The hotel shook under repeated explosive impacts. I couldn’t see what crashed against the building, but something vast struck a few feet away. The roar of cracking concrete drowned out the panicked screams. The floor bounced beneath me as if we were in a terrible earthquake. The shaking continued for several seconds, bouncing me along the walkway’s carpet. I groped blindly, trying to grab onto something solid, but then I realized I was sliding as the floor broke and tilted beneath me. There was a constant rattle and crash of falling debris. Bits and pieces of the building struck me as the floor tilted more violently. Then I was rolling crazily as the walkway tore from the conference center and collapsed around me.

I couldn’t see. I didn’t know which way was up. Then I was falling, part of a cascade of shattered glass.

My shoulder hit first. Then my face. There was another tearing roar that blotted out everything else, then another hit, spinning through the dust and fog, and then I slid and crashed my way to the ground. I was engulfed in choking dust, something else struck me in the head, and everything went black.

The first sound I heard over the ringing in my ears was the wind. It was screaming like a million people being tortured to death. It was alien, haunted, and it made my soul ache. It was the wind of a desolate place where no man should ever go. Beneath the scream of the wind were the screams of the people trapped here. Those were what brought me back to consciousness.

Then the pain in my skull hit and I added my scream to the rest. That woke me right up. Everything hurt. My ribs ached. My head felt like it had been split open.

It was wet. Water was running over me. I was lying in the mud. I forced my eyes open. Immediately the hurricane winds tried to rip them out of my head. The water was pouring from a broken fountain. I was in a flowerbed. Grunting in pain, I rolled over.

Above me, half the walkway of the conference center was gone, blown apart, flung down and spread around me. The other half was still attached, and I saw a Hunter dangling from the far edge being pulled back inside by another. There was a jagged hole in the conference center above and it looked like the building had puked its guts out. I could see that the people closest to the blast had been scattered. People inside were just beginning to get to their feet, and those that had been further away were dragging limp bodies away from the hole.