by Samson Stormcrow Hayes
I stare down from my perch and think about suicide for the thirtieth time today, but I can’t do it. If the five story fall doesn’t kill me, I don’t want to be at the mercy of the hoard.
I snap open another soda and stare at the horizon as a rainbow forms through the distant rain clouds. It’s beautiful. Then I look down at the writhing ground beneath me and I want to vomit. They crawl over themselves, crushing those at the bottom as they try to reach me. Each day the pile gets a little higher.
I try to focus on the rainbow and the setting sun as it bathes the clouds with a heavenly glow, but the hungry, growling cries below have my hair standing on end.
Turning away from the broken office window, I walk back to the studio. I turn on the cameras and sit down behind the news desk. I stare at the red on air light, but today I can’t think of anything to say. Not that it matters. No one’s listening. I don’t bother to switch off the cameras as I walk away.
I return to the weather station where I spend most of my time studying the screens. I’m still linked up to all the satellites. I can view the atmospheric conditions anywhere on Earth, but I’m only concerned with the few hundred miles surrounding me. I click on my state and examine the latest images. Beneath the white wispy atmospheric clouds are inky stains. Each day they get closer.
When I was in high school, my history teacher taught us about the vast buffalo herds that once roamed the plains. Early explorers said that it looked as if a blackened landscape was in motion. My teacher speculated that the herds were so vast that if viewed from space they would have appeared as a black cloud. The black mass moving toward me aren’t buffalo.
At first, I thought they were fires. There were many fires in the beginning. But when the black cloud remained for days on end, I knew it was the hoard. They’re hungry and I fear they can smell me.
It’s hard to believe it’s been only three weeks since the plague began. If I wasn’t interning far from home, I’m sure I would be dead now, like the others. But I had nowhere to go. I always wanted to work in television, but I never imagined I would go from intern to station manager in 48 hours as everyone abandoned their posts.
I tried calling home, but I could never get through. My last meaningful conversation was with a stranger who saw one of my broadcasts. She called the station sobbing. I asked her a hundred frantic questions, but she wouldn’t answer. She simply wept. I stayed on with her for hours hoping she would calm down. She didn’t scream when they got to her. She merely yelped, like a dog hit by a car. Then she was gone.
I know I should end it, but like that woman, I don’t have the strength. Even though the studio is built like a fortress, they’ll eventually break through. They are coming. Soon there will be so many they’ll make an undead ramp to my fifth floor doorstep.
Ring the dinner bell. I’m waiting.
Notes …
Samson Stormcrow Hayes writes, … I won my first writing contest when I was in fifth grade for a Halloween story. My prize was merely a giant cardboard pumpkin decoration, but I loved it. I’ve been hooked on short stories ever since. I am the author of Afterlife, a critically acclaimed graphic novel that Joe Haldeman called “… good dark fun, a fascinating story well told.”
Recent published stories include: “Price of War,” a science fiction story that won third place in the SFReader.com annual contest (2014), “Omens” was published in the most recent Havok magazine, and I won first place in a writing contest ($75 prize) for “One of Our Deathbots is Missing!” In the past, I’ve been a regular contributor to The Weekly World News (national publication) and I was a contributing writer to the documentary, “Clouds Over Cuba” a 50th anniversary look at the Cuban Missile Crisis commissioned by the Kennedy Presidential Library. I am also a member of the Horror Writer’s Association.
When I’m not writing, I read, play way too many games on my Xbox and I teach fitness classes to counterbalance my otherwise sedentary lifestyle.