From the hazy remnants of memories I've tried to shut out, I can tell you little about the next few moments.
One minute I felt the ice soaking through the fabric of my trousers and the solidarity of the ground beneath my knees and feet. In that minute, the lamp flooded the otherwise dark alley with harsh white light. I remember the sound of people waking up, the air humming with the sound of chatter from nearby windows, kettles being switched on, the slight thrum of music and wheels against roads. The rhythms of the city began like an orchestra warming up.
At least that's what I expected. That's what I usually heard on the way back from jobs like this. Evidence of people groggily awakening from their sleep to the dark of winter was all around. They all thought it was a normal day.
At that minute, though, all I could focus on was the crimson on my hands, something that would never leave me. Not in this lifetime. The handcuff dangled off my hands as a reminder, a shackle binding me to the shadow of my past. It may as well have been engraved. It would say: Murderer, Thief, Traitor.
Not just a murderer. The murderer of my closest friend.
The next minute, everything erupted from beneath me.
The solid ground beneath my feet ruptured and cracked, fractals of glass exploded outwards from nearby buildings like thousands of needles aimed for the guilty.
Light unimaginably bright burned my irises, sending pain through my entire body.
The fire came next, charging like a herd of angered horses. It roared its battle cry, consuming everything in its path and shaking its fiery mane. I was in that path.
Believe me, I was surprised too when I opened my eyes.
Seeing the very world explode shouldn't be something that you'd live to tell about.
But there I was, still alive.
When I first saw the building bent horizontally across my vision in the sky, I thought I was dreaming. I thought that perhaps I was horizontal and not the building. Buildings weren't meant to be horizontal, were they?
Then the pain kicked in and I knew I wasn't dreaming.
It reminded me of those movies, the age old line of: 'Am I dreaming? Pinch me!' But that was usually when the stereotypical character had something good happen, like they couldn't quite believe it. That was something believable, like getting the main character of a play or winning the lottery. All of those things paled in comparison to a building bent horizontally over you.
It made me realise how stupid those shows were. I wondered how one of those characters would react if they awoke to the literal impossible.
But, I supposed, the impossible was now apparently possible.
I'm going to announce it like some of those typical characters would, just because it makes it seem more believable. If I convince myself it was a stupid cheesy tv show this entire time, maybe it'll help me cope: 'My name is Cato Faltor and I survived the apocalypse.'
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programme.
Pain. It was like my skin was still on fire, a prickling like being stung by a thousand wasps over and over. Or perhaps more like I had become heat itself.
I stayed like that for who knew how long, shuddering from the pain. Maybe I was screaming, but I couldn't hear myself. Maybe the horizontal building distracted me a little bit, just a little.
Then after a while, it began to subside. Perhaps I should've identified this as an unusual occurrence. People don't just recover from the pain of being burnt. Maybe I was just relieved that it had finally ended; each second had felt like an eternity.
As I came more and more to my senses, I began to notice other things.
The building, yes, but also the sky beyond it.
Pitch black.
It was like night but… closer. Like those angry thunder clouds you would see when you knew an enormous storm was brewing. Except these were worse. They were angrier, blacker, roiling with matter and dust. And these covered the entire sky.
When I moved my eyes to the side, the building to my left was still miraculously standing, despite experiencing the brute force of the building to my right literally snapping in half and colliding with it. The windows had burst out of this one too.
I noticed the silence next, perhaps the worst part of this confusion.
It was then that I let myself think the worst. Maybe I was one of the few to survive.
As soon as I thought I could, I heaved my aching body into a sitting up position, brushing off dust and shards of glass off me.
It was then that I realised my clothes had been mostly burnt away, leaving awkward charred tendrils of fabric hanging off my body.
Upon closer inspection of the damage the fire had done to me, my hair and eyebrows had completely gone, something I would've probably cried about had circumstances been different. My skin had scarred over, like I'd been treated in a burn clinic for months… which of course I couldn't have been. As I searched more and more, I couldn't find a single inch of skin that wasn't burnt.
How did I survive?
"Why am I here?" I remember shouting stupidly, as if the horizontal building or the furious clouds could answer me. "Why am I still alive?" My voice bounced off the buildings, off the clouds, until my sinisterly echoed voice surrounded me, asking me the same questions over and over again.
Why? Why? Why? The echo demanded.
"I don't know!" I replied angrily. "I don't know," I said to myself, quieter. "I don't know," I said again, the reality of the situation sinking in.
In what should've been my grave of rubble, I suffocated under the weight of acceptance.