At first everything seems utterly quiet, except for a continuous tintinnabulation, like church bells.

Then as your eyes adjust to the singular angle of your head and you manage to lift it enough to look around you, it becomes obvious that what you are experiencing isn’t silence at all, rather an extreme, blast-induced inability to hear. All around are events signalling noise, mouths open in the posture of screams, huge panes of glass splintering from within bent window frames. Everything falls much too slowly and silently towards the ground.

You suddenly remember another person, her name escapes you but you know what she looks like and you know she isn’t there, or at least that you can’t see her within the forty-five degrees of your vision. You haul yourself slowly, painfully, up on to your knees and look around, calmly, for calamity is, after all, what you’ve been expecting all along, and what you see that appears to have caused all this commotion is the nose of an enormous aeroplane, crushed and smoking, arranged almost perfectly perpendicular to the floor of approximately the place you were standing five minutes ago. The plane is nearly intact, balanced unnaturally on its head like a monstrous grey pachyderm in a grotesque three-ring circus. Your eyes follow it upwards, mesmerized by the slight sway of the fuselage, or at least that part of it not obscured from sight by what remains of the terminal roof.

This is even worse than you expected. But you have to admit, in some small way, it is gratifying.

I told you so.

There is a hand on your shoulder, the one that hurts, and the girl whose name you can’t remember is standing next to you. Swaying, more than standing. Her face is bloody but she doesn’t appear to be in pain. She holds a camera in one hand and tries to say something to you, but you just stare at her and smile because you are so happy to see her. You see her mouth move with words addressed to you, though you can hear nothing at all.

She takes your hand, pulls you to your feet, and the two of you begin to walk, unsteadily because of all the debris and the bodies and the parts of bodies in your way, not to mention the bruises and as yet uncatalogued injuries spread across your own bodies, and a certain unsteadiness caused by shock. You begin walking faster, almost jogging once you get a little better at avoiding things that you remember could be dangerous, or disgusting, and also you remember how to move quickly, which was never something you imagined you could forget, even for a few minutes. You are starting to remember lots of things, like about fire and how it can be harmful, as you jog towards a hole that has been blasted through the side of the building, picking your way as carefully as possible over the inert bodies of the injured and dead, avoiding molten drips of metal, lethal tottering icicles of glass, pools of blood.

Some of the things you see are curious and might have been disturbing in another context where they seemed more real. One person’s legs look all wrong as if they’re on backwards and there’s a hand on the floor all on its own looking somehow careless. A little further away there’s what looks like a torso with no arms and you’re glad for a minute that you can’t hear any of the noises that are coming from the torso’s head.

Then you stop and look down and see one of the strangest things you have seen so far that day. It is an oversized magazine on the ground, creased open and spattered with blood. There is a picture of a boy in the magazine and he is wearing clothes that look vaguely familiar; there is something in the face staring up at you that reminds you of someone or something, but you can’t quite remember who or what.

The boy in the picture is slim and stands with his body partially turned away from you. His hair is longish, his skin very pale. He has his hands crammed into the front pockets of his jeans. The expression on his face is slightly blurred.

There is a large caption at the top of the page but some of it has been smeared with blood. The bit you can still make out reads: Doomed Youth.

You are not allowed to stop and think about this strange picture, for in no time at all you are being pulled forward and then you are outside, breathing air that doesn’t hurt your lungs like the acrid heavy air in the terminal.

It is a relief to be outside, away from the silent screaming mouths and the falling rubble. When she’s not taking pictures, the girl keeps pulling at your arm, which is starting to annoy you and feels painful, but her grip is surprisingly strong given how small and delicate she looks and the fact that she is barefoot, and you can tell from the bloody footprints she leaves that the bottoms of her feet are bleeding.

You want to stop and look around, wish you had your own camera to take some pictures of the astonishing sight of a substantially intact DC-IO standing on its nose in the centre of your new home. But you give in to the pressure on your arm, because fighting it just causes it to hurt more, and the last thing you require just now is more pain. You are nearly crying with the pain by the time she lets you stop and turn round, and nudges you to follow the direction of the finger she points at the part of the plane now swallowed in flame, and then, succumbing once more to the pressure of her hand on yours, you begin to move and as your feet hit the tarmac in the nice familiar rhythm of running, the words that go through your head sweetly and deliciously like a kind of nursery rhyme gone wrong are doomed youth doomed youth doomed youth.