We clamber our way through the once dead silent city. Now awash with bullet barrage and the screams of the dying and so called glory. The loud jets and helicopters from overhead poured gunfire with blood spewing shrapnel and debris, lighting up the sky with a haze of orange glow with an intensity that threatened to melt the stars. The pungent scent of entrails and burning flesh fill my nostrils as I want to gag, my uninjured hand is pushed hard against my mouth before I vomit.

My damaged hand clings as tightly as it can to Anne, we became each other’s life line in this mess of sound and vivid fire. A bomb falls to the sky, a ways off from us but I am not at all comfortable as it plummets down. The world shudders while the first of I’d say many, mushroom clouds that light up the sky and rain death.

Anne began to take the lead on me, pulling me along the back streets, knowing where to go to avoid any and all confrontation as we run after Markus. My grip was slippery with the blood that’s travelled down my arm but Anne keeps a firm grip on my sleeve. She was silent, her eyes forward. I could tell that she was trying to swallow down her fear.

This glory of war that everyone talks about. I don’t see it here at all. I see faceless shadows yelling and screaming and dying. I see no comrade as one has his leg blown off and his friends run in the other direction, only to be shot in the head. Just who is who out there?

“He’s gone down there!” Anne pulls me out of my thoughts, pointing towards something that looks like it was a shopping centre. Breathing heavily, I realise by the way my lungs ache that we’ve been running for way too long. I have no idea where we are.

As we go through the smashed front doors, I saw it was impeccably dark in here. There were a pair of escalators in front of us that lead straight down and the floor swallowed up by the darkness beyond. A glass railing with gold lining once parred the gaping hole that was always in the centre of these types of places. The shops that lined the sides were sad and broken with glass everywhere and dust collecting that we were disturbing.

“This way!’ Anne tugs me down the unmoving steps. Of course down. Let’s go down somewhere practically pitch-black that has God knows what down there. As my feet hit the solid concrete surface of the next floor, it was met with a wet, splashing sound. Water. The entire floor was flooded. I can hear Cody not too far behind who let out a grunt of surprise as his feet also hit the water. At first, my sight was met with a wall of darkness but slowly I begin to see that it was a dim walkway. Anne pulls me down along, so sure of where she was going while I was blindly stumbling behind her.

Anne didn’t let me time to inspect my surroundings. Down the passageway, there was adimly lit area up ahead. As we came upon it, it was a spacious area that would have been the food court. It was like a massive empty ballroom now. The ceiling was damaged and a huge gaping hole looked up at the moonless night but still managed to be illuminated by starlight and the hellfire razing in the distance.

In a small corner, I see Markus and immediately run up to him as he clutches at his shoulder, his eyes wide and almost feral, like he didn’t recognise anything around him anymore. The last time he was like this…

“Markus,” I call to him, stopping just a few metres away.

“Make it stop,” he whispers to himself. “Make it stop!’ He repeats the sentence over and over, more and more panicked. Almost like a rhythm, speeding up. As he did, he clutches at his head, digging his fingers griping his hair. “Make it stop!” Over and over.

I was stunned. This…he…

He suddenly stops, his eyes now locked on something in the distance. All emotion gone from his face. Like he was a doll. Then the words echoed from his lips, “Make it stop.”

Anne pulls on my arm, “Get back!”

Just as she pushes me back, branches erupt from Markus’s back. Wooden vines peel through his skin as his body transforms. Flesh becomes root. Bone becomes branch.

“No!” I run forward. He needs to stop. Stop it now! “Markus! Stop!”

As he becomes consumed, his eyes fell upon my desperate face. His face was calm. Almost serene. A small satisfied smile touches his lips. And he was gone. My brother. Where a ten year old boy once stood was now a tree. I skid to a stop, my fingers trace and claw at the smooth bark, trying to fine him. “No. No. No. Markus…”

He didn’t. He couldn’t.

“He’s gone,” Anne’s voice echoes as she collapses beside me. Placing her hand on the trunk, she begins to stroke it, her lips trembling as tears spill that she was trying so hard to contain. “Markus…is gone.”

No. I look up at the dark branches, see that magnolia flowers began to open up. Pure white magnolias fill the air with a heavy scent that was almost intoxicating. The held a blue glow that were softly luminescent and the centres were rich golden in colour.

“He can come back. He’s still here,” I try to reason. “He’s right here.”

But Anne shakes her head, “This is just a tree. Markus isn’t here anymore.”

I pull her into a tight hug, not caring for the water lapping at my legs. I was beyond pain, even with the new wound in my arm. Anne pulls on my clothes tightly as she sobs into my shirt.

I look up, over at Cody that was staring at his feet. His fists had curled up tightly at his sides. I felt hollow. Just…Markus was there and now…

I tighten my hold on Anne. Was she always this small? My eyes stung as I look up at Markus once again. But it wasn’t Markus. I close my eyes. He can’t come back, can he? He’s gone. Gone and turned himself into a tree.

I have never felt so helpless in my life. What can I do? What can I do to bring him back? To rewind what had happened. What was there? Why? Markus…just why?

“We can’t stay here,” I said finally. My voice was dead and sounded hollow, completely devoid of emotion, even to my ears.

But how can we leave him? Markus was a tree. How do we move a tree that towered over us enough that it just reaches the ceiling some twenty odd metres above us?

I stand up, helping Anne to her feet and look over at Cody, expecting him to say something next. But he remained silent. He was probably as unwilling to leave as I was. But we can’t stay here.

The screams and machinegun fire outside attest to that and it’ll just get worse from here on. And we couldn’t afford to stay here.

But this was Markus.

I look back at the tree.

Just as I was waging an internal war with myself, the place shook around us. Another bomb had fallen and it was way too close for comfort. I look up in time to see a spray of debris hitting the air, landing in the water around us. I pull Anne closer to me, to shield her from the falling shrapnel and dust. A column collapses near us, sending wave after pounding wave of water against our side.

When the water begins to settle, a sound from above makes my inside run cold. A rope falls down into the hole. Then another and another. Until eventually there were eight lines and men dressed in heavy army gear coming down.

Cody pulls himself between us and them. Without giving them much time to think, he charges forward and without mercy he smashes a fist into one of them, cracking the ribcage and drops dead in the water. Cody then pulls on a number of robes and each strain under the new found tug of war with each having at least three people still on them trying to come down. But Cody was angry and he pulls harder until the lines snap and they came tumbling down to their death. Each body hitting the shallow water and concrete underneath with a wet slab that was sickening to the ears. Cody then twisted around to meet a soldier who had successfully made it down and was raising his gun. Only to have his head meet with my brother’s fist which slammed him into the air and landing harshly into a wall, the back of his head slamming along with it. But Cody wasn’t done. Just as quickly, he comes at him again, still in the air and forces his skull through the wall, cracking it and destroying it along the way.

Another two had made it and began raining bullet down on Cody. But Cody uses his strength to power his legs, giving him lightning speed and he pulls one up by his wrists and punching the other in the gut, making him sprawl across the floor like a skipping stone. Cody then looks up at the man he had a hold on. He had pulled him up so that his feet barely touched the ground and pushes his fist into the man’s gut who collapses onto the floor like a sack.

A silence returns to the area for a moment but more sound illuminated the surface above us. I could see Cody’s jaw tighten and a madden stubbornness was taking over his mind. “I’ll kill them,” he growls before launching himself up to the twenty metre gap up top. Surprised shouts and machine gun fire soon sound afterwards.

I immediately make my way towards the passages back up to the outside. No way in hell am I going to lose him too.

Anne came up beside me, “We need to hurry. He isn’t bullet proof.”

I look down to her, a thought nearly made it to the surface but she cuts it down.

“I’m coming.”

We slushily make our way towards the escalators and with a heavy grip, I somehow manage to pull myself up to the top where Anne was impatiently waiting for me.

“Why are they here?” I ask as we manage to get outside.

She leaves my question unanswered as her head whips over to the sound of an explosion up behind a half collapsed building that was being held in place by a broken wall that it was leaning on. She then runs towards the sounds, “Cody’s over here!”

As I stumble towards her, I try to pull her back, only to miss and my vision starts to go fuzzy. Shaking my head, I try to focus again. I think I’ve lost a bit too much blood over the past few weeks and running around like an idiot with a hole through my shoulder isn’t exactly helping either. Anne squeezes through a hole and I follow behind. Coming through to the other side, it was a horror scene and I just happen to walk through a curtain to it.

Surrounded by corpses and blood staining the ground, Cody was in the centre, wiping the blood from his chin. His eyes were feral. There was a glint in them as they landed on us. As they did, he runs up behind me and lands a solid punch on a solider that was about to point a gun into my back.

Cody was almost enjoying himself. And that left me feeling a sort of sense of dread.

“Cody!” I call to him but it falls on deaf ears as he pulls me to the side as machine gun fire explodes into the air, landing into the concrete just where I was standing before.

Fucking hell.

“Get to safety,” Cody looks me in the eyes, “You need to get to cover.”

“I’m not going anywhere without you!”

A grin spreads across his lips, “Try and stop me.”

And with that, he leaps from my side and towards the ones shooting at us. What a fucking lunatic.