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Hey gang, for those of you so inclined: a new Writing Exercise! The last exercise - basically a historical zombie story - started my writing of a short story (which I hope to get online for reading ASAP).

This week however, let’s get back to formula!

Title: Sign of the Times

Scene: The Apocalypse is here, and you are one of the few survivors.  In your travels, you come across an object that personifies the worlds current situation.

Description Items:

1) The reason for this apocalypse.
2) Your survival party (alone or with others?).
3) Your location/setting.
4) The object.
5) Your reaction.

I don’t even recognize the streets anymore. The overgrowth of shrubbery and knee-high grass distorts everything around me. I have to look to the sky to get my bearings - to remember the way home - all while staying alert for any movement, any sound, any presence of the undead.

Clearing a large, living mound of grass and weeds - which proved to be the hulk of an abandoned Chevrolet Prizm - I see my home. The roof collapsed from the seasons of harsh weather and neglect, it’s a shimer of it’s former self.  The blacktop driveway now a spotty bed of overgrowth, sprouts of grass and indecernible plant-life littering it’s once smooth sloping plane.

Staying low and trying not to remember, I move toward the front door.  The wind carries the creaking squeal to my ears. My body reacts - hair-trigger instict automating my movements - and my weapon is in my hands readying for the attack.

In the center of what was my driveway, a tricycle - rusted almost beyond recognition - sits in a barren patch of blacktop. My hardened resolve, the thing that has kept me alive all of these years, falters.

I drop to my knees and begin to sob uncontrolably. Small persistant patches of pink and purple show through the almost completely rusted frame. Carried by misery, I am kneeling next to it… but cannot remember moving. It crumples in my arms as I pull it close to me. I want to die - to be with her again. I look to the sky - the only familiar vision in this wasteland - and scream. I curse myself for surviving.

At the time, I thought the scariest thing I’d ever seen was the President - who I DIDN’T vote for, for what it’s worth now - on CNN, saying, “We just don’t know… we just don’t understand.”  They cut to the head of the CDC and the Surgeon General, who gave us a lot of technobabble but inevitably, all signs pointed to, “We don’t know why they’re rising.  Just get the hell away from them if you see them.” 

Some conspiracy websites claimed it was all engineered by the government as a way of killing off the welfare families, since the economy was so bad that we couldn’t feed them anymore.  I have serious doubts, but then again, who knows?  I’ve seen the dead walk; I may be inclined to believe anything.  All I know is that when it spread, it spread fast. 

My husband is trapped in Manhattan.  I laugh bitterly at this, because to the borough of Queens, Manhattan was where we all go to work.  Now, it’s a scary island of the unknown.  The last thing I heard from him was two weeks ago.  I had taken a day off - a mental health day, promised the kids Mommy’d pick them up from school early and take them to a movie.  Thank God I did - what would have happened to my babies otherwise?  I don’t even want to think it.  I don’t know what happened to the other children; children my kids played with, knew the names of - I can’t think of it, or I’ll lose what little I have holding me together.  My boys are safe.  I will keep them safe.

He called, panicked.  “Are you okay?  ARE YOU OKAY?  WHERE ARE THE BOYS?”  I had them, we were packing what we could fit into our backpacks.  My five year old stuffed his stuffed dog, Rover, into his Clone Wars backpack and I moaned in despair.  “GODDAMMIT, ARE THE BOYS OKAY?” 

“We’re… here.  We’re coming.”

“NO!  You cannot come here!  We’ve closed off the floor, there are a good 25 of us here.  We’re taking care of ourselves.  Just… go somewhere.  Keep the boys safe.  I love you.  Always.”

I haven’t heard from him since.  Occasionally, I get a bar or two’s worth of signal, but I lose it just as I hit ‘send’. 

So here I am, Warrior Mom.  The part I thought I’d only play in my own imagination.  I lead my two children into battle.  I have killed people, both alive and undead, to protect my children.  We have made our way to Long Island City, which looks like the worst pictures of war-torn Belfast I remember as a child.  We are making our way to the 59th Street Bridge, which will take us to the scary island.  But my children want their Daddy, and I want my husband.  I have killed for them.  I will kill for him.

“Momma,” my nine-year old says.  My poor baby.  He has grown up years in just two weeks’ time.  I stroke his face.  “What, baby?” 

He hands me a PowerBar.  “You haven’t eaten today.  You can’t get sick.  You can’t be slow.”

My five-year old looks at me.  “No more monsters, Mommy.  Two days.” 

I nod at them both, taking the PowerBar from my older boy’s hands.  “No monsters, baby.  Soon.  The Army will help us.”  I tell them that the Army is coming to give them hope.  We did see one tank roll by us in Woodside, so who knows?  It was all I could do to pull the boys back, lest we be seen.  I don’t want to be seen. 

Finally, we arrive at the foot of the bridge.  Cars have been abandoned in the street.  There is blood everywhere.  But no bodies. 

“Momma.”  It’s my nine-year old again.  “Look!”

He’s holding a cell phone.  It’s got their pictures on the screen.  Oh, God.  He was so close to home.  Please, God, if you still exist, tell me he just dropped it.  Please tell me he’s here, looking for us.  Tell me anything.

I fall to my knees and weep.

Suddenly, as if by magic the foliage opens up in front of me.  The rainforest has been as dense as a London fog for the last 3 days of hiking but now it parts like a curtain in front of me.  I’m here.
A gentle slope of barren ground dips in front of me.  Yet, I can’t make out the bottom of the slope.  It should only be four to five hundred meters away.  I should see it.  I made it here, I should see it!
- The “artifact” as it was dubbed on the net is supposed to lie right here.  Discovered just 6 months ago it started as just rumors on the paranormal fringe blogs that spent as much time debating Bigfoot as space aliens.  Some Spanish archaeology students supposedly stumbled on this clearing while studying the South American rain forests.  “Like a hole punched out of the jungle, clean as surgery.” they had said.  The artifact is in the center they said.  But they were showing the first signs of the illness as they gave those reports.
- I start down the slope and the loose soil spills before me like the walls of an ant-lions den.  The fertile loam is transformed into this thin barren grey dust in just 2 steps.  This must be what it’s like walking on the moon.
- Mainstream media reported the first warnings of the outbreak too late.  A modern plague spread from Rio to Barcelona.  The WHO and CDC had worked to trace the source of the outbreak to some Spanish college students studying in Brazil.  Modern air travel proved a terrific vector for the disease and quarantine proved impossible.  Within 48 hours there were cases on every continent.  It took 23 days for our “civilization” to collapse.
- Moving forward is becoming more and more difficult.  I slide down the slope almost effortlessly. In fact I have great difficulty stopping my feet.  But I don’t seem to be advancing.  The atmosphere around me seems congealed and clotted.  Before me the way down seems to ripple and pulse.
- The horrors of the plague were unimaginable.  Terror had not struck mankind on this level since the middle-ages and the Black Plague.  But we were sadly naïve.  It got much worse.  The first reports of the dead rising reached us just before the internet went down.  Television and radio broadcasts had been dead for days and the news on the net was getting crazier and crazier.  Unfortunately we soon found out that this nightmare was not the result of hysteria.
- What I see before me now is beyond description.  As I get nearer and nearer to the center…to the “Artifact”, I am now just starting to understand what we face.  What lies before me is indescribable.  My eyes cannot truly see it.  My brain can not make sense of what my eyes tell it.  The angles I see are physically impossible.  The colors are outside of any palette ever imagined by mortal painters.  Its size is infinite, yet at the same time smaller than I am.  I seem to see through it, but what lies behind is more horrific than even this devastated landscape.  Around me the pulsations continue like a living organism pushing me through its bowels.
- My God in Heaven!  How pathetic they were to send me on this mission.  How arrogant they were to think they could destroy it.  They believed this small thermal device in this ungodly heavy pack could be a match for this.  I struggle to unload the bomb and engage the timing device.  I must complete my mission as I have been trained.  I must serve my duty.  But my mind which has been faced with despair and defeat on a level already surpassing the limits any mortal man has previously endured cannot face any more.  This force is not of this Earth.  This force is greater than all the Earth.  I can feel my mind crack into pieces.

I think I broke the thread

@ Roe & @Doctor - absolutely brilliant stories!  I think it’s very telling how we each ended our entries - they are full individual despair.

I loved both of your stories!  @Cypher, we seemed to be on similar mindsets. :) 

I let my husband read mine and he said, “I can’t believe you killed me off!”  I tried to tell him that wasn’t set in stone, he could have dropped it fighting a zombie off… hee hee…