January 12th

 1


I woke up and saw Erin was no longer in the lobby. I looked out the front window and yesterday’s message had been wiped away.

I can’t lie. I knew what decision Erin had made. I didn’t blame her. And I knew my time limit for making a decision was over. I wondered if the attack would come quick. I could only hope that it’d be fast.


2


By noon it started to occur to me that maybe no attack was coming quickly. I wondered if I ought to leave - the car was still there. I stood up and shook the pins and needles out of my legs. I didn’t have any more change to grab food out of the vending machine so I paced.

Finally I decided to go to the car and find someplace else. Not someplace safe, I knew I was watched everywhere, but somewhere… else.

I drove for hours and saw nobody on the road. I turned on the radio and immediately words in a foreign language were being said to me. I tried to make it out, it sounded like a droning chant, the words almost familiar. But I couldn't understand it. 

I know I heard Erin’s voice in that chant. 


3


By nightfall I was near a convenience store so I pulled into the parking lot and walked in. Nobody was there. I locked the door and grabbed some food off the shelves. It felt like a feast after the last few days.

I probably dozed on and off. But I sat there. And thought. There had to be reasons for this, right? I mean whoever wrote those tweets he must have existed before he appeared online. What was that person like? 

“You’re not alone, you know.”, the voice came from behind me.

I turned around and saw the man standing there. He stood completely still, with a smile on his face. He moved closer to me. I didn’t care enough to move away. 

“You had your chance to join us.”, He said as he sat in a chair next to me. “We want to bring our glee to everyone. But you chose not to take part. You chose to stay outside the circle of happiness the man brings us.” There was a tinge of sorrow to his voice. “It’s too bad. You don’t know what is going on, do you?”

I shook my head, no.

“A war has started. A dead and sleeping king has risen and that cannot happen while my god still walks the Earth. This clump of rock is simply too small for both of them.”, He looked out the window, towards the west, “There are things going on right now that you have no idea about.”

“Do you?”, I asked, venturing to find my voice. If I were going to die, I wanted at least something of an answer.

“A little. But the joy serving my god brings me is enough. A war has started. It's being waged between two gods. But we’ll never see it directly. Let’s just sit here for awhile.”, the smile never left his face that entire time. I must have expressed some worry on my face because he finished with, “I’m not going to kill you. Your sacrament is no longer needed. You just aren’t that important anymore.”

We sat there silently all night.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

January 8th

  1 This was the day the first violence started. I was brewing coffee - even in those days of waking up feeling that something was coming I needed my coffee - and I heard the crash.  I turned around and saw the stone lying in the center of the room, the broken window. I felt like I was in a dream, walking to it, picking it up, turning it in my hand. I didn’t know what to do. It was the size of my fist. I looked out the hole in my window, where glass had been only seconds earlier and saw nobody… but someone had picked it up and thrown it. I grabbed my phone and realized it was broken. I couldn’t call the police. I’d given up on landlines years ago. So I picked up my keys and got in the car to drive to the police station to make a report. 2 I saw more as I drove. A family of three - man, wife and young daughter were being dragged from their home. I only heard snippets but “Please, we are happy as we are” filtered into my car. I wanted to stop, to help the family but as...
Read more

January 14th

  How quick can a society crumble? 14 days ago the world made sense. By the 14th the world just didn’t work anymore. I saw a rift tearing itself through the ground outside. But it wasn’t a rift. It was like the world itself was slowly losing coherence. Like it just didn’t want to stay together anymore. I thought back to that first tweet. That first youtube video and that first facebook message. I am not sure if they were what did this btu they were the contagion that made it possible. None of this would have been possible if that thing that had made those messages hadn’t been able to promote his message worldwide so easily. So easy it was to exploit a urge for the world to make sense again. We had all felt it. We all knew things were spiralling even before the messages started. But it hadn’t really fallen apart until one thing could gather followers by way of those poison tweets and videos. We were divided but those messages had been the hammer on the fault line of our coll...
Read more

January 13th

  1 I slept that morning. I dreamt of a thing. It was as tall as a mountain, tentacles in place of a head, three legs. I dreamt of something else, bat wings spreading across the sky, slimy squirming masses making up the lower half of it’s head. My eyes popped open. I think I awoke screaming or maybe it was just the sound of the two things walking the earth in my dream. The other man turned to me. “You saw them. The gods at war.” I got up and walked the aisles again, grabbing food. Doing anything other than thinking about what I had seen in my dream from moments before. “Grab some coffee. Two cups.”, The man said. “We may as well get cozy.” I did as he asked. 2 Thunder. I think it was thunder. I looked out the window and saw the sky darken as if a cloud the size of Everest were passing over the store. Then the sky brightened again - but I could hear the thunder receding into the distance. I turned to the man and asked, “What is glee?”  He sat there, smile still ...
Read more