Rent Reality... Stalking Shadows... Family Gone — A Helllstorm
The last time he saw his little sister was three days ago — December 17th, 2059.
December 20th, 2059...
Richard stood stiffly in the shadows of what was left of a ruined office building and listened to the thunderous tread of ten thousand soldiers marching in perfect unison. The pick of Hell’s Legions. That’s how Richard thought of the men anyway—well, "men" was not exactly accurate...
The soldiers had arrived just days after the gigantic red tornadoes which had destroyed Richard’s world, shredding the cities of man to nothing, not only physically, but metaphysically as well. In their wake, the tornados left tears in the fabric of reality itself—sometimes transporting whole sections of city, whole groups of screaming victims, into unknown realms never to be seen again. And, left in their place, were sections of other realms, inhabited by… other "denizens."
The result was utter destruction. Better than any conventional bombing could ever have been. A complete mishmash of worlds and life forms in conflict. The life forms which had come crawling, slithering, and hopping out of those red-hazed clouds of rent reality were not pretty to behold.
Richard closed his eyes and shuddered as he recalled the first moment of impact of those tornados, as he had done many times in the last few days...
***
Three days earlier — December 17th, 2059...
It was a bright, sunny day. As it had often been, that is, before the sky had been turned into a black and grey storm of boiling lightning and smoky clouds... Before the air had become a thick, red haze of vile dust that stank of sulfur and burned the eyes and throat...
It was Richard’s last day of school. He was excited, exuberant even. He and his mother and sister were traveling down the old dusty driveway of their country home. Green fields filled with grazing cows stretched out on either side, with views of mild grassy hills rolling into the distance.
He and his sister chatted excitedly about what they’d be doing that summer, while his mother laughed cheerfully at their banter, keeping her eyes on the road ahead as the drove them east. They were in the old blue Ford station wagon they had owned for years. Occasional rugged patches on the road would send Richard and his sister into giggling fits as they were bounced around on the worn-out springs of the back seat.
Presently, Richard was gazing dreamily out the window at the endless pastures to the north, when a strange sound filled the air. A loud siren—like the ones he’d heard in old World War Two movies—only this one seemed to come from the sky, and from all directions at once.
The sound reached into Richard’s heart and reverberated through his mind, triggering a terrible foreboding, deep within his soul. Soon, the siren became so loud that Richard had to cover his ears with his hands.
His little sister began to cry.
He couldn't help her.
His mother winced and held one hand to the side of her head whilst keeping the other on the wheel. She floored the gas, driving faster and faster toward the city. Perhaps hoping reactively that it would be safer there. There were police, of course. So it had to be safer, hadn’t it?
As Richard looked on in horror, the air above a distant field shimmered, then began to tear apart.
A monstrous red tornado began to form, seemingly out of nowhere. It grew rapidly into a raging maelstrom.
It was a terrible sight, just like you see in the movies—trees and dirt and other objects being sucked inexorably toward the gaping funnel—only this was more like one of the tornadoes observed through a telescope on Jupiter: giant and red, and a thousand times stronger than any Earth tornado.
Almost instantly, the air around the car thickened into a noxious red haze, making it difficult to see or breathe. Richard watched dumbly as entire sections of countryside tore loose and were sucked into the maelstrom. He thought he could perceive, more than see, bits of sky and air themselves being ripped away, replaced by shifting patches of crimson fog shot through with green and crimson flashes of electricity.
Dark shapes moved within those patches of unnatural space. Gigantic shapes—with questing tentacles and titanic searching nodes. Richard could only make out their shadowy outlines in the distance, but the images were so alien, so pregnant with menace, they instantly froze his stomach and made him dizzy with nausea.
Yet, he didn’t have time to consider them further.
So great was the distant tornado’s pull that even nearby trees were beginning to twist loose and spin off towards its outer vortex.
Richard’s mother drove, almost maniacally, toward the city, now visible on the eastern horizon — the city where on a normal day they would be going to school.
It was the last day of school.
or some reason, Richard found himself thinking about this again — as if this comparatively small fact somehow made the situation feel even more tragic. A completely irrational thought, but one he couldn’t stop dwelling on.
His sister was screaming now, caught in a fit of panic-stricken terror, but he didn’t know how to comfort her. As he looked at her, sitting at the far end of the station wagon’s old back seat, his mind began to wander. He started thinking about her age. It seemed important, somehow.
She was eight. She was only eight...
And he was seventeen...
A shuddering jolt from the station wagon commanded his immediate attention.
A feeling of weightlessness and then another great shudder as the old car hit the ground once again.
A second later they were completely airborne.
The engine screamed as the wheels spun without traction. His mother kept the pedal to the floor anyway... She was frozen in position, a white-faced, static-haired mannequin.
What else should she have done? Nothing in her driving test had prepared her for this.
he old blue station wagon — containing Richard, his mother, and his sister — was sucked into the outer ring of churning air. A dizzying blur of fast-moving particles and black clouds pressed in from all sides, lit sporadically by flashes of red lightning.
Richard lost consciousness...
Some hours later, Richard woke up—upside down and confused—in the crushed shell of the blue station wagon.
His mother and sister were gone.
He crawled out of the wreck and numbly observed the destroyed city around him, not even able to cry or call out their names.
It was like something out of a post-apocalyptic zombie movie — streets filled with crushed cars, shattered and burning buildings, blood and screams — and, for some reason, an incredible amount of paper flying everywhere.
Only instead of post-apocalyptic, it was mid-apocalyptic.
Great red tornadoes still raged in other quarters of the city, glimpsed between torn-up skyscrapers. People were running here and there, pursued by great, many-tentacled shadows.
Richard took it all in a daze — completely disconnected from the carnage, as if he were watching a tragic film from outside the TV screen.
On he stared.
On the chaos raged.
***
Richard flinched at the memory and snapped back to the present. That had been three days ago.
The last time he saw his little sister was three days ago — December 17th, 2059.
He said it in his mind as if rehearsing it.
It somehow seemed important...
This is just the beginning of the story, so stay tuned for Part 2 if you want to follow Richard as he struggles through the hellscape that was once his home city…
This is a Darkmaw Short Story — crafted from a real nightmare of mine.
Alternatively, if you’re not ready to become a paid subscriber just yet but still want to support my work, consider purchasing my other Darkmaw short story, available now in full on Amazon:
Darkmaw: Yōsei-tachi no kyōen [A Banquete of the Fairies.] (Darkmaw: Grim Fantasy Short Stories)
It is a bit-sized read and is either free or 1.99 on Kindle. Enjoy!