City of Ruin

Tell me about God daddy.

We don’t do that anymore dear.

Small cloth wrapped feet carried the thin body of a girl over the gritty pavement that ran like a ribbon under the earth of the city. A decade ago it had been a tunnel, carved deep into the earth by men scrambling to keep their lives. Her oversized hooded sweatshirt covered in the colors of stone and shadow swayed lightly as the mouth of the tunnel caught a mouthful of air, alerting her and the hundreds of people loosely clumped together around her that the end would be in sight in moments.

              The rumble had begun hours earlier than it had on every day since they had first heard it, the sun had not even cast its warmth through the shutters before men had began jamming belongings into tattered bags and women had quickly wrapped children in layers before scooping them up. Iris had woken to her father whispering in that shrill tone, the one that made his eyes hard and piercing and furrowed his brow. It was the same whisper she had been woken to the night they had left home, some weeks after the sky had turned red and hot and the first rumble had been felt. He now led her by one small left hand as her other clutched at a hard plastic container that contained everything she owned, picking up their pace as they approached a small pin head of light that made up the entrance to the old tomb they walked through.

Her father’s low noises that were no doubt words were lost in the hissing that had erupted amongst the group they were traveling with as they began to run. The girl’s hand slipped onto the end of her father’s dirty rough hand as he began to jog while several others bounced off of him like colored balls at the end of a stick in a desperate attempt to reach the end of the tunnel.   

  The rumble came as bodies packed against the walls, men and women tripping over each other as they stepped on legs and backs and faces, the pile of limbs turning to a mound of moaning, broken bodies as the back of the heard plugged tightly into what had become a human cork in a matter of moments. Iris picked her sore, scraped body up off the damp floor before going down again as another body connected with hers. Her second attempt got her onto her knees and palms, facing in the wrong direction, deafened by the screams of the dying and trapped that crushed against each other an arm’s reach away.

“Iris!” her father screamed from somewhere nearby.

              He lay at her knees, the cloth around his legs turning dark where the lower half of body disappeared into the wall of flesh before her.

“Dad!” she growled loudly as stinging began to grow in her eyes.

“You need to go… remember the way dear” he stated as he slapped the cover down over her container before she could grab at anything.

              Iris moved her thin legs underneath herself as fast as she could, the air growing warm and thick as the path below her rose towards the pink clouds and clear white skies that hung over the long gone ruins of humanity outside. Deep breaths of clean air surged into her lungs as she stumbled to a stop in what had once been a wide intersection that now contained tall, weathered buildings to her front and the buildings that had been churned to gravel to her back.

              Earth rattled below her as a great pillar of flesh and steel slammed into the broken rock and piles of glass a stones throw behind the tunnel she had just emerged from, sending her to her knees and gifting her a loud wringing in ears tucked back into a hood . The rumbling had caught them, it had risen early knowing its prey was near, or perhaps it had stalked across the land in some manner they had not been prepared for.

              The monster would pause now, the stink of blood wafting from the tunnel entrance attracting it, it would rip the stone down twenty feet with the ease of a man placing a shovel into the soft earth and scooping out a hole to find worms. The girl ran for a pile of old steel and plastic that had been packed into the road, aiming for the hole of light she could see through the destroyed windows and doors, trying to ignore the screams of those how had entered the tall buildings before it had been drown out by the splitting sound of claws grabbing a tractor trailer sized fist full of rock from the earth.

Her vison narrowed as she removed the screams and crashing from her mind.

Remember the way dear.