Hell or high water as cities burn, zip.
On the fifth day, he found a road sign: Norfolk – 217 miles. He almost laughed. Two hundred and seventeen miles of burning towns, broken highways, and whatever came crawling out of the dark when the fires died down. Hell or high water , he thought. Already had both. What was a little more?
Ahead, the sky was darker. Not from night—from more fire. Another city burning. Toledo? Columbus? He couldn’t tell anymore. They all burned the same.
Then at least he went walking. With his sister’s face over his heart and the taste of canned peaches on his tongue and a three-bullet pistol riding his hip. hell or high water as cities burn zip
Then came hell.
Kael’s heart slammed against his ribs. He ran after them, waving his arms, shouting until his throat bled. The convoy didn’t stop. Maybe they didn’t see him. Maybe they didn’t care. He chased them for half a mile before they vanished around a bend, leaving only exhaust and the smell of diesel.
No one knew who lit the first fire. Maybe a militia, maybe a deserter, maybe a kid with a match and nothing left to lose. But by August, Detroit was a crater. By September, Atlanta glowed so bright you could read a newspaper in Columbus. Now October, and Chicago was joining the choir. Hell or high water as cities burn, zip
The train passed through what used to be Gary, Indiana. Now it was just slag and silence. Fires flickered on both sides—not the big, hungry fires of the city, but smaller ones. Trash fires. House fires no one bothered to put out. Bodies in doorways, sometimes sitting up like they were just resting. Kael stopped counting bodies somewhere around the Illinois border.
He went walking. And the cities burned behind him, one by one, like fallen stars.
He hadn’t found her yet.
Here’s a story built around your phrase: Hell or High Water as Cities Burn, Zip
Morning came dirty and gray. The train slowed near a collapsed overpass, and Kael jumped, rolling into a ditch full of charred cornstalks. He lay there a moment, listening. No engines. No helicopters. Just the whisper of ash falling like dirty snow.
Three days later, he reached the edge of West Virginia. The mountains had saved this part, maybe—less to burn, fewer people to riot. But the sky was still wrong, a jaundiced yellow that made his eyes ache. He slept in a church basement with a dozen other refugees, none of them speaking, all of them smelling of smoke and fear. In the night, a baby cried for an hour. Then stopped. No one asked why. Two hundred and seventeen miles of burning towns,
Behind him, Chicago was a furnace. The skyline he’d grown up under—the Sears Tower, the Hancock, the lakefront towers—stood skeletal against a boiling orange sky. Hell or high water , his father used to say. We go through both. His father was three months dead now, shot in the grocery riots. Kael had buried him in the backyard next to the dead apple tree.
He stood in the middle of the road, breathing hard. The photograph of Mira was damp with sweat in his pocket. He took it out. Her face was smudged now, but her eyes were still clear. Find me.