The effects of an explosion on the human body, even one at a far remove, are remarkably holistic. It flows over the skin like oil, punches you in the gut, and tears the senses right out of your skull. Millie, like everyone else who had been standing, was on the ground before the shattered glass of the hospital windows had finished scattering over the linoleum.
As the others began struggling to their feet Millie stayed down. Not that she didn’t want to join them, but her body simply wasn’t willing to cooperate. It wasn’t meant for much, especially not this. Her ears rang and lungs burned, she could swear she felt her organs bruising and her bones strain near breaking. Her leg felt even less right than usual. But pain, at least, was a familiar thing. She was still alive.
It was Andrew that came for her first. Paul was helping Wyetta into a wheelchair. George was up and looking absolutely batshit, beady eyes wide, a manic grin on his face. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Brandon bolting out of the room, joining the crush in the hospital halls. It was chaos out there, loud enough that she couldn’t hear herself think.
But she could hear the voice. “Acquisition request for: Milicent Armstrong, memories. Grant access: Yes/No?”
Fuck no.
“Acknowledged. Request denied.”
“Come on, up ya get!” Yelled Andrew, over the noises of chaos and panic.
Rotting organs made Andrew no less of a big dude, lifting Millie onto her feet with apparent ease. She was shaking, white-knuckling her cane. Paul was having a little more trouble with Wyetta, who didn’t look like she was being cooperative. She was saying something to Paul, who was not responding well to her serene proclamations and had turned to force.
“This isn’t a request Ms. Fields, get in now.” Said Paul, as he crammed the old woman into a wheelchair.
Teeth grinding with struggle against her body's demand to just lie back down, Millie grabbed her bag and yelled at Andrew. “What was that!?”
“Pyramid looking things outside, you can see ‘em all over.” Andrew grabbed Millie’s backpack from her and slung it over his shoulder. It looked like a purse on him. “Think they caused the explosions.”
“They the, uh: ‘Emergency shelters’?”
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“Yeah, must be.”
Just getting her runners on was maybe the most surreal experience of Millie’s life. Tying laces as the world ended. By the time she was done, Andrew was at the door urging everyone out, Paul and Wyetta were the first to comply. Andrew had taken charge pretty quick, the chaos had flicked an on-switch for the guy. Millie figured he must be some sort of emergency responder, or a soldier.
As she got up and got ready to follow she saw George over by the broken window, he hadn’t put on shoes. Messy streaks of blood marked his passage through the field of shattered glass. Millie limped up and tried to shake him back from wherever he’d gone too. But then she saw what he saw and went to the exact same place.
Goodbye LA.
Downtown was collapsing. Literally collapsing. Not all of it, but enough to finally acknowledge that whatever this was could really be some sort of apocalypse - a dozen skyscrapers dying like ancient titans. Bucking and roaring against gravity as their own immense weight gave way to ruined foundations. For a moment, Millie couldn’t figure out what had done the damage, until she spotted the ‘pyramids’. They were identical, all over the place, and brought to mind a metallic Chichen Itza designed by a mad brutalist and stripped of their staircases. It looked as if they’d just ‘appeared’ all at once. They didn’t respect existing occupants. Anything that existed where they appeared was just… gone. The Staples center was shorn in half. The UPS store had been completely replaced by a Chichen Itza. The hospital must have lucked out, and those skyscrapers that were beginning to fall… had not.
“Impossible.”
“Clearly not.” Coughed back George, who had that sharpness to him that she’d glimpsed minutes ago. A lifetime ago.
“We need to go.”
“You need to go. I have wanted this for years; a death I can stare in the face.”
“Come ON!” Yelled Andrew, “We gotta go NOW!”
Millie turned to George, tried to muster up something to say, some compelling words she knew she didn’t have. He grabbed her by the shoulders, spoke quick and clear.
“You aren’t dead. Close isn’t the same as is. You make that mistake too much. Fight - fight everyone for everything if you have to. Live for something other than spiting death.”
Before she could respond, George shoved Millie back with surprising strength. “Go!”, he commanded, his bastard’s smile back where it belonged.
Looking down, Millie saw that he’d somehow pressed their go set into the crook of her arm. ‘Ancient trickster god’ was the thought most prominent in her mind as Andrew gripped her shoulder and pulled her out the door and into an awaiting chaos. The last she saw of George was him looking self satisfied as he turned his tired old body to look back out the window. He must have been awfully pleased about the baffled look he’d gotten out of her, the bastard. It took all she had to keep her feet, cane taping a mad rhythm on the floor as they vanished into the press.