A gust of wind through shattered glass and broken concrete on the 36th floor of a building is loud. That is the only thought that the boy had when he woke up. His name was Valentine, he was only 10 years old, but he just watched both his parents and sister die in front of him the night before. Not just his parents, by counting the bodies swarmed by insects and birds, far more than just his parents.

The gusts of the wind into the building sent a chill down Valentine’s spine. There was a hole in the building the size of a bus right in front of him, but he couldn’t hear anything from the street below. No hustle and bustle of the city, no sirens of the police or fire department you would hear next to a destroyed building, nothing.

Valentine got up to walk to the gaping hole in the wall where a window once was. His body creaked from sleeping on hard concrete for the night. As he peered out the window to the city below, he realized what the cause of the deathly silence was. The city outside of the building was decimated. Many of the buildings that had occupied the skyline, that blocked his view out the window the night before, were gone. Left only as rubble on the city floor, the once clear blue river that ran through the city was now a dirty gray-brown stained from the rubble.

Valentine decided that it would be better for him if he was on the ground floor, as he headed for the exit to the stairs, he found a long object wrapped in cloth where he was lying. He hadn’t seen it when he woke up, and when he picked it up, he could feel that it had a heavy weight to it. He tried to unwrap the cloth that was bound to it. But he couldn’t seem to find the starting point to begin unwrapping it. He felt strange when he held the thing in his hands, but he didn’t want to leave it behind, he had to take it with him.

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As Valentine entered the emergency staircase that led to the floors below, he was careful not to misstep in the pitch black. As Valentine made his way down the stairs, he thought that he should check the floor below, maybe there would be survivors there to help him. Opening the first door he felt along the wall, Valentine was greeted with a stench that reminded him of the floor before. He didn’t have to look around to know that the people on this floor met a similar fate to those above. Valentine didn’t check any more floors after that, he simply walked down each stair in a dark silence.

Once on the ground floor, Valentine could barely see, however, there was lighter here than in the stairwell. The little bit of light that was coming in came from small holes in the wall near what he assumed was the entrance. Valentine went back toward the stairwell and began walking up the floors. On the second floor, there was a little more light coming in but no way for him to get outside. When he reached the third floor, he realized what had been blocking all the light from coming in was rubble.

The rubble from another building had fallen and blocked the bottom 2 floors of the building Valentine was in. As Valentine made his way to the window overlooking the rubble he found an open window. The window had shattered and gave him just enough room for him to get out, and right below it was a large part of the rubble that gave him a walkway to the street floor.

Valentine began carefully crawling out the window and climbing down the rubble to make his way to the street floor. The street floor didn’t change much from what Valentine had viewed when he looked down from the floors above. Any sidewalks and areas close to the buildings were covered with rubble. The streets were accessible but large areas were covered with rubble. In the distance, Valentine could make out lights, so he began walking in that direction down the cluttered street.