Rough Writing

Hannah rubbed her fingers through her dark brown hair and then rubbed her eyes in a vain attempt to push the exhaustion away. She hadn’t had a good rest for weeks. Even the snatches she managed between sweeps merely served to keep insanity at bay but did little for her bone weariness. Every time she started to enter deep sleep something would trigger an adrenaline surge and pull her out of it. She was the last, the only survivor. Her dreams were as nightmarish as her reality.

Slowly and with a little trembling she pulled out her pad and turned it on. She needed to know if any of the darklings were out there near by. Silently she clenched her teeth and pulled up a local sensor scan. Three pings, all within 20 meters of her. She was stuck here for a while. Resigned she leaned back into her makeshift perch amongst the pipes in the industrial center. Even out here where humans had not been for weeks the darklings still circled. Surrounded by the bones of her dead age Hannah didn’t know why she kept pushing on. She’d lost her husband, Jim, in the first week. Her friends Richard and Carol had fallen one by one. The memories of their screams began to fill her mind. Muttering to herself she shakily opened her gear and pulled out one of her liters of water and her med pack. She’d taken the med pack from Richard’s body after the darklings had finished with it. They’d managed to raid a Walgreen pharmacy. She popped some painkillers to help calm her nerves. They almost didn’t do anything anymore.

The darklings didn’t really have an official name. Over a month ago humanity had celebrated its greatest scientific achievement, a sustainable antimatter based energy system. True ubiquitous and cheap power was at hand. The nation’s various space programs were already building ships in orbit to utilize the revolutionary design. It almost seemed like finally after eons of conflict and self destruction humanity was going to be able to move to life beyond scarcity. How wrong they were. Within days of activating the Prometheus plant research stations across the globe began picking up strange EM radiation that eventually coalesced into tiny momentary rips in space time that began to appear like ripples on a gigantic ocean. The core engineering team at the Prometheus plant decided to shut it down. But it was too late.

With a staccato of thundering crashes the momentary spikes sharpened and ripped into extra dimensional portals. Chaos erupted as beings emerged and began destroying everything and everyone in their path. Conventional weapons were useless. Eventually every human began to flee the hordes pouring through what people were calling the gates of hell. There was only one choice for survival, run.

That is what Hannah and her husband Jim had been doing. Part of a small convoy who had left the wreckage of the cities to seek shelter in the mountains they had hoped to avoid confrontation. It did them no good.

Hannah broke from her reverie with a start. Had she just heard the soft sound of a footstep nearing her position. Her body had no more adrenaline to give. She curled up into a ball and prayed to be ignored, to not be found. She didn’t know what these beasts wanted and she didn’t care. Panic seized her body into a tight ball. From under an arm she saw below her the shimmering multi-legged beast slowly walking along the catwalk. Horror filled her as she realized that she had not turned her pad off. The beasts seemed able to sense the smallest electrical impulse. She prayed to an uncaring God that the small shielding of the case and her body would be enough. The beast made its way pausing every step or so to raise dark armored tentacles into the air and wave them back and forth. The beasts were always searching. It moved on. Relief flooded into her accompanied by stiffness and pain as her body relaxed from yet another moment of pure terror. She’d survived another hour. She hoped she’d survive another day.