had just unfolded in front of him, if he had of been in that cabin he would of died, if that woman didn't murmur to him while he was in that cabin he would still have been in there. This woman had saved his life, in a weird way.

There was a blue box in front of John now and when he looked at it, it seemed to follow his eyes, always staying center. It was still hard to focus on it because of the now two raging fires in the background but he could make out the words and he straight away thought about the games he played. John knew that leveling up was normally something you did when you gained enough experience and you could gain experience normally by killing things, completing quests and other less common methods. John thought back to when he caused the fuel leak. 'Well, I'll add that to the I'm going insane list. Along with the rest of the weird shit that has happened today'. John was strangely calm about everything at that moment, as if it had long gone past the point where anything actually mattered.

John got up and looked for any signs of help, there was nothing coming. At least an hour had past and there was still no one, even for a small country like Ireland there should have been a response by now, especially because the crash was only slightly outside of the capital city.

It was getting cold and John knew that there was only one safe place he knew of that had shelter and would be fairly warm so he picked up the still breathing brown haired woman and carried her on his back towards his truck. It was difficult to walk through the fields with all the extra weight but it gave him time to focus on the blue screen that still centered itself in his vision. 'So either I'm in shock and I'm seeing things that aren't there or I now have the same properties of a game character, I suppose I'll sleep on it. At least until the traffic Gardai knock on my window and tow me off the motorway in the morning'. John thought to himself.

When John got to his truck he opened the door and he noticed it was beginning to frost over, it was going to be a cold night. John put the woman in the cabin before climbing in behind her and laying her down. He retrieved some blankets he kept from the inside of the overhead and was about to put a couple on the woman when he thought to himself that he should check to see if she had any bleeding underneath her clothes, he had a first aid kit in the truck after all. John lifted up her shirt but only found minor scrapes on her stomach that barely bled enough to merit a plaster, but he put them on anyway before moving on to her legs. Taking off her jeans John saw a large gash on the outside of her left thigh, it seemed to have been caused by a piece of jagged metal from inside of her jeans. Thanks to women's fashion the wound had been held closed by the tightness of the jeans until John took them off, causing the wound to bleed. He applied disinfectant to the wound before bandaging it up.

When John went to put her jeans back on he found a problem, they were too tight, it was a blessing and a curse it seemed. This was bad, if she wasn't warm enough she might catch something but in the grand scheme of things John gave up and dropped a couple of blankets on her and one on himself before passing out from having far too much fun for one night.