Author's note -
Okay, completely owning up to this. I am awful at this challenge. Not only in getting these stories out daily, but also in the Flash Fiction aspect of the challenge. So far, I've been unable to actually write any flash fiction, rather I seem to just be doing short stories.
No matter, I'm having fun and definitely plan on finishing this out, hopefully it doesn't take too much time and I actually come up with some ideas for some flash fiction. Anyway, on to the story!
The sky turned purple the day that civilization collapsed. It didn’t happen the way that anyone was expecting or had anticipated. It wasn’t aliens from some distant star, who came to wipe out humanity. It wasn’t the return of a long lost god. It wasn’t a comet that randomly made its way end over end through infinite space, landing on our small rock. It wasn’t even man’s inhumanity to man that ended things. It was far more simple. How it happened, what it was. Those are questions that were never answered. It was just one of
those things.
“Hey Todd, how’s it goin’?” The man asked, approaching the hot
dog vendor.
“Eh, I can't complain. We’re supposed to get some wicked weather today. Roger Thompson on ‘Channel Five’ was saying we may even potentially get a tornado, can you believe this?” The man said.
“A tornado? You jokin’? I thought theys only happen in Kansas? ‘There’s no home, cause the tornado took it’, ain’t that what they say?”
The man laughed and nodded, “Anyway, can I get a couple dogs? Maybe six of them? Buyin’ for a couple co-workers today.”
“Sure thing!” Todd said, opening up the cart with the warmer inside. He grabbed out six foil wrapped hot dogs, putting them into a brown paper sack. He handed it to the man, who exchanged cash with Todd.
“Thanks Todd. Hey, say hello to your mother for me!” The man said, walking away.
“Ooohhh, bada bing!” Todd replied, though the man never heard Todd. That was the last encounter the two of them would ever have. Later that day, Todd would make his way to the subway. Because of what was happening worldwide at that point, the power was already having trouble, so the subways were not functioning. Todd would make his way through the subway tunnels with a group of people. He would make it home to his wife Linda, running between cover holding a cardboard box above his head. Todd and Linda had enough food to last the first two weeks.
When things got desperate and Todd refused to leave the apartment in search of food, Linda took matters into her own hands and killed Todd one Sunday morning. She used a camping grill the two of them had bought two summers previous to cook parts of Todd. She wept while she did so, but after two or three days was happy she had killed Todd. He didn’t know that she knew he “had relations” with their daughter's best friend one night. The girl had come to Linda and confided in her. Linda, who had been with Todd since their Freshmen prom, had been waiting for the right moment to reveal her knowledge. The morning she went after him with the meat cleaver, she felt like was the right moment. Besides, she was hungry. Linda died of severe dehydration and food poisoning a week after that.
What distracted the man was his phone. The man was a day trader and was on his way to the Market. The man wasn’t like Todd. The man would never cheat on his wife, if he had had a wife to cheat on. He didn’t though. The man was too busy with his work to settle down. He thought he may some day, he wanted to even. Would even like a couple of kids when all was said and done. There was one woman in particular he was interested in, Emily. She was interested in him too, though he didn’t know it. There had been a lot of glances between the two of them, when they thought the other wasn’t looking. A lot of thoughts of one another.
The man and Emily had met through a mutual friend and had hit it off almost immediately. They spent a lot of their free time together, going to see movies together, going out to eat. It was just that neither of them had made a move to take their friendship beyond that. Until the day of the purple sky. That day changed everything for everyone.
While he was looking up information on a stock, he got a text message.
Em
Hey u ;)
Me
Hey urself ;) ;)
Em
On your way to work?
Me
Yup. TGIF though, rite?
Em
That’s for sure!
The man checked on a stock and then brought his text messages back up on his cell phone. There were three little dots under Emily’s last message, indicating that she was in the process of writing something when it began.
KRAKAAAAAA BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.
The man almost dropped his phone, fumbling with it, but caught it just as it was about to slip between his fingers. He swiftly wrote a message out.
Me
OMG there was an explosion or sumthing downtown!
Em
U heard it too!?
It began with a single drop. A tiny drop in South Africa, in the province of Western Cape, in the small town Darling. Just one small, crimson red drop that fell from the sky milliseconds after the world heard the boom. It landed completely unnoticed by anyone in the town, landing in the middle of a road that a car had passed by moments before.
Across the world, most people mistook the first few drops that fell near them for blood. Almost without fail, they would glance up, expecting to see someone or something injured above them. Hundreds of thousands of people made this small gesture of a mistake, looking up as the first droplets fell and instantaneously lost their eyesight, as subsequent droplets landed in their eyes.
They’d be forgiven for thinking that it was blood, though it had a darker shade of red, looking closer to how blood looked in the movies. As everyone began to find out very quickly after the first droplets fell, it was thicker in consistency, sticking to whatever surface it happened to land on its descent from the sky; grass, concrete, trees, hills, concrete, dirt, skin, fur, scales. No surface was safe as it began to coalesce.
There were those who did not think that the substance was blood immediately and thought it was some form of red paint. Once again, hundreds of thousands of people looked to the sky, expecting to see a painter on a scaffolding somewhere above them. Those not fortunate enough to be wearing some sort of eye protection, lost their eyes as well.
The man ran under a nearby bank awning, pulling his cell up to look at it. He went to recent calls, found “Em” and pushed his finger on her name signaling his phone to call her.
“All circuits are currently busy, please try your call again later.”
“Shit!” The man said, looking at his phone to see that it had no service.
‘What is going on?’ He thought. His mind raced through the options that most people thought of; aliens, a second coming, some sort of weapon. He didn’t have enough information to know that what he was experiencing was happening world wide.
The man leaned against the building, almost cuddling his back against the building, wanting to be as far out of the open as possible. Someone joined him, a middle aged man who had the same idea as the man, letting a cardboard box fall to his side.
He watched as the color began to speed up its descent, becoming more dense, equaling that of a strong thunderstorm. The man watched as it covered people, engulfing them. He thought back to the movie he had sat in front of a black and white television, laying on his stomach, eyes fixated on the television as The Blob devoured a town. The only difference, at least so far to the man, was that the color did not appear to be alive.
“This is crazy.” The middle aged man said.
The man looked over toward him and nodded, “Is your phone working?”
The middle aged man looked as if he hadn’t even thought about his cell phone, reached into his pocket and activated the screen. He frowned, then shook his head, “Says ‘No service’.”
“I’m Ben.” The man said.
“Terry.” The middle aged man said, giving Ben a nod of acknowledgement.
“Where you headed, Terry?”
“Nowhere fast, right now. Was headed to Midtown.”
“Me too.” Ben said, reaching down and off a carabiner clip keychain, unhooked the umbrella he had brought with him when he had heard the weather report from Roger Thompson on ‘Channel Five’.”
“It is The End!” A man, also with an umbrella, reminding Ben more than a bit of Charles Manson, down to his hair style and he had the outfit of someone who lived a transient lifestyle. Charlie, as Ben came to think of the man, had a megaphone he held up to his mouth, “God’s judgment has arrived! Repent of your sins!”
As the man ended his sermon, someone ran by him with their umbrella extending, bumping Charlie, causing his megaphone to tip upward. From where he was standing under the awning, Ben watched in horror as the color entered the end of the megaphone. Charlie’s skin turned a reddish tint, then purple and he began to choke. He brought his hands up to his throat and squeezed, as if he was hoping to push the color back up his throat. He began to cough harder, then fell. The color quickly covered him. Within seconds, Ben could no longer hear the man.
“Jeez, I guess God judged him unworthy to spread His message.” Terry said, shaking his head.
Ben thought of him. He hoped, even prayed to the God that had rejected Charlie as his messenger, that Em would have stayed put in her apartment. He was worried with the cell service out, that she would attempt to leave to find him. The way that the color worked, if she had done that, he wondered if he would ever see her again to find out.
“I’ve got to go, Terry. Listen, I’m headed in the direction of midtown. If you’d like, you’re welcome under my umbrella.” Ben said.
“I appreciate that, Ben. Given what we’ve seen, what we’re seeing, just seems like there is too much room for error.”
“All right, then, Terry. Best of luck to you and yours.”
“Same to you.”
From the awning to Green Park Apartments, where Em lived, Ben knew that it was four city blocks. He pushed the button to unlatch the umbrella, held it over his head, took a deep breath and stepped out under the color. Like rain, he could hear the color pattering the top of the umbrella. Like paint, he could see its slow drop to the ground as it cascaded down the umbrella.
On the other side of the street, Ben heard the sound of shattering glass. He turned his attention to the sound as someone emerged from one of the store fronts, holding an umbrella and merchandise that Ben assumed from the way they were fleeing, they had not paid for. Two things happened simultaneously, someone stuck their foot out, tripping the thief and the color began to do its frightful work. The second, someone stepped on some of the glass from the storefront, involuntarily reacted with a scream and were quickly silenced and covered by the color. Ben quickened his pace.
Ben saw the color consuming vehicles that had been parked on the sides of the street. He thought again of The Blob and how it had fed on the town. He wondered if that was what the color was doing on the people and objects that it covered. He wondered what was happening underneath the color.
He opened the door to Green Park and entered the lobby. The lobby was deserted. Ben knew on a normal day that the lobby would have been bustling. He pushed the elevator button door and realized that the power was already out. On the off chance that she had come down using the elevator, Ben cried out, “Em!”
There was no reply. Ben went for the stairwell. As he climbed to the twelfth floor of the apartment building he could see out windows overlooking the city on each floor. From above, the city looked like a Vincent Van Gogh painting. It resembled the city that Ben had grown up in, but looked like something from a scarlet dream.
Ben reached the twelfth floor and exited the stairwell. He went down the carpeted hallway and knocked on the door. A few moments that were agonizingly long for Ben, nothing happened.
Then Emily answered the door.
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