Clouds of blood |1|
Dystopian horror flash fiction.
I never know where writing will take me; that’s the beauty of the process. I wanted to write some beautiful horror, dark aesthetics, maybe a dash of romance. But my horror brain said ‘nope’! You’re writing a gore-y dystopian piece, Kathrine honey! Here goes…oh, and a question for you guys: should I make it a short serial? Read and tell me, please!
The sky rained blood. Crimson drops stung his face, he felt every single one. Curled up like a fetus, pushed out the cradling womb, he lay shaking in pain. His skin wasn’t ready to face the world outside the incubator, paper-thin, it dissolved from the bloody raindrops, leaving hundreds of tiny open wounds on his naked body.
His fall was an accident. His existence was a mistake. A glitch in the system. It happened; solar storms caused glitches, vibrations of the magnetic particles. Tiny little things, causing genetic deviations of the new humans developing in the incubators. Perfect replicas of the most genetically superior specimens. In the times long gone, they were called clones.
He was one of the thousand others genetically damaged replicas. A thousand men with the same face. A thousand mistakes. And yet, they had a purpose. Some might call it a noble cause. They were no longer human-shaped mistakes, when dumped from the giant platforms gliding through the atmosphere. They were fertilizer for the dying earth, a rich red shower falling down from the bloody clouds in the sky, after the razor-sharp grinders at the platform’s disposal openings crushed them into tiny particles. Droplets forming giant red clouds, falling down to feed the hungry earth. Patch by patch the land was revived with minerals and nutrients, falling from the sky.
This was the day of the bloody rains, and afterward the earth would awake with greenery birthed by death of the unborn.
It was a grand project; to renew the human home-planed, destroyed by nuclear wars many thousands of years ago, reasons for which were long-forgotten. The land vomited poison, until it was clean. Dead but clean. Waiting for the nutrients to feed the dormant seeds hidden within it.
He was a living mistake. From his conception, to the unfortunate solar storm, up till his pre-mature birth; accidents followed his life-cycle, and even death didn’t come to him as it should.
He should’ve been grinded by the razors at the platform’s opening, instead, the grinders malfunctioned, letting the first fifty clones fall out whole; naked bodies of men descending in a silent freefall, then landing on the sand with muffled smacks like chunks of meat.
It went quickly. Flashes of horrid sensations; cold, pain, bright light, pain, pain, pain… he smacked onto others just like him, rolled off from the dead bodies, and lay, while the clouds of red gathered above him, and the sour blood-drops began to rain down, causing his frail skin to dissolve.
It was a minor malfunction. Those in charge knew, even if the clones fell un-grinded, the impact of the fall would crush them, and the earth would feed on them eventually. Even if by some strange accident some might survive, their undeveloped muscles would prevent them from finding shelter from the scorching-hot sun. A lifeless desert was no place for a man-sized infant.
He whined, an overgrown new-born, the bloody drops burning his skin like hot needles. Until a shadow covered him, and a noise of exulted yawps rang through the desert. Men dressed in rags, opened their mouths to the sky, letting the bloody rain quench their thirst.
“We’ll feast tonight!” one of them said, rolling the fallen corpses over with his foot.
“Shamani?”
The shadow-man stood looking at the man-child whining at his feet.
“We won’t feast on this one. We do not eat living flesh,” Shamani replied, he picked the whining clump-of-a-man covered in a thousand tiny wounds into his giant arms.
He wrapped a clean piece of cloth around the fallen man, and carried him away, while a pack of wild men followed, dragging the corpses of fallen mistakes with them, and sticking out their tongues to drink the bloody rain.
Read next chapter here: Chapter |2|
Suitably gruesome. Now that you have opened the door, don't be too quick to close it. I want to know what happens next, you tease!
Hellishly gruesome. So these survivors are other fallen mistakes or actual survivors from long ago?