Quinn Voss

Dystopian Dilemma

It wasn't the inferno burning around me, consuming homes and humans alike, that snapped me back to reality. It wasn't the crack of the gunshots that slashed through the paper of silence that brought me back. It wasn't the screams of my brothers and sisters in arms or the terror boiling up like bile in my throat. It was a single, guttural, horrific moan. The kind that you would hear from a dying animal who had given up. The kind that sneaks into the cracks of the armor and takes you apart from the inside. It tugged on my heart, pulling my being towards itself, dragging my eyes across carnage and pain to the face of a small girl.