My legs acted without my conscious involvement, taking flight from my all too insufficient cover towards the door across the street. Our personal machinery had run the numbers and had come to either one of the two available options that is presented to every creature in times of peril: Fight, or flight. Death is an irrational solution to the equation and is immediately factored out by the great machine encased in our skulls, so we stood or we ran.
Death is not a rational function. Death was whistling past my ears, skittering off the ground and howling from the muzzles of automatic rifles. Death was dogging my heels, skipping off the stones in grim frustration as he failed time and again to catch up to me. Death was calling to me, beckoning me to fall and embrace inevitability.
My legs twisted and danced between the bullets, as graceful as any dancer. That is, any terrified dancer that was sweating under the weight of a full pack and the responsibility to defend one’s country.
My breath grew loud and ragged in my own ears; faced with surrounding horror and uncertainty, my body clung to the little bit of order that it could. I reached the wooden door of the small house across the street and slammed into it shoulder first.
I heard a startled cry in a foreign tongue, but I understood it all the same. Fear crosses all language barriers as well as bullets.
Crouching beneath the window, my foe mirrored my shocked expression with widened eyes. From his vantage point, he had a clear line of sight to the rear of my recently vacated position. The position where my friends were still standing, still fighting, still fearing. Briefly I wondered why he didn’t have his weapon drawn, and that’s when I saw the grenade leisurely falling from his hands, dropped in surprise at my sudden entrance.
My eyes flicked from his face to the grenade and finally to the pin in his hands. There wasn’t enough time to scream, I stood stock still, frozen as my opponent fell to the ground and fumbled to remove the ruination from our midst, but the laughing fates took an interest in our predicament and at that moment, turned to waters of time to molasses. Either cruelly or mercifully, I was granted enough time to withdraw within my own mind, and as terror opened its smiling jaws, I retreated further and further until I came to a timeless void. This is where I would stay, conscious of nothing, aware of only myself as my body remained in the room, waiting, bracing for impact.

• * *

I watch in horror as the stranger approaches my door. His twisted visage a macabre mockery of human the face of pure, unadulterated fear captivates you with its cold, penetrating gaze; when it looks past your corporeal exterior and weighs your very soul, that’s when you find that you can articulate your feelings with greater elegance as time loses meaning, and you lose track of yourself. Words that you didn’t even know that you knew spring forth and arrange themselves in a delicate yet beautiful pattern that seems tantalizingly familiar yet altogether alien, like some dream half remembered before it happens; as soon as you grasp for it, it disappears as if it had never been. A myriad tapestry of unnecessary and wholly arduous adjectives flow from you as naturally as the exhalation of oxygen you depend upon for survival, an experience I counted to be quite odd.
I was happily in the midst of one such experience when I remembered that I am a living, loving creature whose primary mode of functioning is maintaining its own existence. This notion of survival that has permeated my very soul since the spark of life that God first ignited in me sprang into being. Vaguely I wonder how long I have been apart from myself, transfixed by the sheer wonder of it all and not to be distracted by the mundane happenings of the here and now; how long has it been since I was blissfully ignorant of my body’s own preservation cycle? It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds since I’d run into the room. A man was crouched before me with lines of shock and terror engraved upon his features, reaching vainly for the innocent calamitous little sphere before him that was falling, falling…
I become aware of a distinct pop, and suddenly my ears are overloaded with a vast multitude of air particles assaulting my tympanic membrane. My eardrum holds for the briefest of moments before it gives way to a terrible shriek that tears its way across the limits of my audible perception until I cannot track it any further. As a testament to its passage, it leaves a sharp ringing in my head, a final salute by frequencies that I will never be able to hear again.
The primary wave hit me then, slamming into me like an invisible fist while passing unhindered through my skull and sending ripples of agony throughout the aqueous mass that I use as an anchor for my consciousness. Thankfully, the brain is quite busy with other things at the moment; it files the damage away for later processing.
Presently, I open my mouth but whether it is to unleash a guttural cry of defiance at inevitability or to stand there jaw agape at what could almost certainly be imminent and unavoidable doom is beyond my comprehension. Perhaps it was simply because it had been a while since my last inhalation. How long has it been exactly?
It makes no difference, for just as soon as my mouth fell slack, I close it again as the first shards of shrapnel begin to pelt my face, etching their signature upon my face as testament to their passing, a grim reminder of their brief visit signed in blood.
Through the oncoming cloud I see a horror manifest right before me. It rears its ugly head and smiles at me in a chilling manner. It is a mindless thing, it only has one purpose and that is to consume all until all is consumed, a purpose that this horror seeks to fulfill to the best of its abilities. It has burst forth from its confines and it hungers, lashing out in all directions as it searches for food to augment its power and continue its survival.
I close my eyes as the inferno rips through the air as it makes its way to me, sinewy tendrils greedily exploring the room, feeding the insatiable hunger that drives its very existence along and to the brink of madness.
I feel my feet leave the ground through no act of my own doing. The tongues of fire are upon my face, testing my supple exterior covering experimentally to see if it enjoys the taste. The fire seems to shudder in anticipation, and my skin begins to blister as the fire happily expands its existence by destroying all around it, as natural as breathing.
Time stretches again, and I lose track of myself once more. I decide that it would be better to not be present and blissfully drift back to that place of pure thought, pure emotion and pure vernacular. A lifetime passes, and I distantly wonder why I am still floating in this void, having seen no bright light or slide-show of my entire life, merely flashes of anguish.
Once again, I am rudely and unexpectedly yanked into this reality by my own brain with a deep inhalation of breath. While I was gone and away from myself, the machine that is my body continued to run; it knew what needed to be done even without my involvement.
I wince as my burned and battered form protests to this treatment, but I ignore this sensation and greedily take in as much air as I can stand until I feel fit to burst. The acrid stench of charred flesh and hair mixes with dust and other unpleasant particles, but I take no notice; there’s nothing so sweet as the taste of breath undeserved. My body, the great machine that it is, begins to run a self diagnostic which I delegate to the unconscious. With nothing to do but wait until my body has finished its repairs, I drift back to sleep. Presently, my breathing becomes slow and rhythmic, keeping time with the pulse of survival.