The shorts.

[Weriom]

I wrote this first one in ... *checks* June 2006 sometime, and edited about half an hour before posting here. No name, no intro, no need. Just something to show my writing style back then, really. The lack of dialogue is intentional, and has been fairly common in my short stories, really, although the next one I'll post will be a completely different creation entirely.

As fire slowly ate through the floor below him, the young boy began to sob quietly. The heat was unbearable, intense. His eyes hurt from the sheer effort of keeping them open in the burning air. The floor was weakened by the heat, groaning with the effort of supporting his weight. A hole close to him was a show on what would happen when the effort became to great. The boy had already tried escaping, but to no avail. He had only gotten up two flights before finding a blaze before him, and he had run back down the stairs in a tearful horror. Unbenownst to him, the fire had started on the roof, but through bad luck or a terrible fate, burning timbers falling from the hotel's roof had set a second fire on the ground floor which had spread thanks to thick carpets at the entrance which lead into the building. The boy had been trapped, caught between two blazes and inhaling smoke as it rose like an evil apparition from the air vents, stairwell and floor. He had tried to crawl away through the vents, but the smoke had been thick, chocking him as if it were water. He coughed quietly. Smoke was leaving everything dirty, dark. Dead. It was as if that smoke was hugging him, latching onto his clothes, his face, on everything in an embrace that was surely deaths. It was a sign he was trapped, lost. It looked hopeless. It was hopeless. In the inferno that had once been so many’s home, a little boy sat down and cried.

Firemen were working at the blaze down the bottom, trying to extinguish the fire so that people upstairs wouldn’t suffer from smoke inhalation. But every time men went into the fire, either they were forced out or not at all. Their job was to save lives. Their aim was to save lives. They couldn't manage it. Not like this.

The helicopter circling the blaze was relatively small, used only in emergency situations. It was meant to land on the roof, but that was obviously impossible. The only other course of action they could take was to use a precarious rope ladder to get close to the windows and pull anyone out who was there. It was a fools errand. Someone would need to stay on that ladder, buffeted by strong winds, seared by blazing heat and doomed if a cinder so much as brushed the ladder. But people could still be inside.

The little boy was still crying when he heard a scrape at the window frame. He looked up to see a man, pulling the window open and beckoning to him. His lips moves, and he smiled encouragingly, but his words were lost among the black soot, the smoke and dirt. The boy got up as if in a trance, and took a slow step forward. He took another step. Stopped. Listened to the fire, the creaking and groaning. He looked at the hole, to his left, at the indistingushable shape that was burning itself to hell down there. He took another step, and sighed as the floor below him groaned one last time and gave way.

The buildings frames had taken too much. The roof caved in on itself, the floor just shattering outwards like a bomb. Firemen outside fell victim to rubble flying out, the helicopter fell rapidly away, somehow saving the man on the ladder, and a little boys body inside the collapsed former tower was crushed beneath the soot.

In the country's quiet cemetery, four people attended the burials that day, two of them the undertakers. The hotel had been for tourists, after all. None of them had family around to farewell them. Thirty seven charred skeletons were beyond recognition of any sort, with few records to trace them and no details to follow. Their markers were a mound of dirt and weeds, flecked with black traces. That, and a headstone. A blank, empty headstone.

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I'm not that happy with it anymore, but I'll still post it for people to see. Anywho. Uhm. I guess I will make a topic to talk in, just for in/conviences sake (read as desired), so go over there and say what ya think, if you want to.