Click The Image For A Bigger View
The acrid smell of sulfur and damp mold welcomed Reggie back to the night as he regained consciousness. Before his eyes can fully adjust to the fact that his car is now laying on the road upside down, he feels the weight of his body against the shoulder harness of his seat belt. His neck and shoulder are already stiff and filled with a dull ache and an occasional shooting pain.
Looking around, he sees two dead people halfway inside of his car. Their torsos are inside and their legs are tangled and splayed through the windshield onto the asphalt beyond. The first body is a man that looks to be in his 60’s. His face is caked with blood and chunks of glass and his eyes are open and staring out in fear, his mouth and teeth clamped down upon his outstretched tongue. Next to him is another man that looks to be in his mid 30’s and in similar condition. The younger of the two men is less than six inches from Reggie, his death wail silently screaming into his face. The air is heavy with the scent of excrement wafting from the lower portion of the bodies.
Reggie’s first thought isn’t to flee, but he’s struck with the realization that he has never seen a fresh dead body before, let alone two riding shotgun upside-down in his car. Fear grips him on all sides and he tries to scream. Instead of the large wail he is expecting, he feels his breath taken from him and his abdomen tighten as his stomach launches its contents violently out of him. The vomit sprays all over the face of the younger corpse and what’s left of his windshield, finally rebounding back to Reggie. As his stomach continues to lurch and heave, his nose and throat start to clog from being upside down, causing him to panic and gasp loudly for air.
Frantically Reggie attempts to get out of his seat belt. He struggles with the buckle, fear, and lack of air and after a few minutes, hands shaking, the vomit covered buckle opens. His freedom comes with a heavy thud and he crashes on his head. Grabbing his belongings and then twisting his body past his two hitchhikers, he’s able to get himself past the remains of his windshield and out into the night. Free of his car, he rises to a crouch and peers past the driver’s side tire to get his bearings and see what has happened around him.
The street is a battle ground, filled with the remnants of burning cars, torn asphalt, and bodies strewn everywhere. Still a bit unsteady after vomiting and choking, it takes him several minutes to focus on the large shapes in front of him that are moving farther away. Occasionally the mists swirl and he’s able to get a better look at them as they continue to toss aside cars and devastate anyone they find. Taller than any living thing he’d seen before and densely muscled in the manner of a walking tree trunk, their skin appears rough and leathery with coarse dark hair covering their arms, chest, legs, and back. The large wooden club that each of them is carrying is covered in thick dripping blood. Bits and pieces of automobiles are mixed with body parts and embedded into the clubs in many spots. Occasionally they let out a low guttural moan with each swing of their club, sending more cars and bodies into the air.
Wondering what he should do, Reggie decides that since he is relatively close, he should try to make his way back to campus and the safety of his dorm room. Digging his phone out of his pocket he tries to call one of his friends back at school. Despite his phone being fully charged and in a reliable spot, he’s unable to get a service provider. A large crash behind him signals a new wave of attackers coming in his location. Unfortunately he finds himself caught in the middle as the giants that have passed him are heading in the direction of his dorm room.
With his eyes on the party of giants ahead of him, Reggie began searching for a path over the mile between where he was and his dorm room. Running between piles of debris that consisted of cars and at time, their former drivers, Reggie slowly makes his way along the road, past the brightly lit local high school. By the time he was able to skulk past the high school, the amount of destruction had greatly diminished; most people were able to detour away from the massacre by taking
As the carnage decreased, he began to run out of places to hide and was forced to consider another strategy for getting back to the safety of his room. The road he was traveling, Rt. 53 was about to split two old limestone quarry areas that lined the road. The quarries were bordered by a buffer along the road that consisted of a thick overgrowth of trees, bushes, and out-of-control weeds behind a serious chain link fence lined with razor wire and barbed wire. He decided to trust in the continuing darkness that was mixing with the red mist and hide from shadow to shadow and have some room to run than find himself trapped against a fence.
Reggie had gotten almost three-quarters of the way past the quarries when he noticed two things. The first was a sense of relief that he could no longer see the giants through the fog; the second was terror as he realized that he could hear a crowd of gibbering, throaty voices quickly coming up behind him. A quick look behind him showed a writhing mass of smaller creatures, possibly an unruly mob. Unsure what to do, he realized he was going to have to get off the road and risk traveling the rest of the way along the fence.
Reggie quickly made his way off of Rt. 53 and moved along the perimeter of the quarry, crouching and moving as fast as he could along the fence. Unable to risk running as fast as he could, he felt the wave of creatures closing the distance between them. Almost at the point of panic he found a patch of medium sized, overgrown weeds and small bushes against the fence that would have to serve as a quick hiding spot.
Pressed against the chain link fence, he could see dozens of the humanoid figures as they moved in his direction, as though they were following the path that the giants had cleared for them. As he watched and listened, he noticed that they always stopped when they reached a body pile or automobile. It wasn’t until they were close enough to see them that he understood these were not humans, but dark creatures that were stopping and checking for any survivors. Hoots, hollers, yelps, and an occasional guttural howl would escape from the group when they came across someone still alive. They would all immediately swarm the body and feast, all the while the victim would spend its last moments in pain as it filled the air with their screams and cries for God.
When the creatures moved to within two hundred feet of him, he began to notice they weren’t much more than five feet tall, sinewy, and bestial in appearance. As they moved around the bodies on what was left of the road, he could just catch glimpses of fangs, horns, sloped brows, slimy skin, and slits for nostrils. Once again frozen with shock and fear, he could feel the panic begin to build within him with each step they made towards him.
Reggie was almost certain that making a run for it would only draw attention to him and lead to a pursuit he didn’t think he could outrun, yet he no longer felt safe in his bushes. He began to search the area around him for a miracle of any kind when he noticed an access gate in the fence a few yards from where he now stood. There looked to be space under the gate that might allow for him to slip through and into the thicket of trees beyond site from the road. As he made his way towards the gate, he grabbed a few larger rocks in case he needed to dig out more room for himself.
Once he reached the gate, he was able to slide under with a very minimal amount difficulty, although he took his time so as not to shake the fence and draw attention. With only moments to spare, he got himself through and hidden from the road as the horde of creatures, some dragging various body parts with them and eating as they moved, passed by without noticing him and trampling over his former spot. It took him several more minutes before he was able to get a handle on his emotions and start making his way towards the college.
The expanse of trees was less than one hundred feet and it took only moments before Reggie exited out into the open again. For some reason the fog was thinner here and he could see to the other side of the quarry, approximately eight hundred feet directly in front of him, but he was going to have to travel at least three times that distance on a dirt road around the sides of the quarry to get to a point in which he could try and exit the area and head back towards his dorm. He wasn’t sure how much time had elapsed since he left his car on the road, but he guessed it was just under a half an hour.
Looking out over the quarry, the fog swirled with the air currents and he couldn’t make out how deep the bottom was. The sun had set awhile ago and the last daylight was now fading below the horizon and he was being swallowed by the darkness. The waning moon was penetrated the mists just enough to provide some light to guide him. He checked once again to make sure he was alone and set off on the road.
After he had walked a few hundred feet, he came across a white construction storage truck. He couldn’t think of the proper name of this type of truck, but it looked like a full size pickup truck with most of the bed taken up with storage cabinets. He thought it was strange to see a truck just sitting along this dirt road unattended, so he slowed down and proceeded towards it cautiously.
He came upon it from behind and as he got closer he could hear the radio blaring out static from the open driver’s side window. Moving closer until he could see the hood of the truck, he noticed it was smeared with blood. He could see a pair of boots on the ground in front of the truck. Thinking someone might be injured, he quickened his pace and came around to the front and let out a yelp of surprise.
On the ground in front of the truck where he expected to find an injured body, he instead found a pair of legs without a torso lying in a pool of blood. There were flies buzzing all over and the top of the waist looked like it was bitten in half. As he bent down to get a closer look, he heard the sound of a giant pair of wings coming from the quarry. He quickly moved back behind the truck and lay on the ground next to it.
Whatever portion of hell that rose out of the quarry was hidden from Reggie by the mists, but the loud flapping sound and the thick giant swirls in the mist from above told him that there was a pair of large leathery wings attached to it. Reggie continued to lay still until the flapping sound gradually grew fainter and farther away. Once he felt safe, he got back up and looked again at the remains of that body in front of the truck.
“Well that puts two and two together,” he thought, “I definitely don’t want to be here when that thing returns.”
He thought about searching the truck for a flashlight to use the rest of the way, but decided he didn’t want to provide anything that might want to eat him with a shining beacon. He decided to proceed quickly and jogged the rest of the way around the quarry, stopping frequently to listen for more noises. Once he made it to the other side, he quickly got to the fence and forced his way underneath the chain links by digging out the dirt with the rocks he had in his pocket from before.
The other side of the quarry backed up against a small residential subdivision that was usually very quiet. There was only one road that went in and out of the subdivision, so the only traffic you saw was from the residents of the houses. With everything that had happened tonight, Reggie wasn’t surprised that it was quieter than usual with no traffic on any of the streets. He noticed that the porch lights were still on at most of the homes and took it as a good sign that power still remained.
As he made his way through the subdivision, he gained sight of the university campus and the airport that was a part of it. Everything looked normal with the lone exception of a flaming mass of metal, which looked like a helicopter that seemed to have crashed short of the runway near the east end of the campus. As he passed the wreck on his way to his dorm room, he made out the Newsradio 780 logo on one of its doors. It was actually the only door that remained and it had what looked like claw marks on it and the outside of the rest of the helicopter body. He decided he didn’t want to know what the inside looked like.
He made out the outline of his dorm building just a short time later. Although the campus was quiet, he could still see and hear people in their dorm rooms listening to the music. He thought it strange that no one had on the news. As the bells of the campus chapel began to ring in the 7:00 hour, Reggie was knocked to the ground by a silent force that was immediately followed with a huge explosion. The lights on campus and in the immediate area flickered and then went dark. Reggie got back to his feet and looked back towards where he left his car. In the sky above where the power generation plant was Reggie could see a huge red glow rising towards the sky as darkness took the campus.
