Fallen Ashes

• Daniel Gage, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2010

Fallen Ashes

Blood was everywhere, Soldiers wounded and dead, the ashes were falling from the sky like little diamonds of fire, coming from the devastating fire a few hours earlier. You could hear the people screaming and hearing the building crash to the ground…it was horrible. I had a few injuries and burns, wasn’t much, but it could keep me away from the fight for a while. You want to know what happened, ok…where to start.

BOOM! Goes the artillery shell, which has just hit the ground right in front of my squad member and ripped his leg from his body showing bone; with blood everywhere.
“OH this is wrong. I’m spitting up blood that aint mine.” Said one of the soldiers.
Taking fire from all angles, surrounded, we don’t give up. We hold out for long enough, our soldiers decreasing by the minute; we had to act fast. We had one objective. Get into the town and defend the tower, which had important information in it. Enemy soldiers began to decrease faster than we could count and before we knew it we were out of those life-losing foxholes and into the town. Watching, Aiming, Waiting at every alleyway and street. The streets of Afghan are no place for an English Soldier and his Squad.
BANG! BANG! BANG! Goes machine guns off in the distance and it seems as if it’s coming from that burning down…oh no.
“Men, We need to get over there quickly. We haven’t got much time!” I yelled.
Walking, running, not easy to sprint thought, think of it, carrying a heavy gun, wearing heavy suites and very thick, so you get tired.
“The building, she is going down!” I shout while breathing very deeply.
BOOM! The building is half way down, luckily not all the way; if we want to save that building we need to be quick.

In about 5 more minutes we arrive at the building…nobody…there is nobody as far as the eye can see. I wonder what happened here. Just in case we set up the machine-gun turret on that sand bank over there which had a great view of the town. Suddenly, out of nowhere Afghanies appear from houses, streets and we are under heavy fire from the AK-47’s they are carrying. Bullets are being dropped, and ammo shells are being thrown to each other.
“We will hold off the Afghanies as long as we can but I’m not sure that…RUN!”
The building was falling on top of us, we are running out the building while hearts are pumping and adrenaline has hit us all.
BANG! The building has fully hit the ground and all of us are now lying on the ground, which at first I thought was just injury, but oh was I wrong. They were dead.
My brother Justin Miller, great man, he experienced a lot of things in the afghan war with me by his side, I lost him that day. He didn’t make it out alive though; he got surrounded by Afghanies and got shot.

Ok…That’s his story…time to tell you mine; where to start.