Young Writers Society

AN: This is the start of a five-part short story inspired by a dream I had last night. As a result it’s extremely weird and hastily written (I wrote the entire thing this morning) and some of it might not make sense. Feel free to rip it apart. I just did this for a bit of fun.

16:21 PM~~

~~~~~~~~~

When you go to a bank during opening hours, you expect to get some service from the cashiers. You certainly don’t expect to find every cashier gone, and a little pile of uniform on their deserted seats.

“What’s going on?” The speaker behind me, a posh-sounding woman, was leaning past me in the two-person queue to try and see the front desks. She didn’t actually jump the queue of course; that wouldn’t have been British. But she did sound distinctly irritated, not to mention a little befuddled.

“I’ve no idea.” I turned around to face her. “I’ve been waiting here for… oh, about ten minutes now.” I tapped my watch then looked back up at the thing that had bothered me most since entering the deserted bank. “Here, take a look at this. Don’t you find it strange?”

Deciding that queue-barging was, for the moment at least, permissible, the woman joined me by the desk. We both stared up at the ceiling just above the cashier desks. The ceiling had four very neat, very precise holes in it, directly overhead where the cashiers would have been sitting. If you craned your neck you could see right up to the sky outside.

Now that I thought about it, something smelled slightly scorched. I pressed my face up against the bullet-proof glass partition they have on bank desks, and saw, through the haze of my own condensation, a burn mark on each chair. One of the employee’s discarded jackets was still smoking.

“That’s it.” The woman was reaching into her pocket for a phone. “I’m calling the police.”

But before she could put the phone to her ear, the automatic doors opened, and two people hurtled in carrying shopping bags. From the terrified expressions on their faces, it couldn’t be good news. “There’s something out there,” stammered one, a presumably Muslim girl wearing a headscarf. “It’s coming for everyone…”

There came a loud crash from outside. My head snapped up. Things were moving outside, at speed. Then the posh-sounding woman grabbed my arm and gasped. Beyond the bank windows, cars were coming off the road, sliding into one another like marbles. It was like something out of an action film.

“Fire engine!” the other person, a man, shouted suddenly. He hurtled towards the welcome desk, dragging the three of us under it. It wasn’t the best shelter. There was barely room for four people to crouch underneath it. And as the out-of-control fire engine sped towards us, I realised that it was probably going to be crushed under the truck’s heavy weight.

But it was a shelter.

I swear in all my life I’ve never screamed so loudly as I did back then. Back when the nightmare was only just beginning. The people crammed in on either side of me screamed too, so we were basically just a chorus of high-pitched screams. The fire engine thundered towards us and I squeezed my eyes shut. There was a loud crash.

It was over.

Tentatively I opened my eyes and discovered that I was still alive, my heart beating fast. The other three were staring blankly through the smoke and steam, their faces grimy with ceiling plaster.

In true grand-finale style, the fire engine’s sirens began to blare.

“Come on!” The first to remotely come to my senses, I crawled out from the ruins of the welcome desk. The others followed me, slowly and sluggishly, like they were sleepwalking. It was only once we were back in the relative safety of the foyer that they began to snap out of their shocked dazes.

“Oh my God oh my God oh my God.” The posh woman was hyperventilating.

The young woman with the hijab pulled her phone out of her pocket, frantically keying buttons and swiping the screen at a speed I’d never have thought possible. “Is Mum OK, oh my God, is my sister OK…”

The automatic doors refused to automatically open. Something must have messed up the electricity, I thought as I yanked at them. Outside on the street was a scene of chaos. People were running and screaming, but to my surprise all were running in one direction.

Said the man as he stared out through the glass, “They’re running away from something.”

I finally triumphed over the doors and managed to yank them open. But before I could move he grabbed my arm, pulling me back. The sky overhead began to darken and still people ran and screamed. There came the sound of a million helicopter blades from the sky overhead. As I watched, laser rays came shooting down, and people were vaporised on the spot as they tried to flee. I swear to God it was like something out of War of the Worlds.

I wasn’t even sure why I wasn’t surprised anymore. It scared me how readily I accepted that this was happening, that this could even be real. Staring up at the gunships as they descended over the crowd like a plague of locusts, the one thing that disturbed me was: why doesn’t anyone seem to be at the controls?

I shooed the terrified customers back from the doors. “We need to stay hidden.”

It felt like a long time before the sound of the screams and helicopters died away. I couldn’t stop asking myself if the helicopters were going to come back. But risking a glance out of the windows, I saw them slowly disappear over the horizon.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” the posh woman whimpered.

I crossed the room to the doors, my mind already having been made up. “I’m going out there.”

“No!” the girl said at once, trying to grab my arm. “It’s too dangerous. What if there are more of those things?”

I patted her on the shoulder. “I’ll take that risk.”

“Who is that girl?” I heard the man murmur in shocked admiration as I ran out of the bank and down the street.

I could only think of one word to describe what I saw; devastation. Cars lay wrecked and abandoned and everyone was gone. Only the occasional scraps of clothing that drifted by gave me any clues as to what might have happened to them. In no more than five minutes, a busy shopping street had become a ghost town.

“Shit.” I became aware that I was shaking. “Everyone… really did…”

As if in answer to my disbelieving mutters, a loud cry pierced the silence.

[To be continued]