Shine On

He first tried a screwdriver and a pair of scissors. Neither made a scratch. The claw end of the hammer made a little dent here and there, but nothing that would lead him out anytime soon. Pushing and clawing made no difference.

He tried the phone, but it was dead.

He tried his cell but there was no service.

Eventually he reverted to screaming and crying, which passed the time but did nothing for the situation.
It was hopeless. And Draynor was getting desperate. It had already been three hours and he was stuck inside his home knowing literally nothing about anything.

He didn’t know what time it was, what was happening, or how to get out.

Draynor had already found too that the water was not working. The pipes hissed and gasped when he turned the knob but not a drop fell from the faucet.

Then, in mid swing of the hammer, repeating a movement already done ten times over, the lights flickered and went out.

It was pitch-black.

The torture had begun, and Draynor was done with it.

He beat the hammer against the blockage with a dull thudding and no real effect. At least not until his tired arm slipped and the blunt end of the hammer took out a good-sized chunk of plaster and drywall to the side of the doorway. In the darkness, he felt around for the edge of the hole he’d made and began rapidly and violently swinging for the target. He heard pieces of wall pile onto the floor and later he felt wires and nails and splinters of wood.

Finally, he saw a puncture wound of light stream through the wall.

It was a dull gray light, like that made by reflecting clouds moments before a thunderstorm.

But it was light nonetheless.

Eyes to the hole, he could make out the sidewalk and the trees of the outside. So he screamed with joy and banged away all the more virulently at the expanding hole. The air smelled wrong and the static hum was growing louder, but Draynor didn’t care. He was making something happen.

When the hole was the size of his shoulders, Draynor dropped the hammer and pushed himself through the opening and dropped helplessly down to the cold sidewalk. He took gulps of air and waited for his pulse to calm.

But he didn’t find peace here either.

Right away, there was a multitude of new problems.

Nothing was right on the outside. Nothing was the same and yet nothing looked different.

The clouds were tracing the sky with lightening speed, like watching a time lapse of a moving storm front.

They were moving much faster than any clouds Draynor had ever seen before. But the odd effect was that nothing else here was moving. The trees, branches yet to form the buds of spring, stood stock-still.
And standing up on the cold sidewalk Draynor felt an enormous wave of heat surge over him, but the clouds and the sky were dark with gray and blacks. The cement felt chilled but the air was making him sweat profusely. Like the moving clouds and the still trees, everything in the air indicated sunshine and bright white, but there was nothing but dull grayness all around. It was like lightening and snow, not unbelievable per se, but truly a feat of something unnatural.

Looking farther up, still unmoved from his original place on the sidewalk, Draynor saw what he should not have: the sun and the moon. In the corner of the sky, behind a mass of furiously rolling clouds, was the sun struggling to light the open space but being drained by the ever-moving clouds. Opposite that picture was the moon, also buried underneath trailing clouds. And as the gray clouds tripped and skipped past the moon, Draynor could glimpse it enough to see that, like the sun, the moon was also putting out as much light as it could. Yet the sky was still relatively dark. As was the air and the ground.

With the next thing he saw, even though Draynor was a man of self-possessed nature and strong will, he wet himself uncontrollably.

It was the situation of the surrounding apartments. He lived in a community housing six or seven buildings, each with its ten apartment units. Draynor lived on the first floor, unit C101, and from his vantage point on the sidewalk he was looking up at the nine units, top and bottom, that spread east from his corner location. And down the line, on every window and every door, were the black seamed coverings. They were just as imposing and vicious outside as they had been from the inside. Expanding his view, Draynor saw that every apartment unit, from his building on down the street to the next six or seven, was covered with these black-locking leeches.

No one could get out.

They were all locked inside their own homes without electricity, water, fresh air, or any way to communicate.
Draynor was lost now, both physically and mentally. He saw what was happening right in front of his eyes, but he somehow couldn’t come to comprehend it. It was a blur of abstract. Nothing seemed real.

He fled down the sidewalk and out into the neighboring subdivision, but he only found the same thing.

Groups of frightening blackness covering every possible way in or out of every home on every street.

This was the last strangeness that Draynor witnessed before he blacked out and crumpled to the sidewalk in a heap of flesh and bone, wet spot running down his pant leg, hair disheveled from sleep, blood slowly soaking the gray cement around his mind.