The only character I own in this story is Isabelle, so please do not use her in another fanfiction without my permission.

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the lyrics posted in this fanfiction. The credit for them belongs to the respected artists as well as my thanks for inspiration for this story.

As I stumble along this crumbling road, my fear and anguish are on the brink of consuming me. I am almost ready to succumb to the pain of my still bleeding sides. My hair dangling in front of my one eye is barely distinguishable from the ashes of my surroundings. Smoke rises from the small desert town in the distance as I turn back to stare at it and wonder... What happened? A long period of silence almost consumes the scene of smoldering fires. The sound of jet engines grows closer, and then stops. The ground trembles around me periodically as if...some titan were on its way to end my suffering. A silent shadow covers me from behind and the heated air becomes cool. This is it. Some unearthly being has come to finish these unexplainable events by snuffing out my life... The vision in my remaining eye darkens and the ground grows nearer and nearer. This is the end.

"Almost there, Belle," my dad announced while glancing behind him to see me yawning in the back seat of Jim's pickup-truck. It was the summer after my sophomore year in high school. We had been driving to Jim's house in Jasper, Arizona all night, and now he wanted to go shooting in the desert first thing after breakfast. Jim was a nice guy, and was one of my dad's only friends who knew him since high-school. My dad was a guy who was almost always right in survival matters and current affairs. At least, it seemed like that to me, because I seemed to have inherited that part of him. I glanced in the review mirror to see if my brunette hair had become disheveled. It was still in a ponytail, but my side-swept bangs had been fluffed a little. My blue checkered shirt had become twisted around my torso, and the sleeves were coming unrolled. While I was straightening them, Jim turned onto a dirt road and the cabin began to shake violently. I held onto the seat to avoid hitting my head as we sluggishly traversed to the end of the road.

When we finally stopped, I opened the door and jumped through the wall of heat into the scorching desert sun. We had stopped between two hills next to the flattest land I had ever seen. I could barely make-out the vertical landforms in the distance. My dad and Jim exited the truck and walked around to the back of it to gaze at their firearms before loading the magazines. In the meantime, I strolled around the hillside to look for items for target practice. I found a few empty cans and a few bottles. My father called me down, after he thought I had collected enough, so we could begin. He allowed me shoot one of his bigger guns, and it had a lot of kick to it.

"You're leaning into it too much," he remarked as he began to correct my stance. "I know you're trying to use the gun as leverage, but don't. Stand up straight. You'll aim much better if you do this." A tad bit annoyed, I corrected my stance, and took a deep breath. I focused my sights on one of the cans set a few feet from the hill in front of us, and squeezed the trigger. "Nice!" my dad exclaimed as it went flying backwards towards the hillside. I grinned and felt triumphant that I had impressed my father.

After we had finished, my dad asked me to pick up the cans so that they wouldn't be left out there. I found all of the cans at the base of the hill except for the one I had shot earlier. It turned out that it had flown much farther than I thought it did. The hike back up the small hill was almost unbearable, because I hadn't adjusted to the Arizona heat yet. I finally found the can halfway up the hill before five fighter jets soared overhead towards the desert plain. Curious, I made my way to the top to see where they were going. When I reached the top, surprise and horror overcame me. A massive, unearthly, black spire reached towards the sky and was aiming its cannons right at the jets and... I turned around to see that they were also aiming at Jasper, the town we just drove from.

"Jim, start the car!" I screamed down the hill. They seemed to realize that I wasn't joking when I started to sprint down the hill. Jim flung-open the front door and got inside to start the engine. My father got in the other side after glancing to see if I was still running towards them. I jumped into the bed of the truck and commanded Jim to drive as fast as he could away from Jasper. Without question, he threw the truck into gear and raced down the gravel road. The sound of the cannons from the spire echoed through the desert. I looked up to see debris from the jets falling towards us. It barely missed us, but a piece of scalding metal broke off of some of the plane and landed right in my left eye socket. I screamed in pain and felt the vision in my left eye fade away while the searing pain remained. Half blind, I held my eye as I fell on my side due to the shaking. I heard the back of the truck open as I slid towards it. Desperate to stay in, I grasped for anything with my right hand. I ended up grabbing the edge of something on the tire cover just as my body reached the corner of the truck bed. My arm was wrapped around the edge as I hung on for dear life. We made a hard turn onto the main road and the truck door slammed hard on my shoulder and head. The feeling in my right arm seized and I slid out of the truck bed and rolled across the road. As my vision faded, I could see the truck racing away and hear my dad commanding Jim to turn around. Heat began to grow intense from behind me and I saw that he explosion of the town had caused a massive cloud to form above it and waves of heat to rush outward. The truck was barely a speck on the horizon when my remaining vision went black.