12-19-11
“AMY! AMY! WHERE ARE YOU?” I called out frantically to my best friend in hope that I would hear her voice in return. At the moment I was chocking on the words as they came out due to the cloggy dust in the air. After what seemed like years of painfully straining my ears, I still herd nothing. I suddenly became aware of a throbbing pain on my left cheek. My mind whirled as I tried to figure out why it hurt in the first place. I didn’t remember anything. I sat in place willing myself to remember what just happened. All I knew was that one minute I was sitting under a tree giggling as my best friend Amy took a sip of water from my new water bottle, all of a sudden a loud wrenching noise cut out the busy sounds of the city. There were countless screams and cries, and then a shock wave of dust came rushing towards us destroying everything in its path. With it came a dead silence.






Next thing I new I was waking up in a mess of rubble, broken glass, and the reminder of the tree we hade been sitting under.
I sat there slowly putting all my small bits of memory back together, like a puzzle with bent pieces when, a fast unexpected noise shocked me out of thought. The noise took me by such surprise that I whirled my head up. In the process I hit my head on some old piping sticking slightly out of the ground. The metallic smell of blood pierced my nostrils as a red hot pain shot thru my mind. I rubbed my new injury with a dirt caked hand trying to make the pain lessen instead increasing the pain. I jerked my head back and saw the dark red of my own blood, making me feel a little scared. Forgetting the pain for a moment, I suddenly remembered what made me hit my head in the first place. After a fast glance in all directions I found that it was Amy. I started to crawl over to her as a wave of relief washed over me.

“Amy are you ok?” I asked as a neared her. A painful sound escaped her mouth that answered my question in a secant. Worry shot through me. As if to make this worse she then said, “I don’t know I can’t feel my right arm, and everything I can feel I wish I didn’t.” Her slightly freckled face looked up at me, reviling pain as she said to me, “Hay Lil is it as bad as it feels?” I immediately
Responded without with out knowing if she really was or not, “No. I don’t think so,” But as the words escaped my mouth I saw why they weren’t true.

A sick hollow feeling sank into my gut as I realized that her arm was stuck under a small but heavy piece of cement. It was crushing her arm against the ground. A fast glance at her face told me that she saw the wrenched look on my face. I quickly changed my expression, but it was too late. I knew she saw through my lies. Guilt hit me like a brick. I felt awful for lying to her and even worse for telling her the truth.
After a few minutes of failed attempts trying to get her arm out, I suddenly remembered the red hot pain at the back of my head. This gave me an idea of how to get Amy’s arm free. I scrambled over to the piping, yanked it out of the ground, and went back over to Amy all in one swift motion. I could feel the cold of the mettle against my hand, as I put it between the ground and the cement. Using it to give my leverage, I pushed up trying to roll the arm crushing object off. The unforgettable noise of bones crunching came out from under her arm, making me wince feeling the pain for her yet I kept trying. It was almost off her arm when an ear piercing scream cut through the air, “Stop please!!!” Amy cried out in pain as we exchanged stressed glances, we both knew her arm was broken. I still kept pushing. With one last push that sent little droops of warm salty water running down my back I rolled the small slab onto its back and off from her arm.
Having her arm free, Amy lifted her head to look at her own arm. A sick color of green washed over her face, I couldn’t blame her, the sight was enough to make anyone sick. Like a light switch something clicked inside me, I went into survival mode. I grabbed a tin water bottle the color of the sky that had been lying on the ground beside me. I poured what water that was left in it onto Amy’s gaping arm. I then took off my beautiful silk scarf and bandaged her arm with it. Hot salty tears balled up in the corner of my eyes making them sting, at the thought of ruining my new gorgeous scarf. I had just gotten it for my thirteenth birthday a few days ago my mother had sent it to me from her new home in China; it was the first gift I had gotten since the “big move.” Not wanting to feel the pain of this memory anymore, I stopped my pathetic train wreck of thought and pushed my memories to the back of my mind. As I helped Amy onto her feet loose dirt whirled up all around us. We both looked around us at all of the destruction; Amy managed to slide a few words in between her pain invaded mind, “What happened?” The sound of fire filled our ears making the horror sink into our hearts Amy and I ran from the backyard into home hoping to find another person, but as we did so in our hearts we both knew that nobody would be there, only the empty shadows lurking in the corners waiting to be discovered. I don’t know why I was surprised that the phone wasn’t working, considering that everything else seemed to be in shambles. I was most likely just out of hope. In our panic Amy and I ran out the front door screaming for help, “Help us is anybody out there?” We saw a person lying on the ground and for a minute we both stood there wanting to believe that the man would stand up, brush off the loose dirt on his clothes and help us, but we knew that his body was cold, and his heart was no longer beating, he was the one that needed help. “He…. He…he’s...”
“Dead. I know” A voice unknown to us interrupted Amy mid sentence Amy and I looked around us until we spotted a boy about the age of fifteen standing by a light pole. He had jet black short hair and looked like a shadow; he looked a little too clean compared to everything else in sight. He must have seen Amy and my confused looks because he said, “Oh I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you what happened, didn’t I?” Amy and I nodded in agreement. “You should sit” he said. His lips moved in a slow discordant manner, as if Amy and I were two kindergarteners, having algebra explained to us. I took a slow and timid step towards him, Amy right behind me. Bit by bit we both staggered towards him, each step getting more rapid than the last. When we found ourselves looking this stranger in the eye he took out his I Pod touch and pulled up a video. Putting the video aside for a moment Amy and I listened to the story he told. The next five minutes were one of the hardest I’d been through. The strange boy had informed us that his name was Jake and that a meteor had hit the city!! After this Amy and I went through a few different phases processing our new information, “HAHAHAHA!!! Good one and this really isn’t the time for jokes.” Amy exclaimed in a shaky voice, and then she started crying when she realized it was true. I on the other hand just stood there, unsure what to make of this. That’s when he showed us the video, and that was the most horrific sight I have ever seen. WWWOOSSHH we watched on the small screen as a huge mediator came bolting out from the sky with hot flames flying behind it like a skirt, then, BAM! It hit the city for a good long moment Amy and I just stood there looking at one another speechless. Finally finding out tongues we asked how he had the video in the first place. He responded with a steady voice, “I was up in the mountains staying with my parents in our summer house, we weren’t affected, but we knew others were so we came down to help.” After many confusing reluctant moments Amy and I accepted our new reality, our home, our life, it had all been crushed. As I explained what had happened to Amy’s arm Jake put it in a sling made from his jacket. Many rushed words later we found ourselves walking towards the mountains, and into our only hope.