Blackpool Burns

The fire started at the point of the spire. Instataneous and unexplainable, it took a minute to crawl down to the observation deck. Within five the Blackpool Tower was completely engulfed in flames.
It was six in the evening and a fine July day, so the Tower was full of excited children and weary parents. Drunken teens and nostalgic OAP's, so full of life and hopes, memories.
Six minutes after the ifre started, they were all dead.
As the rest of Blackpool lit up light some lurid universe, families roasted alive in the famous landmark.
The fire crept down from the metal legs that it was warping and melting and began a slow crawl across the orad as if it were alive. A living thing with a malevolent mind that only wished to burn and consume.
The fire brigade were on scene within minutes. Minutes too late for the souls now cooked to a fine crisp inside. Their hoses blasted out water which was evaporated by the heat of this strange fire before it even got close.
As the Chief's tried to think of a solution, the first car exploded, the fuel in it's tanked heated and ignited by this unearthly fire.
In all, it took thirty seven minutes from the flames first appearance for all of Blackpool and the majority of it's citizens and vistors to be removed from the face of the Earth.

The next day, a charred and steaming hole was all that was left of the famous seaside resort. It was two days since the crash. One day since the explosion at the police station.
Investigators from around the globe began to fly in to this island that had shaped much of recent history. Experts in their field, fire investigators, crash analysts, bomb experts, all came, and all were clueless.
Soon after the cranks began to arrive. The UFO abductee believers, the paranormal investigators. The mediums and psychics, the spirit walkers. Even old wise men from various tribes across the globe.
They all came, and they were all useless.
Not a one could say for certain why any of the events had happened.
The explosion at the car crash was proved not to be a car. The detonation of the police station was not from a compound known to any of the bomb experts.
But it was Blackpool that scared the experts and the politicians the most.
Amateur footage of the burning tower ran on every news network across the world. People claimed they could see the face of Jesus, of Mary, of the alien that stuck the cold metal dildo with the words "Hug Me" up their arse. The flames crawled down and up the tower, as if seeking every potential scrap of flammable material, before snaking it's way to the nearest restaurants theatres and arcades.
All of the footage was taken by people in boats. Anyone with a camera in town was dead and their camera long since melted.
The screams of these filming sailors as the flames licked at the water's edge, raising a wall of steam that hid the majority of the carnage only added to the horror.
Then voices came through, claiming to see people with their skin melting away trying to get to the sea.


Horrific, devastating, unparralelled footage.
The DVD was available the next Monday and was an instant bestseller.

Survived

Carol Manning sat with the unnecessary blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She had told the police officer with the unamused face that she was quite fine and didn't need one, but he'd been adamant.
Sat in the interview room she watched the door with interest. It had been fifteen minutes since they had sat her down at the table and told her someone would be in shortly. Why she was here and not at the hospital with Jake, she couldn't imagine.
Not that Jake needed her any more. The raging fireball that had melted the skin right off of his face has seen to that. His scream would haunt her for a long time, she knew that. A gurgling screech of pain and as his eyes turned to her they begged for relief. But she'd been strapped in the passenger seat and could do nothing to help him.
They day had been going so well. A ride in his new Skyline, just delivered from Japan. He'd never been happier, except for when she did that special something he liked so much.
Now he was dead, along with at least sixty others they told her.
She knew they were puzzled, quite frankly, so was she. How come she didn't have a mark or scratch on her? With the car upside down, how had a fireball melted her boyfriends face like ice cream yet left her untouched?
She didn't know and was sure that was an answer the officers asking the questions weren't going to like.

It took another ten minutes before two men entered. Wearing suits and not uniforms, she knew they had to be detectives. If cop shows on TV had taught her anything, it was that.
"Now, Miss. We want you to tell us what happened."
Carol shrugged and told them. How Jake had taken her for a spin, then suddenly cars were swerving all over the road and something had flipped them onto the roof. They had skidded for a distance and then there had been the explosion and the fireball.
"Did you see what caused it?"
"No."
"And you say it came through your boyfriends car, but didn't touch you, not even a minor burn. Can you explain that?"
Sighing, Carol told them she could not. Nor could she say why there wasn't a single scratch on her and why she was the only survivor from that area of the pile up.
With a slight nod the detectives stopped the recorder and left Carol to her thoughts again.

They let her go two hours later. She'd done nothing as far as they could tell, beyond have a miraculous escape.
Taking their card, she left the station on foot. Home was ten miles away and she didn't want to get in another vehicle just now.

The young officer who saw her to the door watched her back get smaller as she walked away. He never saw the lithe figure dressed all in black slip past him into the station. Nor did he feel it three hours later when the bomb exploded, killing everyone inside and leaving a crater the size of a football pitch in the centre of town.

It Begins.

The sky turned an ugly purple colour just before the dark rain clouds rolled in.
The animals that crouched down by the side of the motorway shook in apprehension of the coming storm. It must have seemed to them that safety was the other side of the road.
Instead they were to cause the deaths of sixty seven people and destroy of eighty cars in one of Britain's worst car crashes in years.
It was a badger that started the deaths Running behind rabbits and a fox, strange enough in and of itself, the striped beast stopped in the middle lane and jumped at the oncoming set of headlights before him.
He landed on the bonnet of Tom Harven's brand new Mercedes SLR. Harven slammed on the brakes and screamed as the badger growled through his windscreen at him. He skidded to the right and was killed, along with the badger, when a Ford Transit travelling at 90 miles an hour smashed into his side.
The transit flipped onto it's side and slid for a good hundred metres. Behind the luck driver, who would only suffer a concussion, other animals began to leap at cars, on both sides of the three lane motorway.
When the first explosion hit, no-one knew what it was, assuming one of the cars ahead must have gone up from the fuel.
This was not the case.

The papers were full of the accident for days after. Everyone wanting to know why there were so many dead animals in the middle of the crash site.
No answers were ever found.