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Last Week’s FFF (well, it wasn’t really one, but I put an exert from the second part of my Skyland serial book.  Check it out, let me know what you think!) – Windchasers

storyt title

The first year was the worst, I think.  The firestorm came out of nowhere.  Hundreds of millions lost their lives that first year.  I’ve forgotten a lot of the last seven years, or maybe I just blocked it out, but I remember the day that it all began. 

It was Monday, and I was wearing a suit.   Coffee in hand, god, how I miss coffee, I searched the house for my car keys.

When I think about the time before, it’s like another life.  I still can’t believe that I used to wear those back then.  Traded my tie in for a shoulder holster in the second month.  Feels natural now, like a part of me.  But a tie, a suit, seems more like a straight-jacket than acceptable attire.

Anyway, couldn’t find those darn keys to save my life.  Turns out, not being able to find them is what actually saved it.  Wasn’t five minutes later that the meters began to hit.

It was already a sunny day, but as those rocks came closer, the sky lit up like someone had turned on the sun’s high beams.  At first, I thought a cloud must have moved, and that was the change in brightness.  But then, it intensified.   Instinctively, or I should say, stupidly, I went to the window.

The sky was full of them.  I froze in awe, or fear, or whatever, and just stood there watching the sky fall.  It wasn’t until the first one struck that I was snapped out of it.  It didn’t land close enough for me to see it, but I felt it.  The whole house shook.

Now, I’ve been through my fair share of natural disasters.  Tornado’s, hail, heck, even a couple earthquakes when I used to live out west.   But none of them filled me with impending doom like this did.

I jumped away from the window and ran towards the stairs.  Another boom.  Windows shattered this time.  They were getting closer.  I flew down the stairs, into the deep basement.  I had a installed a solid door that lay flat with the ground.  I shut it and locked it tight.

Now, I’m not some nut.  I never really believed that Armageddon was coming.  But these are scary times, and I just so happen to live in tornado alley.  Therefore, I was prepared.  I was one of the lucky few.

I had enough food and water in my basement to last me a couple months.  I was armed to the teeth, but that only put me on an even playing field with the rest of the neighborhood.  Actually, I had very little practice, so I was at a disadvantage.  That changed quick.

I turned on the television to find out just what was going on outside.  I had it hooked up by both a digital antenna, an old-school one, and cable.  Redundancy didn’t matter.  I had less than an hour of news before every station was down.  What I heard during that hour wasn’t very promising.

The news cautioned that there was an unforeseen firestorm of meteors.  They varied in size.  They weren’t big enough to kick up the kind of dust that would destroy all life on Earth, but they were still dangerous.  They didn’t know how long the storm would last, but cautioned to stay indoors, underground if possible, for as long as we could.

The constant shaking kept me in the basement for a solid week.  Turned out, at night, we could go out.  That was Asia’s turn for the storm.  What I found was devastation.

There’s no real way to shield yourself from a meteor, other than to stay out of its path.  This meant going back underground when the sun started to shine.  My house was nonexistent.   Just a pile of debris on top of a hard to push open door.  All the homes were like this.  For all I knew, everywhere was like this.

There was rumors of untouched cities, places where the meteors had missed.  People headed to them.  I didn’t go.  I had my supplies here, and a piece of my home.  I wasn’t about to go on a journey just to get pinned down by a meteor along the way.  Or to find that the city was untouched, at first.  The meteors, they’d keep coming.  Eventually they’d get everything.

And that’s why we didn’t rebuild.  Sure, there was emergency aid, at first.  But how can you aid every one?  There were no more crops.  No more farms.  No more food.  There were no structures to protect people from the elements, or worse, the meteors.  The water stopped flowing after just a couple weeks.  The pumping stations were destroyed.  That’s when everything turned worse.

Suddenly, it was survival of the fittest.  I had to adapt quick.  I had to do things that I never expected I would do.  But I survived.  Even though every day was a struggle, and awful, somehow, after awhile, it became normal.

So imagine my surprise, when two weeks ago, those dang meteors stopped.  I was in my basement, or my home, as I now think of it, and there was no booming.  No strikes.  I couldn’t believe it at first.  It took me three days to dare a peek outside during the day.  I looked every hour that day.  Then, the next day, I went outside.  Spent the whole day there.  Nothing.  Not a falling pebble.

A week later the radios came back.  The freak firestorm of meteors that had started crashing into our little planet seven years ago had finally run out.  They had moved on, moved past, never the wiser of the lives they destroyed.

It was finally over.  Now, all we had to do was come back from this.  But, where could we even start?  How could we clean this mess up?