The city is burning.
The streets teem with people, streaming into the outskirts like so many rats fleeing before the glow of a thousand fires. Horns honk, women and children scream, men shake their fists: a cacophony of humanity, as though it can assert its voice over the roaring blaze and reestablish its place in the order of the Universe.
Cars stand still, bottlenecked at the on-ramp, where too many drivers simply had to be the first out of the city, as if their continued social standing demanded it. The vehicles closer to the front of the line, where people could see the obstruction ahead, have simply been abandoned, their passengers now on foot, braving even the unknowns of the surrounding suburbs just to escape the chaos inside the city. The exodus from the traffic pileup has started slowly; those near the back haven’t caught on yet, and continue in their panic to inch forward even as the crowd and the fire press closer. Still others cower in their shells of steel and plastic, unable to open their doors against the press of flesh, praying the wave of survivors will simply wash over and move on before the fires reach them.
Corpses smoke in the street, illuminated by the flames from broken shop windows, broken and empty and unmourned. The weeping will come with safety. TVs, BluRay players, computers -- the trappings of humanity, the prizes for which looters exploited the chaos of the dying city -- lie in pieces and forgotten. And always people. They pour from doorways and alleyways, fall from windows, here adding to the stream of refugees, there to the number of dead. And now -- even now -- violence. Whether in fear and panic, or merely taking advantage of the chaos, hands that cannot help but harm those around them.
It doesn’t matter anymore to whom those hands belong, whether to the soulless shells of the Donors who caused the havoc, or to a humanity already bent on destroying itself. There is only death, and those who bring it.
