Lup noticed there was a strange rain beginning to fall, a black and sticky rain. It stuck everything. When it fell on trees and leaves, it stayed and turned everything black. When it fell on his men's uniforms, the cloth turned black. It stuck on their hands and feet. It made his skin itch like mad, a gnawing burning sensation. Lup used one of his canteens to try and wash the black rain off, only to find it was sticking to his skin. Just like the Ami's infernal jellygas, it couldn't be washed off.
They continued to move their small convoy towards the town. Just before the outskirts, they passed a mad naked man running in the opposite direction. He held an iron bucket over his head as if to hide his face since he had nothing on his body. Lup stopped his vehicle; the man had been engulfed by flames and barely made his way out. He kept repeating that his mother had woken him up in that morning, and that he was washing up when it happened, that mother was on the third floor of their apartment house and had been blown away with the blast. When his men tried to take the bucket he started to fight them, screaming that he didn't want to see, no matter what happened, he didn't want to see. Even when the soldiers could see his face, it was so swollen Lup couldn't even tell whether his eyes were open. While his little column had stopped to deal with the man, Lup heard the wind moaning and wailing yet the air seemed quite still now after the blasts. Puzzling, Leaving the man behind, he moved his column of vehicles forward, over the crest of a smaller ridge in front of him.
What lay in front was the Stadtpark along the banks of the Ruhr, Paths and bridges were blocked by the trunks of fallen trees and were almost impassable. If he'd had trucks, he wouldn't have got through. Even his AFVs only just made it. The trees was blasted and burned on the sides facing the city center, the other sides of their trunks had survived. Radiant energy Lup thought, and something else as well. Even where the leaves of the trees had been sheltered, they were already turning yellow and dying. Trees didn't die that fast, they fought for life, he'd seen trees blasted and burned by artillery and they'd fought to get another green shoot out, to repair the damage somehow. But here, the trees had given up. “Not just the trees either, the grass and bushes were either burned into blackness, charred beyond recovery or had the same sickly yellowing of death.
That was when Lup saw the sounds he'd heard hadn't been wind after all. The park was covered with hundreds, perhaps thousands of appallingly burned and injured people. The victims hair's was frizzled and turning to ash, and their faces bloated and dark red from burns. Pieces of their skin were hanging down from open wounds, and their clothing was scorched. They were covered with blood. Many of them were brought in on shutters that served as stretchers. They looked like ghosts, lying there, their internal organs bulging through their hands, moaning, wailing or just sitting quietly in silence, waiting to die. Lup had seen people burned before, he had pulled men out of burning vehicles, he had seen the victims of the Ami's hated jellygas but never had he seen burns like this. He'd heard the expression “burned to the bone” but, never before applied to the living.
Everywhere he looked was horror incarnate. One place he saw a man whose skin was completely peeled off the upper half of his body and by him a young woman whose eye balls were sticking out. Her whole body was bleeding. Next to them were another mother and her baby, both lying with their skin completely peeled off. The father was standing motionless beside them, his skin was paring away all over his body and was hanging from his finger tips. Just by the road were a group of high school children from the local gymnasium. They had been outside when the bomb fell and were covered with blisters, the size of balls, on their backs, their faces, their shoulders and their arms. The blisters were starting to burst open and their skin hung down like rags. Some even had burns on the soles of their feet where the super-heated pavement had burned through the soles of their shoes. Lup heard the echoing of rifle shots as some of his soldiers, overcome by the horror, gave the only form of mercy they could to those victims whose sufferings were too horrible to endure or to witness.
Shaken to the core of his soul, Lup gave the order to mount up and move into the city center. There was nothing they could do here, the scale of the disaster was beyond their ability to comprehend, let alone ameliorate. Perhaps, in the city itself, there was something they could do. The stunned, silenced soldiers took their vehicles across the railway bridge over the Ruhr. By some weird fluke the railroad bridge had burned and was leaning but it was still standing and could even take the weight of the corpulent Porsche APC. The railing on the bridge had been blown away, and the force of the shock wave reflected by the surface of the river had torn up its 30-centimeter-thick pavement. The train tracks were twisted, like melted taffy. The shadows of incinerated human bodies had been burned into the structure, and at one end, a water tank bore the shadows of its valves.
Below them were people looking for water and taking it from the river. But the water was worse that cyanide. From above the soldiers could see the weird iridescent scum floating on the surface and, even as they watched, those who drank the water screamed and threshed and died soon after. They saw the bodies floating in the river, of the poisoned, the burned, the blasted and the drowned. They saw soldiers, from the local garrison who'd shared their breakfast with the Panzergrenadiers a few hours before. Now they floated with bloated stomachs and contorted faces down the river. Lup guessed they probably had to dive into the water to get away from the searing heat of the fires.
Abandoned on the bridge, standing with sunken heads were a small group of horses, four of them, with hideously large burns on their sides. Lup and his men had eaten enough horse to recognize the smell of cooked horseflesh. Lup had always felt himself lucky to have a P08 pistol, not one of the lousy P38s. Now, he used it to shoot the horses.
A little father on, they saw uncounted numbers of dead people piled up at the side of the road. As the armored vehicles drove further on, Lup saw a woman whose legs were caught under a large timber in a building that was already burning. She couldn't get free and was screaming for help but no one came. Everyone was too busy trying to get away to pay any attention to anyone else. The soldiers used the AFV tools to free the woman but she died almost as soon as the weight was lifted from her.
As they drove closer to the city center, terribly burned people formed groups and cried from the heat as they wondered from place to place seeking an escape. Yet the fires were closing in around them, spreading from building to building and shutting off the escape routes. AM their clothes were scorched black and their skin was sore and melted as if they were hanging vinyl handbags from their bodies. The flakes and the black rain were burning Lup's skin painfully, what it must be like for people who had been flayed alive he couldn't imagine. Lup saw a blind child whose eyeballs were melted by the blast and were running down his cheeks like tears, crying “Mommy, take me somewhere!” then falling down and dying after aimless unsteady steps.
A line of people walked in the opposite direction, down the darkened street, now lit only by the orange flames of the burning buildings, each with a hand on the shoulder of the one in front. Lup thought they were wearing blackened rags but then saw they were naked and the “rags” were their flesh and skin peeling form their bones. The vicious sawing burst of the MG-42 mounted on the vehicle behind beat his order by only a split second. A man must have heard the snarl of the machinegun because he came out from behind some rubble. He must have been partly shadowed for the left side of his body was seared purple while the rest was untouched. He earnestly told Major Lup that firing a machine gun inside city limits was strictly forbidden. Then he started laughing hysterically and advised everybody that there was nothing to be concerned about. Quite mad, thought Lup, poor man. Then, perhaps to go mad was the only sane course of action