They were all gone. All of them, just like that.

Hold on, let’s rewind about 3 minutes.

I’m walking downtown Washington DC. I look up and feel the heat of the sun in my face, such a warm feeling, and I start to wonder how it would feel to fly. “Amanda!” Kathrine, my best friend, comes over to me, “Come on you slowpoke! Stop daydreaming again!” She gives me a warm-silly smile.

“I’m not daydreaming.” I pout, but it’s still hard to hold back a smile.

“Oh whatever, come on! Let’s catch up to the others!” She exclaims and grabs my hand. ‘The others’ are my brother Sam and some of our other friends. We run for a few seconds and catch up with them, and Kathrine and I end up laughing because she almost ran into Andrew. Nothing could ruin this perfect day. It was the perfect day for a view of the capitol city of the country. I close my eyes and start to think of how I wish everyday could be like this. Then that’s when we start to hear it. At first it sounded like a huge truck driving by, then it sounded like an airplane, then it sounded like hundreds of them. Everyone stops and immediately looks up to the sky.

“Whats going on?!”

“What’s that noise!?”

“I’m scared”

“It is 9/11 again!?”

After some seconds of scanning the sky and hearing people making accusations, someone spots it. It’s too far away to be sure of what it was. People then start making more weird theories that all seem too strange to be real, like ‘alien attack’ or ‘the moons crashing into earth!’, until we hear someone say, “I think I know exactly what this is.”

We all turn our heads to the person who said it. It was Mary, one of my brothers friends. She has an intense but controlled look on her face. I can’t tell whether I should be scared or not because of it.

She clears her throat. “Guys. Don’t freak out, but I think that this is the North Korean missile we have all been waiting for. We’re in Washington DC. Less than a mile away from the WHITE HOUSE.”

Everyone’s silent. Kathrine and I exchange confused and worried glances. A few seconds people scratches their heads and murmuring, then you hear the first person scream, “WERE ALL GONNA DIE! EVERYONE FREAKIN’ RUN!”

All I see then is the blurred image of everyone around me running, me running, and the noise. A few seconds later, the emergency sirens start blaring, almost as loud as the missile coming for us. All I can hear is a mix of screaming, sirens-all kinds of sirens, and the sky screaming at us.

“AMANDA!”

Kathrine? I turn around to see her running towards me from 30 feet away.

“HEY!!” I yell. But no.

You can’t hear it.

I can see it.

The explosion in the near distance.

The heat of death.