A faint glow in the distance, like something is just beginning. There was a sobbing from the depths of this desert.

Something like a black expectation now hovered in the air, so that even the dust storm seemed intimidated; a speechless darkness fell over the atmosphere.

They feel like screaming to put an end to this stagnant landscape. But the stench of the slum permeates their intent. The empty immensity of things, the tremendous oblivion in the sky and on the sands…

Suddenly, like a scream, the dreadful day shattered. The light of a sweltering hell swept through the contents of all things, filling minds and crannies. The street winced in the stark white light, and the dull oblivion echoed all around the village with a boom of echoing crashes.

A wedge of metallic light and shrapnel tore into a large government office, ripping into the peace of each human body. A huge rock of sound struck with a quake on all sides, shattering into a hard silence. The sound of falling shrapnel diminished, becoming a soft voice. The absolute disintegration of all things.

A screeching of certain things.
A falling of fragments here and there.

The village froze. The air was like lead. Hearts of the survivors automatically pounded hard, and thinking made them dizzy as they made their way out of the smoke and debris. Twenty or so of them who'd been in the market across from the office were strewn in every position, blown to pieces among the overturned chairs and tables with the fresh splinters blown out of the wood and the mud walls pocked everywhere by enormous holes.

The inhabitants of the office, eight in number, were caught in a panorama of flames, where they sizzled and stank and the thick smoke rolled out over the Euphrates.

Everything gaped in awe, and then some heaved a sigh of relief, for the strike had passed. Three men were running down the street for help and two others were limping across the square, away from the inferno.

They spoke in whispers. As they approached the market, a man emerged from the doorway like a parched and bloody apparition. He turned and watched his world wilt away at the edges to a shimmering collapse which seemed to swallow the desert.  

The dust storm continued. The almost human sound of the sad howling wind was happy.