The Copious Few. Chapter 6

I will normally release them in sets of 5, but this was kind of a transitional, so I thought I'd just publish it since it's done.

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10/10/10

Silence. They always talk about the silence before the storm, but you never hear about the silence after the storm. You sit there quivering, not wanting to break the quiet for fear of more destruction. A ringing fills the ear as you’re afraid to open your eyes. No matter what, it won’t be good. Either you’ll see whatever comes after death, or you’ll see what was left behind.

What was left behind in the cozy little town of Wiondale was not very much, and what did remain, was something to wonder at. Half of the Saenz house had been crushed by a strange object never seen in this town before. It looked like a sculpture, but not like anything they would have in their town. Black, huge, and ominous, it looked like something that would be used in some sort of satanic ritual. The shape was like nothing recognizable on this Earth, and the material resembled petrified wood.

About a mile across town, the entire block on which Sonia Sutton lived was covered by an eerie mist. It looked like a cloud, and would have been beautiful, if not for the fact that everyone inside it was dead. Well . . . almost everyone.

The Merle home was demolished. It looked like it had been pressured from every angle, and suddenly released. The force of the explosion had spread the framework of the house as far as two houses down. The stairs to the basement were visible as the walls of the building were yards away, and the ceiling was still raining down to the ground from the blast. No sound came from what was now just a hole in the ground.

On the outskirts of town, a man had lived alone. He had run a fairly good life of mugging old ladies as they got into their cars and robbing gas stations, until Diamond put an end to that. The house itself looked fine. But if you looked inside, at the body lying on the living room floor, you would see a strange thing. The blood beginning to boil, the skin starting to shrivel. Had Diamond, who was mere feet away from the corpse, been conscious as the air pressure in the room dropped below .15atm, she would probably would have passed out anyway at the sight of the deforming body. But she wasn’t. She was completely fine, as was her brother in the next room over. Lying on the bloodstained carpet, the watch was still clasped in her hand. The seconds hand ticked slowly around to the twelve. 12:05 am.

Most of the other houses and inhabitants in Wiondale had suffered similar fates to those previously mentioned, with moderate variety. The Zegher home for example: while the structure still stood, all the windows were blown out, the doors blasted open by the force of the water now soaking their property and rolling down the street. There seemed to be no other explanation than a vast quantity of H2O suddenly filling the house to the point of bursting, and blasting all fragile aspects of the walls out. Not much of an explanation, but what other one was there?

If one drove through Wiondale at any point on that sleepy October morning, they probably would have checked themselves at the doctor right away for fear of hallucinations. But nobody drove through Wiondale. And in reality, if they had, it only would have confirmed an already established fear. Because at the same moment these strange occurrences hit the town, similar disasters struck the entire planet. Propane trucks on the highway burst from a change in pressure, or exploded as an entire mile of road spontaneously combusted. Almost every coastal city was flooded as the sea level rocketed because all across the planet, including over the oceans, the same thing happened as did to the Zegher’s. Fire didn’t stop at highways either. Forget global warming, the flames that lit up the north pole that night were enough to make the penguins drown themselves before they could become extinct.

And as the end of the world took place, the people all across the country fell mysteriously into a deep sleep. And 99.99% of them died. Whether this is classified as the “end of the world” is really a matter of opinion. But one thing was indisputable: Nothing would ever be the same.