Part 8
‘Inta bikhair?!’ he repeated louder. I nodded after which he took my hand in his again, asking me to skip over the flame. I grabbed his hand but hesitated when I caught a glimpse of Ahed on the stage, trying to free herself from the chains as she struggled in a ring of flames, sweat dampening her hair as the heat licked her shackles. I pulled myself free from Farouq’s grip and ran along the line of fire to the stage.
(are you okay?!)
Just as I neared the steps, Ben brought himself up from his fallen stance by his blood caked fingernails. He staggered up in the flames and reloaded his gun, attempting to cause a death before tasting it himself.
I stood dumbfounded. I kept commanding my body to move, telling it that I couldn’t afford to get there after the bullet, but I simply couldn’t move my legs. I panicked and let the rolling floor shake me, they were shelling the outside of the building.
Some of the soldiers who were buried under the wreckage started to crawl their way out, disoriented and holding on to any sharp stone they could to free themselves, the same fate they bestowed on so many people.
‘Stop! We're inside! Cease fire!’ the ginger woman shouted in a tremulous voice. I focused and held my hand out the distance my feet couldn’t go, to Ahed’s confusion yet she still held her own slender arm out for me and I grabbed it climbing up and over the stage to meet her eyes coloured with the flames surrounding us, then her shoulder, then behind it where Ben stood, furious
‘I won’t let you be!’ he bellowed in angry coughs when-
Another rumble started up. The stage was breaking apart from the top.
The whole structure was about to land on the soldier too blinded by robotic rage to see the entire stage come crashing down on him until he was under it. This time the rifle hadn’t even fired. The huge curtain track had missed Ahed’s barefoot by a hair; however, all this curtain now surrounding two of us just caught on fire and she still wasn’t free of her shackles.
The air was beginning to thicken with smoke when I reached for the Helmet of Ben’s head, severed by the wooden framework of the stage with the same sociopathic stare.
I raised the helmet high, directing the little energy I had left into bringing it down against the rope of small interlocked chains binding her ankles to the ground anchor. The ache in my arms was numbed by primal desperation unlike anything I had experienced thus far. I swung at it again and saw yellow sparks produced from the friction. Each strike made sounds that brought Ahed’s hands to ears, extending the chain and making it tense up under the repeated hitting which resulted in it wearing out quicker.
The link between the metal loops were loosening, giving way, and I inhaled audibly taking in whatever strength from the tainted air and brought it down again with 5 times the force. I successfully broke the chain, and a few hundred sweats.
I helped Ahed get up, she apologised for her slow running due to the numbness in her legs from being on her knees for so long, and while I managed to break her free from the restraints on her wrists, her feet were still being weighed down by the cuffs biting into her ankles. Nevertheless we ran and I managed to get her into the pickup truck Farouq stole from the prison ward who was driving him and a few other detainees back into the pillaged city upon their release. External paramedics did not arrive at the scene yet but someone had gotten hold of a van that held the elders, Abu Hannan and the kids-
Wait. Only the two boys were there.
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Mona and the other girl who lay asleep, were still inside. I thoughtlessly ran back in with no support, or so I thought, against the driver barking for me to get in the vehicle. The distressed uncle begged for his niece back and for the van to wait just a bit longer as I and Doctor AbdulRazzaq made our way to Mona.
Mona was lying stretched out on two adjoined chairs when the explosion flung her out of into the circle of flames beneath the stage, I ran to her from Roshdi’s dismembered body as Abu Hanan and Karim screamed at the sight, crying for help from the cars stacked with people on the inside and outside to wait for their niece and sister.
Doctor Maarouf held out his hands to catch the child. I had her in my arms, She made some soft sounds. She asked for some water, and I wondered if she even knew what was happening. I thought she was crying. But she was dying. I stepped over the moat made of the ground surrounding the stage and handed her feather light body to the doctor with whom I rushed towards Karim and his Uncle. His Uncle scooped Mona from the Doctor in a frenzy and began patting her cheeks as and tried to make her stand before the buckling of her knees and her shut eyes, eyeballs rolling inside in the last flicker of life made it clear that she was dead.
Shrapnel had entered the back of her head and neck. Abu Hanan wailed with his fingers interlocked with the small girl’s cold dead ones while Samira, the 50 year old woman who used to make us Qatayef every Friday with the exception of today brought Karim to her lap at the edge of her seat in the car, holding the trembling boy close to her but failing to cover his eyes which shone with the scene of his sister slowly fading out of this duniya.
My breathing became ragged and unbelieving, I was having a panic attack. I swallowed it upon seeing Shima and Besan push a metre long trolley with wooden planks on it and some discarded floor mats. A makeshift Ambulance. Besan laid Mona’s small limp body onto the “ambulance” when Shima looked me up and down, searching for something, or someone.
‘Where’s Hoda?!’ She asked, her voice was frantic and my breathing quickened again, delaying my lack of an answer for her when the doctor jogged back from the inferno.
Without. Any one in his arms
‘She’s dead’ he said, gulping for air after sucking in the poignant scent of the burning building.
That car started and revved away as another one arrived, and a man stepped out, demanding answers- and asking AbdulRazzaq to go back in and get her. I didn’t look back to find the girl, believing the expertise of the doctor, until we had to hold the panic-stricken father back from rushing into the flames and that’s when I saw her.
Crushed from another set of adjoined chairs, her legs poking through the rubble, where I couldn’t see her, in the blindspot. I watched the face of the man lose colour in the fiery surroundings as he realised with me that she was dead. Killed from the hair on her scalp to the pink of her little painted toenails. His expression went from one of denial and desperation to act fast and save her to an outpour of grief as we stood by the side of the road, watching her, everyone who was executed and everyone who couldn’t get out of the fire, burn up.
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