Volume I - Episode 11 Where: Cologne, Germany When: 12 days after E-Day, 8:45 pm Until recently, Cologne had been a thriving cultural centre with almost a million residents. Now it was a ghost town. The museums and theatres lay silent and empty. The streets were deserted. The Rhine wound its way through the heart of the city, undisturbed and smooth as glass. Krystal looked up from her book as the sun dipped over the horizon. The end of yet another day. Her uncle's high-rise apartment offered a commanding 180-degree view of her surroundings, and she watched as the city plunged into darkness. The street lights had gone out at midnight on the 6th of August, and had never come back on again. As the sunlight faded from the apartment, Krystal turned off the CD player and turned up the lights. She liked a little ambient background music during the daytime - it made her feel less lonely - but with the city in blackout there simply wasn't enough juice to keep everything running at once. In time, of course, she would get better at having more equipment running at the same time. But, for now, she wanted to finish this book, so it was the living room lights that got her attention. She looked forward to the day when she could have the TV, the DVD player, and the lights (in multiple rooms!) all running at once. A gnawing irritation gripped her. She suddenly realised the page she had been reading for the last fifteen minutes didn't make any sense. She turned back to the diagram on the previous page and rolled her wheelchair towards the centre of the room where the lighting was better. The living room lights flickered as her right foot bumped into the dining room table. "Pute!" she hissed. There was no pain, but she didn't like the way her leg moved. Damn wheelchair, she thought. I wonder if I'll ever get out of this thing? But then she remembered how lucky she was to still be moving at all. Every night, her sleep was haunted by visions of Big Steve's body flying over the guardrail into the canyon below. Such dreams were invariably followed by hours of intense guilt and uncontrollable sobbing. She'd spent a week in hospital after her accident. Her left leg was broken at the hip socket. It had been bitterly painful, but at least it was a clean break. The surgeons had no trouble manipulating it back into position and fixing the snapped bone back together with screws. She still couldn't put any decent amount of weight on her hip, and for a few weeks there the bruising had been horrendous, but overall it seemed to be healing quite nicely. Her right leg, however, was in bad shape. The car's bumper bar had torn through her shin like butter, smashing both tibia and fibula through the flesh at the back of her leg in a hideously gory mess the likes of which she'd never seen. When she'd first looked down after the accident, she thought she'd lose the leg for sure. But bless those Russian surgeons, they had managed to save it. At least for now... They'd spent four hours patching her leg back together. She'd been too terrified and doped on morphine to take in all the details, but she knew that a bone graft, a titanium rod and good deal of plastic surgery were involved. She knew she'd spent a week being drip-fed antibiotics. And she knew her leg was now a hideous, scarred and blackened mess underneath the cast. [CONTINUED IN FIRST COMMENT BELOW]