Chaos Incarnate

Above the bunker, the city was chaos incarnate.

Buildings stood like blackened teeth, their jagged edges catching the firelight from burning streets. Sirens wailed in dissonant harmony with the distant boom of makeshift explosives. The air shimmered with heat and ash, every breath tasting of metal and soot.

In the distance, a mob surged forward—shadows against the flames—clashing with armored patrol units that moved like mechanical predators. Bullets snapped through the air, ricocheting off the husks of cars. The ground trembled under the pounding boots of riot squads, their visors gleaming, their batons rising and falling like pendulums of brutality.

Above it all, drones hovered like carrion birds, their searchlights sweeping the streets with clinical precision. Anyone caught in that sterile white beam froze—either from fear or because it was already too late. The drone-mounted loudspeakers barked commands in a voice too calm for the carnage below, urging “order” while bodies fell.

And through the smoke, Mayor Karen Trout’s holographic projection flickered high above the skyline, her smiling face twenty feet tall. She spoke of “unity,” of “progress,” of a city “stronger than ever” as the fighting raged beneath her image. Her words bled into the screams of the crowd, becoming part of the noise, as if truth itself had been drowned in gunfire.