They knew great joy, and at the upper limits of the clouds where the lightning was hottest, they thought they could see the stars.
When the storm passed, a boy on the north side of the city found a strange object on the roof of his apartment building, near the pigeon roost. It looked like a charred-black construction of bones, melded together so you couldn't tell where one bone ended and the other began. And in that mass of bones was a silver chain, with a small ornament. A heart, he saw it was. A white heart, hanging there in the tangle of someone's bones,
He was old enough to realize that someone---two people, maybe---had escaped the Dead World last night. Lucky stiffs, he thought.
He reached in for the dangling heart, and it fell to ashes at his touch.