The Bombing

He stood on top of his dune looked up into the sun, eyes closed, breathing deeply in meditative prayer. The heat of the day pounded his face mercilessly.  He’d gone back and forth a thousand times. Was his act selfish? Was it necessary? Had it been sinful? Had it been God’s will? He did not know but he prayed. The wind swept round his habit but it was dry hot air and it offered no relief from the heat of the day.

They’d been waiting but not a sound had crossed their bandwidth. All there was was silence. Had the Papal Council known where he was all this time? Had they destroyed all but him to let him live through the pain? Had they done it so he would see what his actions had wrought? His own village would starve eventually. He knew it. Did they? Was he being egotistical to think they cared so much about an abbot from the Unconnected that had grasped the weakness of the Tri-Verse? When he thought about it that way… no, he was not.

It was on his dune where the wind brought him warning.  The sound was far far away; perhaps, even beyond the mountain range in the distance. The noise was faint and foreign and it was a buzzing of sorts. It didn’t matter what it sounded like, it only mattered that he’d not heard it before. As though the fires of hell had lit under his feet, he ran. Asa ran and screamed, picking up his staff as he took off, he waved it so that the people would see him from a distance.

“To the shelter! To the shelter!!” and as his village heard him they began to scream and run. Somewhere, a watchman must have heard the noise too and the warning bells rang. They warned those to take cover below the meeting hall. The ancients had built the shelters for warfare but the current tenants had always used them for safety from cyclones. All these centuries later the old stone blocks that has preserved them from the unforgiving storms might now fulfill their old morbid purpose.

As he ran Asa picked up Rachel, scooping her up as she cried for her mother. The children had all been playing in the village during their mid-day break, a stroke of luck really, and they followed him in a river of small humanity to the shelter. As they ran down the main thoroughfare, a townsman and a lesser priest and others joined the moving throng. They entered the meeting hall and began to descend the stone steps into the shelter.

He was guiding people in when the first bombs dropped. He ran in himself when he realized the meeting hall was collapsing. It was then, in the safety of the shelter that he realized the vast majority of those that had made it in were the children. Asa knew the attack dropping at mid-day was no stroke of luck.