(Zeslinry)
A little before dawn. I couldn't sleep very well anyway. The electricity went down. The fact that I couldn't hear anymore the buzzing sound of the neighbourhood transformer made me feel something was off.
Sitting and looking by the window outside, I saw more than a quiet night. It was still cold and foggy, but something else happened.
I saw the stars disappearing, when an odd glow took over the horizon.
It wasn't dawn. It came from the south.
Before I could understand or react, that white shade washed through everything. It was not blinding white, but just a momentarily mute soft nothingness. It was more pale grey than pure white. It swallowed me and everything for maybe a few seconds. Hardly a minute.
And then as sight, sound and awareness returned, the apocalypse began.
~
Following that elusive glow, it felt as if waking up from a painful coma. I suddenly had the worst hangover beating me, and ill sensations all over my body. I was gasping, sweating over my bed, burning with a strong and uneven heartbeat.
I thought for a few minutes that felt like agony that I had seen a nuclear explosion and been irradiated to death.
Maybe the aftermath of the loss at Intemporelle had been such a strike over a bigger city after the horizon. A new genocide might be starting.
My first coherent thoughts were of pain and hatred, against the historical southern enemy of Solaris, even though I had no idea of what just really happened.
But gradually, my pounding heart and brain seemed to calm down, and I was still the same...
I noted that because from the rising screams and yelling outside, I would soon realise how much likely were people to turn dead, mad or insane.
The music of cries and sounds of agony began to really rise outside loudly as minutes passed.
I was able to stand up again and wipe my burst of sweat with a towel.
But at the same time outside, it was a crescendo of voices nervously grown into a fully blown ruckus from a torture pit of hell. All around the city where electricity was sparkling back, it was a show of horror. The cries of the damned grew to echoes that filled your skull.
In shock but sane, I dressed back, picked up my bag in an intuition, and headed outside. If as I feared we were under attack, there was nothing better to do but run away as far and fast as I could still muster.
But when reaching the outside, what I saw through the streets enlightened unevenly that night were vision from hellish artists.
Fissures were growing as I gazed in stupor at them. Lines were cut, sparking. Flames were appearing while these hollows turned into pitfalls and buildings collapsing.
The city was cut into pieces by an invisible knife, geological rifts breaking. Raising clouds of dusts in the distance were spreading, some of which were catching fire.
Entire city blocks were levelled, or corroding, or even apparently melting inside orange looking mists and oddly articulated fogs.
I saw amidst the exploding confusion a tower melting and rusting into shards in mere minutes.
And then, between the people panicking in the streets, I saw the first monsters.
I was trying to find my shortest way out of this panic and town, which wasn't wide but already felt like an ordeal of a pit to escape.
They were wrecks. And where people were crushed to death in number, they appeared, far too suddenly to feel real.
Where pooling fluids and organic materials accumulated wild, some awful things were turning seemingly sentient and joining the awful chorus.
From lost bodies, odd things rose and moved. Near the collapsed buildings with too many people dead inside, cluttered to one another, they could rise and become horribly massive.
It was like eldritch sea creatures trying to rise on land aggressively. They crawled, growled, moved as they deformed, but collapsed under their own weight and fluid trails. The animal shapes were random attempts that didn't succeed nor lasted. But they added a lot to the horror and overall confusion.
Some we passed by with other people panicking, were more watery and translucent. They rose from water tanks perhaps. It was all very unpredictable looking, but appeared as a widespread bubbling of organic chemistry, all across the city.
Everywhere, these things sprouted to life, which didn't last long, but were causing a few more horrifying steps and moments for every witness.
I just kept running for my life and out of there. The early crowds of panicked people trickled along the ways, disappearing one street or another hole into the dawn.
Along the road I recall running along, I ended up noticing being the only one left at some point.
I stopped to breathe and look back toward the city centre.
No one else was following that street behind.
Everyone else had been trapped, was dead already, or on their way to sad demise obviously.
I couldn't believe any of it, given how fast it all grew.
I continued to jog my way outside and away from whatever this corner of land had turned itself into.
~
Maybe an hour later, I was sitting to breathe, tired and still confused. I was in the prairies outside of town. All I could watch were the dimming night shades, and the colourful mists shrouding the burning city.
I could still hear distant screams, albeit fainter and probably dimming. It was still nerve wrecking.
An ominous yellowish glow was floating and covering the city now, reflecting some of the lights from its lingering fires within. Other explosions and gunfires could still be heard in the far distance, popping.
And then I saw a flash blinding me from over the eastern sea.
This one. This was a nuclear explosion, unmistakably. Like in the movies and history.
It happened on the continental coast, or at sea maybe.
Moments later, the ground began to quake and the wind to blow. I recall looking to escape the incoming blast or attempt to at least.
My memory really became hazy at the time.
I couldn't think. I just ran, looking for anything to escape the real shockwave coming.
~
I woke up in the middle of another day, in an abandoned car stuck in a ditch.
I had bruises all over. Mushrooms I had never seen before had grown over my clothes and some filaments even over my skin.
They were real mushrooms, with silk like threads to spread. They were drinking my sweat down to the pores of my skin, and beginning to dissolve it on some spots where they grew bigger.
I scratched what I could away, acting in panic. I jumped out of that car, ripping some of my skin away.
A freezing gust of wind stopped me clean a while after on this road.
Most cars had been pushed into the ditch by a strong gust of wind I forgot living through.
Also it was a blizzard now outside and it really slapped me awake.
But looking around to where I was, I could now see the ash grey and sooty clouds surrounding the city in the distance.
I entered a better looking car to clean myself and try to recompose my thoughts completely scattered all this time;
The radio of the car caught no signal at all.
Its computer also booted properly, but couldn't link to anything either. It was stuck to act offline only.
While I was bandaging my skin, still overall lost in thoughts, an aurora borealis passed by above in the sky.
I saw it clearly because of light green, this one was rather mauve, switching to nut brown at times.
I recalled learning their colours depended of the nature of the magnetic field and atmospheric chemistry. Had I been mistaken to witness such a change?
I was confused, but still thinking I should put more distance between me and this city. The car wouldn't start properly however.
I thought I'd wait by the side of the road for someone to pass by and help, and to ask them what happened.
But nobody came.
Days would pass. And I wouldn't meet anyone else alive this way.
I made up my mind when about a few days had passed, and continued on foot and away.
Slowly I would realise, through other changes and clues in the environment surrounding me, that this had been otherwise but a military strike over this land.
I was just one of the very few survivors of the white day.
~