MicroHorror

The great pit opened. In the middle of what would become literally Death Valley the great black pit opened. Most of the people came to see it out of sheer curiosity. A perfect circle exactly one mile across; scientists couldn’t fathom how it naturally occurred. The other puzzlement was it didn’t have a bottom.

The best cave divers had gone down attached to more than three miles of rope but hadn’t even caught a glimpse of the pit’s end. Light, like everything tossed in by the locals, just simply vanished. The government even threw down a high-powered laser beacon: its light stayed for a while and then went dark.

One hot day things started to come up from the pit. Some of the people ran when they saw the creatures; most just stood and looked. The creatures stood on their hind legs, about five feet tall; their semi-clear bodies had a translucent goo coarsening through their veins. The onlookers could see through them if they looked hard enough. Something that resembled slime but smelled fouler dripped from them constantly. No eyes, ears or hair were on the creatures. They looked like a wet unfinished sculpture of a human. The only exception to their clarity was their teeth and claws that were as black as the pit itself. Making sounds like a fish out of water, they started advancing on the crowd. The news choppers arrived just before it happened. The creatures screamed in an inhuman pitch and attacked.

Leaping into the air they crashed down on the crowd. After a few minutes just the parts they didn’t like was all that remained. As the next twenty-four hours passed, thousands more of the creatures sprawled out. Every direction the compass could point, the beasts went on their murderous rampage. In less than two hours 200,000 people had been killed. The National Guard formed the first line of defense. They fought bravely but foolishly and fell after a 45-minute battle. One good thing did come out of it: one of the cooks threw some salt at an attacking abomination. The creature screamed in pain and fell over dead. The news spread little joy; by the next morning over a million of them had come out.

If things weren’t bad enough the creatures started to grow wings. They took to the skies to get to the rest of the world. In Japan so many screamed down from the sky they blocked out the sun. When they came for the rest of Asia the wind changed from a calm south-southwest to a raging north-northeast. How Europe fell is lost but what is certain was it was sudden and bloody. The predominant story is they came from everywhere at once. Before long all the creatures coming out of the pit had wings.

Back in America, what remained of our armed forces staged a last stand on an island in the Great Lakes. The world’s guns had been converted to shoot rock salt. For two weeks they held out, but in the end the unlimited demon horde broke through. When the American military fell the rest of the world fell shortly after. Even to this day I still think they are pouring up from the great pit.

The last of us hid in the salt mines of the world. I don’t know why, really; we’re just waiting to die. All of the others are dead and I’ve got a choice: die by what I’m breathing in my lungs or by the creatures outside. Funny… I never thought mankind’s final words would be written on a junior legal pad.