I have been working feverishly on my creative writing. More specifically: an old favorite piece of fiction. What follows is a little sample of an upcoming story.
Everyone was dead. Not just ten, not a hundred. Everyone at the graduation ceremony. Maybe a thousand. Parents, grandparents, sons, daughters, and almost worse than anything else, classmates. Best friends since kindergarten hugged one another in their final moments, their cold bodies intertwined with one another as they laid face down on the hard dirt. Younger brothers and sisters clung under the graduation gowns of their older role models. Soft, pink flesh wrapped around hard, cracked brick. Bodies that breathed life just two days ago sat strewn about the rubble and ruins of the school campus.
No one could recall exactly what happened. The day started perfect: the seventh of June, high school graduation. The weather cooperated in all the best ways: sunny and warm with the temperature easily in the lower eighties. Everyone was in their place. The school auditorium filled up by the hundreds until friends and families began to watch their favorite sons and daughters walk across the expansive stage. Some were clearly nervous, stumbling up the stairs or using the wrong hand to grab the diploma. Others smiled overzealously at the crowd as camera flashes bounced off their faces. Some danced, some cheered, and no matter the show, everyone in the audience clapped furiously for their graduates.
Brent was nervous for sure. He was near the back of the line, and although he was in a graduating class of nearly two-hundred, he forgot about his plan to carefully watch everyone ahead of him walk so he knew exactly what to do without looking like an ass. A shallow set of metal stairs rose to the stage and crept up on him, and before he could compose a healthy smile, his name echoed throughout the auditorium.
“Brent...” and then something else. His last name, maybe? He wasn’t sure. The words fizzled as the thump-thump of his heartbeat filled his ears. Thousands of eyes were on him. Camera flashes bolted across the room. Brent put one foot on the stairs, a hand on the railing, and lifted his other foot.
Then his world began to spin. The stairs seemed to move under his feet. Sweat poured down his face. So suddenly? Was he this nervous, this fast?
Flashing cameras halted and a dozen people screamed. The ground was shaking. It kept shaking, each tremor more violent than the last. More screams from the crowd, this time loud enough to echo throughout the auditorium. Long, sudden cracks tore through the three-story brick walls while large pieces of the ceiling began to crumble into the crowd below. Hundreds of people scattered in different directions. Only the those near the edges of the room made straight lines for the exits - the middle of the crowd succumbed to tons of concrete, steel, and wood as they chaotically pushed and shoved into one another.
There was a moment of calm silence in Brent’s ears when the first dozen people were crushed under the crumbling ceiling. The violence was unlike any he had seen, only the stuff from distant stories his mom told about her job as an emergency room nurse. Faces were crushed, arms and legs ripped from bodies, and screams instantly muted.
Brent regained focus in time to watch a group of his robed classmates fall into the thin wooden stage below them. Brent jumped from the metal stairs, turned towards an exit not more than ten feet away, and... and that was it. The last memory from graduation.
Although he was uncertain how many days had passed since then, Brent awoke from a haunting dream that morning, but was no sooner conscious than he discovered the worst of his nightmare was reality: his dead family strewn about him. Mom’s hair fancied up for the occasion, soaked in blood. Dad’s shirt and tie missing, his bare chest torn and shredded with the shrapnel of bricks, steel, and bone. The sight was sickening. Was the nightmare really over? Could Brent’s eyes lie to him?
Among the silence and rubble of the destroyed auditorium were sobs of crying. The world was different, irreversibly changed, and although Brent did not understand why or how, he pressed onward. His sore body shambled from one corpse to another, searching for the distant sound of crying. Bodies were fresh - all recently dead - and each one a classmate or parent or grandparent. It was the graduation day from hell.
B3 out.
No comments:
Post a Comment