‘The Eternity Machine’ by Graham J Darling

History is for survivors. But if I’m to help you grasp what we went through that terrible night, and what you all face now, then best we take this in tiny steps, just as it happened to me.

Like a baby dropped from its mother’s arms, I screamed, that moment I lost the touch of the Earth.

Twisting and flailing in a howling wind, I felt my outstretched fingers scrape something huge, my bare foot kick away a small, soft body, all falling with me. I was blind, suffocating in the bedsheets that had wound around my head and tightened as I tumbled and twirled.

There’d been an explosion, too, like a thunderclap at my window. Its echoes, mixed with snaps and groans, as if the building around me were coming apart, seemed now a physical fluid filling my ears to near bursting. But this agonizing pressure, presently, my stifled shrieks seemed to relieve, as the roar of rushing air subsided to a moan, then a sigh. Until at last, except for my own pants and sobs and the occasional distant creak and rumble, I found myself floating in dead silence and perfect stillness — and, when I had torn the last of the clinging fabric from my face, utter darkness. My outer senses no longer found cause for alarm, but I was still falling inside.

I tasted blood. My nose was filling with blood. Another minute of panic as I learned to deal with bodily fluids that no longer drained on their own.