For a few hours the battle abates. He sits in the shadows of a dripping ruin, drawing in the cold air in rattling gulps. They're using biological agents. The past eighteen hours have been seen through the fogged goggles of a gasmask. He's free to breathe the sulfuric air again.
They appear to him then, his Nan and Grandad. An image of them, sketched out in the soot on a fallen slap of the structure around him.
'You'll get past all this.'
'We believe in you. We're proud.'
'I don't know,' he replies. 'I'm not sure I can survive all this.'
'Just get to the next dawn lad.'
'And the one after that.'
'And just keep going.'
'For us.'
'Alright,' he says. 'I'll do it for you.'
His radio crackles.
Paddy Dobson
11th March 2022