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“What are you staring at?” she asked, her hands on her hips, her breasts bursting out of the V in her top. Those same breasts I had fondled and suckled at so many times before.
“Only the most beautiful woman,” I told her. “Are you ready?”
She sighed, looking around the church and at the altar we had just desecrated in the most primal way possible before she looked back at me. “Yeah, I guess I am.”
I stepped down off the pew I had been on, making sure the wires to each explosive were connected and I took her hand, the detonator in the other.
We marched our way to the double doors that led out to the Caldwell side of the city. Both of us took a handle for each door, and kissed briefly before we opened it to a barrage of police officers, their guns trained on us.
“Roman Moreno,” Amir shouted into the loud speaker. “Lay down your weapons.”
“You best get going,” I shouted at him. Somehow I knew he had heard me. “This place is set to go up any minute.”
“Roman, don’t be stupid.”
I smiled out at the sea of red and blue, I could hardly see where he stood. If it weren’t for the big white loudspeaker in his hands, I wouldn’t know where he was. I looked at him, even though I couldn’t see him, and I held up the detonator in my hand before I pressed the red button on the top. Jolie and I stepped back inside the doors, watching as they closed slowly. I kissed her, one final time, as the explosions went off downstairs first, and then the one at the altar exploded through the church. The power of the explosion ripped through the air, separating me from Jolie before I felt something hard hit me in the back and everything went black.
Epilogue
Twelvemonthslater
Ruins of Verona
The rubble of where the church once stood was just a pile of ash and old stone now. I looked around the site, now that it had been deemed stable, and took photos with my phone for the article.
When my editor had sent me all the way to the destroyed city of Verona to cover the story of the two warring families who had wiped each other out before destroying their city, I had thought him crazy. I’d wanted a real story but I suppose you must pedal through the bullshit before you get your big break.
I knew that.
No one lived here anymore, everyone had fled, if they hadn’t died of course, but there was a new city that had been erected in the year since the tragedy. A city that had been sitting, waiting for people to populate it from what I’d read. Right next door, of course, but you needed an invitation to enter it and that was something I didn’t have.
When I heard the sounds of rocks falling, I turned to see a kid running through the debris.
“Hey, kid, wait up!”
I ran after him, losing him through the rubble of multiple buildings that had stood next to the church.
Damn it. I lost him and couldn’t hear his running anymore. He’d been the first sign of life I had encountered since I drove here. The beach was full of ashy debris on the sand, but the waves still crashed on the shore as if nothing had occurred.
I took a few more photos and tried to find something that would give me a story. A story my editor would be happy with, enough to get me more stories that would make a difference. I sighed, knowing that this city was once a thriving metropolis, governed by a stern sheriff and two families who split the city. It had lived that way for decades before it all went tits up.
As I headed back to my car, I felt a sense of emptiness as I walked these streets. I tried to think of what it was like when it was lively and active. What had the people been like before the war erupted?
A chilly wind picked up and I pulled my jacket closed around me as I felt my hair tie blow out of my hair. Turning around to see where it went, I saw a piece of paper floating through the air.
Weird.
It looked like a newish type of flyer. It wasn’t burned, and it wasn’t over a year old.
I ran to it and grabbed it from the air before it blew too high for me and I looked down at the two faces on the front of it.
The faces of the new city, Verona Heights, being the new mayor and his wife. I looked at the wife, because I knew her face.
I could never forget that face and to be honest, it was the real reason I took this assignment. I knew she had been from this city. Back in St Augustine’s, we’d been thick as thieves until she’d left with a promise of a brighter future, and had told me to reach for the stars. Our school days were limited, but I knew she had been right. She’d taught me to be tough, strong enough to withstand anything that was flung my way.
Rumor had it that she had been the reason the city had imploded. It had been caused by her love for the son of her father’s enemy. Their love launched a city of destruction but everyone had said she’d died among the bombs exploding with her lover. I knew it had taken out the police force in Verona, and anyone who had stayed behind.
But as I looked upon her smiling face on the piece of paper, I knew what she’d done. Something she had always wanted to do.
