She couldn't breathe. The thick ash coated her throat, just as it clung to the walls around her. There were shades of grey mixed with darker shades of grey, which were then further mixed with the dying reddy-orange embers flickering around the bases of the walls. This was all she could make out from the floor, where she had flattened herself when the smoke had risen an hour earlier, choking her. 

She squinted through the dark trying to make out an exit, a safer place to move to where the walls won't crush her if they buckled, anywhere but where she was right now, but there was nowhere. She began to move - her arms dragging her legs behind her, the heat from the now evaporated flames still searing. She could make out the frame of the once beautiful oak door that had stood tall in the entrance of the building. Now a pile of ash. That was her way out. 

She had no energy left, but she had to get out before the building collapsed, completely coating her whole body in soot. Slicing her palms on hot pieces of coloured broken glass from the windows that once existed, but now scattered the floor. She could feel the warmth of her blood caking her skin amongst the soot, but she didn't care, she needed to get to safety. She needed to get into clean air where she could breathe again. She finally reached the frame and pulled herself out onto the street front. Cold air hit her face, searing pain shot into her lungs, she began to heave, her heart pace began to rapidly speed up, she couldn't breathe anymore, she couldn't see, and then there was nothing. 

When she came to, she was lying exactly where she had fallen. Outside of the building she'd worked at. The building that had exploded when the man walked through the door. She looked back at the building and she could see her bosses face clear as day yelling at her to run, duck, get out of here, and then a sound so loud her eardrums imploded. Her eyesight was shot. The last thing she saw before the building became a large pile of ash, was the sheer look of terror stretching across the aging mans face whom she'd worked long hours with for almost a year. Then he was gone and so was everything else. 

She jumped as the sound around her present pushed in, interrupting her thought process, fading out his face and the blast of white light. She hadn't realised until now that she had only been able to hear a high ringing sound for the best part of the last few hours. Now everything was clear and painful. Her ears had bled just as her hands did afterwards. She could hear screaming and sirens coming from every angle. The air was still clouded in dust from the ash, but it was easier to breathe and see than inside the building. 

A woman ran past her, smashing into her left shoulder and tripping herself over onto the street in front of traffic. There was complete panic in the air. Terror. 

She stepped away from the woman who had fallen, pushing herself along the building walls trying to avoid contact with anybody. Her body ached, she could barely keep herself upright, she wanted to rest... To sleep, but she needed somewhere safer. She pushed herself down an alley way, away from the crowds of terrified people. She was dizzy and their incessant yelling and crying along with the sirens was making her nauseas, she needed to sit down, but she couldn't stop, she needed to get out of the streets. 

She spotted a dull red door frame standing below a shop sign that read "Everything you didn't know you needed!" and quickly ducked into it. The shop had trinkets hanging from every inch of the fuchsia coloured walls in a small confined space that smelt like beetroot, chamomile and smoke. The explosion hadn't touched this place, but it was deserted. There was a large green teapot sitting in the middle of the room on circular end table covered in white doilies and a book wedged underneath one of its feet to keep it balanced. That was where the Chamomile was coming from, it was tea. She walked past it, slowly inhaling and exhaling trying to regain control of her rapid breathing so she didn't pass out again. She caught her reflection in a wall of owl shaped mirrors, her face was black with speckles of blood oosing from her nose and staining her lips. She wiped it from her face with the inner of her elbow, smearing what mightn't have been her blood down her chin. Her black hair was wild and knotted resembling a birds nest with the shrapnel included.