darknation

part 1 omg

Darkness fell. The final sun to leave the sky was red, bathing everything in a bloody hue before it winked out over the horizon.

The moon rose behind me. Just one, fortunately, though the colour it glowed was enough to remind me of the insane unreality that I currently occupied. I can’t describe that colour, the refracted light of the triple suns. It was a neon purplish blue reddy orange yellowy green. It fell upon me to name this new and remarkable colour, so I called it Pluedangeow.

Rational thought was slowly returning, I realized. I was still outside the broken pub, here at the end of the world or the beginning of the world or wherever the hell I was.

I stood, listening to the crack of glass under heel as I slowly righted myself. The pludangeow light was bright enough for me to see by, though I really didn’t like what I saw. Apparently I was still insane because the city around me was still impossibly trashed and empty. But I was insane and logical, and logic told me to run away as fast as I could.

I clomped down the street listening for people. I desperately needed people. Or a drink. A really, really big drink. I salivated as I walked, picturing a giant pint glass. Which wouldn’t really be a pint glass, now that I thought about it. It would be a quart glass. Whatever that was in metric.

I stopped and reached for my beermat, wrote down ‘Quart Glass’, then continued on my way.

All around me the destruction was unrelenting. Buildings were totally creamed, their hollow windows and doors as devoid of soul as a fleshless skull. Glass was everywhere, littering the cracked roads and sparkling in the pluedangeow moonlight.

A shadow passed overhead, dimming a path of glass in its wake for a fleeting second. Then the shadow was gone.

Panic rising to mix with my hysteria, I walked on. The shadow hinted overhead twice more, and twice more I stopped and searched the dark sky for the cause. Twice more I found nothing.

On the forth pass, I saw the huge, dark wings glide overhead close enough to send a breeze shooting down my neck and chill my testicles up and into my sternum.

Self-preservation kicked in. Huge dark wings gliding overhead in this foreign landscape I liked not. I desperately looked around for someplace to hide.

I dashed towards one of the dead buildings, one that still had a door. I reached the portal and crashed into the solid oak with my shoulder.

The door refused to budge, but the building behind it collapsed in a thunder of pulverized concrete.

Waaaaaaagh, I thought as I ran. And I had never been a very good runner. I had no natural grace, no style. I was no Olympian. Whereas the well-hung athletes in supertight lycra shorts ran in smooth, lucid lopes, I ran like a screaming retard with a firework inserted up his behind.

Once again the shadow passed overhead. I ran faster.

Up ahead was a dilapidated car park. More importantly, inside the car park were dilapidated cars. Between me and salvation loomed a significant hill.

I pounded up the hill, screaming a wordless obscenity and pelting hell-for-leather towards the nearest vehicle. It was a Volvo estate.

I remembered my daddies old Volvo. It had been a complete wreck. The gearstick had a habit of falling off during inopportune moments and the back doors were secured shut by a long piece of string that could be tied taught between the interior handles. If my father had ever had to perform an emergency stop then any passengers in the back seat would have been garroted in half.

Well, they would have been, but since the brakes were buggered any sort of emergency stop would have had to have been facilitated by crashing into a brick wall.

I reached the Volvo and yanked at the door. The handle came off in my hand.

Of course it’s locked you complete retard, my subconscious screamed. Think of a way to open the bastard!

In the post-apocalyptic city I now inhabited, detritus was in ample supply. I picked up a half brick and launched it though the Volvo’s rear window. It shattered in the satisfying manner of safety glass.

The giant winged thing was now circling above me as I fumbled with the lock. It clicked open and I climbed inside.

Keeping as far away from the broken window as possible, I clambered into the driver side of the car and peered out of the sunroof. The circling winged thing had vanished.

Adios, fucker, I thought to myself, leaning back in the decaying interior and heaving a huge sigh of relief. There was a click and the car began to move.

That will be the handbrake then, said the small part of my brain that wasn’t calling the rest of me a fucking idiot.

I reached down, grabbed the handbrake and wrenched it upwards. Something in the bowels of the car twanged as the cable snapped.

“Waaaaaaaaaah!!!” I screamed out loud this time, the car rolling down the hill and gathering speed. It bumped over the pavement sending my head crunching into the ceiling and dislodging the driver side sun screen mcthinger with the mirror in it, stratigically positioned so lady drivers can check their makeup when they aren’t gabbing into their mobile phone.

A spare set of keys fell into my lap.

What sort of idiot keeps their car keys up there, asked my brain to no one in particular. I fumbled the keys with my shaking hands, got them into the ignition and gave them a savage twist. The battery was done for, but it managed a brief second of brilliant illumination from the headlights. And I saw the giant winged thing as it swooped directly down into my path, though I really wish I hadn’t.

It was a giant bloody moth. It was gargantuan, with a wingspan easily ten foot across. It was massive. It was a behemoth.

The speeding Volvo smashed into the behemoth, spraying bug juice all over the bonnet and making a serious mess of the radiator. Realizing that my doom was near imminent, I unlocked the front door and recklessly leapt to safety.

Lying there, bleeding from the broken glass all over the road and nursing a seriously battered body, I watched as car and Volvo rolled into the night, eventually colliding with the Royal Bank of Scotland and sending the entire edifice into a spectacular collapse.

And that, thought I, is the end of that.

It was around about that point that another shadow flitted overhead. I groaned out loud just before the massive insect swooped, grabbing at my jacket with its horrible clawed legs and chittering mandibles. It knocked me flat onto my belly, splayed out and splattered on the pavement. The moth had me pinned by its massive weight.

This is it, I thought. I’m going to be eaten by a giant fucking moth. What a totally stupid way to die.

Something ripped, though I didn’t feel pain. I had always imagined that getting your kidneys ripped out through your spine would hurt quite a lot, but I never felt a thing.

There was a second, much more serious tearing sound. And then I was free, I felt something fly my body, I was weightless, I was…

Still alive.

I watched in disbelief as the Moth flew off, carrying my denim jacket with it into the night.