Kyle Koenig slipped his card into the machine. It made a mechanical noise as if it were chewing the paper and then silenced. He withdrew the card.

Upon donning his hard hat, Mr. Koenig emerged from the small construction trailer and slipped the work card back into his wallet, which he stuck in a pocket of his work clothes. He had only allowed the briefest glimpse of a small family picture, where his wife, Thalia, and their three young girls were relaxing by the pool of the family's modest home. But then Mr. Koenig had had to adjust to the din of the machinery as he returned to the world around him.

With a sigh, he massaged his sore hands and pulled on his work gloves. It was going to be another long day.

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as written by bex321

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The next morning in the papers there were no stories of a teen queen's latest break up, or the results of the latest presidential poll. The city paper, the Santanna Chronicle, was only a couple pages thick and had only one gruesome headline. But it was enough.

Of course, the people of the city already knew. They had no choice in the matter. But that morning, as the news of the city's misfortune spread to surrounding counties as well as across the country, it became common knowledge: Downtown Santanna no longer existed. What did exist… looked like a page from the book of Hell.

All that would ever remain was the gruesome shell of a once prominent place, with its shattered skyscrapers recondite behind a ghastly, ominous black cloud, with it's cars ravaged and wrecked upon the roads. And if you cared to look, you would see that streaks of silt marred the pavement, as did bodies. You'd see that rescue workers who were battling the blaze were also battling their own instincts.

Amidst the chaos, three innocent little girls noticed what would be the devastion of their lives, before their trembling and tortured mother could divert their eyes. But for those three, the image would forever be burned into their minds-- a construction worker's hard hat rolling off his charred, lifeless head, and registering in their impressionable minds for the first time a terrible but true fact.