Noelle - Day 176 (Suddenly a Story)

Hi guys!
I wrote a new short story!  It'll either be horrible or awesome (I can't decide) but I've gotten positive feed back so far, so lets see what you say!  :)

The Day It Rained

People from the town call it "The Day It Rained".  Newscasters around the country called it "That Natural Phenomenon".  Most people called it "bizarre".  My people?

They call it a tragedy.

Nobody survived that fateful day.  There was no one who escaped.  Not one.  The blood ran - the streets were coated in the flesh of my kin.  If you are weak-hearted, turn back.  This not the story for you.

Because, you see, this is not a nice story.  There is no happy ending.  This is the truth about what happened on the day of the “incident”.  The truth that was covered up like it was nothing.

*****

They woke me up.  They tramped through our homes, squashing the runts beneath their feet.  Even the big adults looked away.

It happened everyday.  They would come.  They would rip us from our very house, despite our desperate clinging.  They would take the strong; trample the old and rotten; then leave.  There was no escape.  No one could do anything.

But this time was different.  This time, they were taking me.

I wanted to scream, but not a sound was heard from me.  I'd never left the farm.  What was it like out there?  Where had my friends and family gone, carted off every day for as long as I could remember?  What was out there, that none should return?

They stuffed me with one hundred other.  I had no idea there were so many like me.  But here they were. We were shoved on a beastly creature - a truck.  It was gaseous and nauseating and horrid.

We trundled along.  The bumps bruised many of us.  The noise was beyond loud.  This was sonic boom can't-hear-your-neighbor loud.  Very, very, loud.

"Wind speed in your area is becoming dangerously high," said a voice, coming from the front of the truck. If we could hear each other, we would have heard a sudden hush.

We kept going.  On and on and on.

The wind became audible to all of us.  The floor suddenly seemed arbitrary.  Some of us - the lighter ones, with a little less fat on their bones - rose into the air like fat old birds.

SLAM.  Any weightlessness that we had afore felt was gone.  One of us was heavily injured - the red flesh was everywhere.  I steeled my nerves and looked away.  RIP, my comrade.

This pattern repeated itself.  The weightlessness.  The thunk.  The horrible wounds.  We were slipping over our fallen friends like so many dominoes.

And then one time the weightlessness didn't stop.  Everybody rose in the air.  The truck itself began to spin, thrown about by some unstoppable force.  More of my kin slammed against walls.  There were only fifty of us by now.

The doors of the truck burst open.

We all crowded towards it, leaving the injured.  There was nothing that could be done for them.  To our horror, there was nothing solid in sight.  Dust.  Wind.  Spinning clouds that made me sick.  Spinning, spinning, spinning,  round and round.  The noise was incredible - like twenty cats screaming for food.

In our rush to get out the death hole that was now the truck, we pushed some of our own over that perilous ridge.  They plummeted, vanishing into the vortex.

Even more were ripped away by the howling wind.

Some despaired and jumped.

The rain streaked across my face like the tears I should have been shedding for my lost friends.  I was the last.  The very last.  I could not leave and jump to certain death.  I could not stay and bash myself against the wall.  I was at an impasse.  Mother Nature decided it for me.  Before I could stop, the wind tossed me carelessly into the fray.

Confusion.

Grit.

Debris.

Howling, endless wind.

I could feel myself dropping.  I was no longer weightless, no longer gravity free.  I was plummeting.

The ground - green and dusty and chaotic as it was - was coming up to me fast.  Buildings.  Roads.  A river of flood water, filled with the lifeless bodies of my kin.  I found myself too close, too fast.

I crashed into the building.  The world flashed red and black and started disconnecting, dewebbing itself from reality.  I was destroyed.  I remember seeing the red, the blood, my own guts.  And then all fizzled out.

There is one last thing you should know about me - me and my hundred fallen friends from that day.  I am a watermelon.

THE END

(Update: here's the picture prompt that I used for this story!)