Blonde in Bagdad

Chapter 6

           

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WARNING: This chapter has graphic content, both emotional and physical. Psychological responses and injuries are described in detail. My advice is not to skip it, but in case you decide to, I will add a summary of the chapter at the end of this update. Thank you for reading.

The blast only knocked me out for a few seconds. I wished I hadn't woken up. Ever.

When I opened my eyes, all I could see was gray.

I heard a thousand of alarms blaring, but I didn't know which were real and which were inside my mind. All the sickness I'd been feeling minutes before had been replaced by new, even more horrible sensations. I could hear moaning and howls of pain. Sounds of destruction, of glass breaking and furniture catching fire attacked me. It really felt like I was being attacked. There was movement near me, but I couldn't see anything.  I wondered if I had gone blind. Something warm and liquid was dripping from my forehead. My lips were slightly parted, and I immediately recognized the metallic taste of blood.

Somewhere not so far, a woman cried.

I strained my eyes, and the catastrophe started to come in to focus. The smoke was so thick I could barely recognize the shapes of fallen bodies around me, and the mountain of debris where the doors to the elevator had been. Pieces of the ceiling kept falling over me, but none of them big enough to kill me. For a second, I found myself wishing they were.

I realized I had been holding my breath and I tried to catch some air. The result was a painful, uncontrollable fit of coughing. All I had inhaled was dust.

I was laying in the middle of a corridor, if you could still call it a corridor. The whole floor seemed to have lost its original shape. The world had stopped turning.

As I became aware of my body, I noticed weight over my abdomen- slowly, I moved my arms to try to identify what it was. A squeal of horror escaped my lips when I felt the contour of a human head under my palms. The young man who had held me was laying over me. A steel bar protruded from the back of his neck. If his body hadn't been on the way, it would have gone straight through my stomach.

With great effort I sat up and moved his dead body away from me. My blood-stained blouse was sticking to my skin. I looked down to find every inch of the white silk covered with dark red stains. I left him lying face down, lifeless. I couldn't look at his face.

I crawled on my hand and knees as far as I could from the corpse, and puked my guts out. Exhausted, I fell back against the debris covered floor. I wanted to fall back to asleep and slip in to the darkness, where there was no death and no horror to witness.

But no matter how much I fought it I could feel senses coming back to life, and with them, the need to do everything I'd trained myself to do in those situations. I scanned my body for injuries. Indescribable waves of pain hit my left leg. I pulled up my trouser suit and the injury I found made me scream in an animal way- nothing about this felt human.

A huge wound ran all the way from the back of my knee to my heel. Half my calf muscle had been slaughtered, and I realized I had left a trace of blood behind me. I gagged at the sight of my bone sticking up from my leg, in a weird angle.

The bleeding. I had to do something to stop the bleeding. I looked around for something that would work as a tourniquet. A few feet away from me I saw the motionless figure of a middle aged woman. I dragged myself towards her, using just my arms. She had no visible life-threatening injures, but her wide-open eyes and peaceful expression told a different story.