The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
Burn
by A.F. Stewart
Does it matter anymore? Human life?
We are the hunted, the species on the verge of extinction. A generation clinging to an ill-fated survival. We are the scavengers on the fringes, chased from the places we used to call home.
I live outside a factory city, squatting in a ruin of a house in what used to be a suburb. Five others, plus a family, live here as well, for a total of ten
It used to twelve. Garth and Jen went out last week, into the city, to find supplies.
They never came back.
It used to hurt, when people disappeared. Now I barely feel it. Maybe the pain buries itself under the smoke billowing from the factory chimneys and the ever-present burning stench. I don’t know why I stay. Maybe I enjoy torturing myself, staring at the stacks churning grey haze against the reddish sky.
Or maybe I know it won’t be any safer somewhere else. Not even the rural areas are free anymore. Humans are the prey. Waiting to be picked off one by one. We’re just too dumb to quit fighting.
It doesn’t change the truth. We will all end at the factory, I will end at the factory. Someday the seekers will find me, kill me. Then my body will burn.
Like all the others.
Fiction © Copyright A.F. Stewart
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com
More from A.F. Stewart:
Hell’s Empire: Tales of the Incursion
A unique anthology of two thrones at war as the forces of Hell assault an unsuspecting Victorian Britain.The cry went out to theologians and engineers, to artificers and antiquarians, to every name which could be named. By telegraph where lines were still intact, and by volunteer riders where they were not; smuggled along the coast in fishing smacks, semaphored from hill-tops. It came without royal sanction, issued jointly by the Lords of the Admiralty and Marquess Lansdowne, the new Secretary of State for War:”In God’s name, help us. We are losing.”
Spreading the Writer's Word 
Chilling!