OGENUS EARTH 🌎 🌊 {Dystopian Sci-Fi Adventure}

Prologue - I Will Follow You Into The Dark

Marion, or Ms. Babette as her students knew her, glanced up from her grading to locate the source of the muffled hollow moans interrupting quiet time. 

There were at least fifteen minutes before she would resume lessons with a rehearsal for their portion of the Semicentennial Pageant, and she was in no mood to have her schedule trifled with.

The dull thud pounding behind her left eye had finally pierced her iris, slicing through the jelly like a firey scalpel protesting her sudden movement.

When the flash of white-hot pain cleared from her vision, she was met with ten little ashen faces. Their cherubic cheeks were melting like candle wax, despite the sudden icy chill in the air.

The school's thermostat should correct for that soon, she thought, squinting against the radiant pain burrowing into her head.

James, one of her brightest students, arched over his desk and clawed at his tiny neck, gulping for air with a stricken look of pure fear.

He seemed to be calling out for help, but the sound was more of a wet, wheezy cough. She watched in subdued horror as he went from ghostly pale to a rotten shade of blue in the seconds it took her to blink.

Someone help him! A grating voice (perhaps it was hers?) shrieked. 

One of the muscles above Marion's eye twitched, recoiling from the shrillness of the sound and driving the nerve attached into her brain with an intense burst of pressure, followed quickly by a roll of nausea. Her body spasmed forward to retch strings of acidic bile onto her desk.

Her lungs struggled to hold air as if something immense had wrapped its deadweight around her ribcage, crushing her from the inside. 

Caustic saliva clung to her lips as she tried to suck in a breath and scream for help. Time warped slowly, pulling with it the tiny anguished groans of the children, her students, distorting their terror into an echoing loop of hideous feedback.

The overhead lights dimmed to an ephemeral screen, morphing everything into a hazy incubus. 

It was nearly impossible to know what was real. Marion, however, still understood that this was wrong because she had just looked at the clock and it was only one in the afternoon.

The sun glinted through the engineered tint of the immense geodesic dome outside. It was supposed to protect the citizens of Arc City Two from Earth's toxic atmosphere. 

She also remembered commenting to Kenneth, the school's headmaster, that the kids were going to sound great for the Semicentennial Pageant. Inwardly, Marion had wondered if Kenneth was going to accept the invitation to her family's Semicentennial party she'd sent three days ago. She needed an accurate headcount for hors-d'oeuvres as the whole city was going to be throwing some form of celebration or another.   

That was only an hour ago, wasn't it? Marion's thoughts were slowly being smothered beneath the overwhelming density in the air.

As the usually happy colors of their immersive classroom swam dangerously, Marion watched Steven and Mary-Belle stumble out from behind their desks on opposite sides of the room. The children's joints dissolved the moment their feet hit the floor.

Steven crawled on all fours, then, contracted into himself violently, hitching his stomach up into his spine. The milk he'd had for lunch spewed from his mouth and nose, mixing with the spaghetti and bean curd meatballs that had been marinating in his belly.

Strands of Steven's partially digested lunch dangled from his nostrils, dripping with the thick pink stuff that had just rocketed out onto the floor. Between choked sobs, his hand slipped on the noxious stuff splitting his chin clean open when the bottom of his mouth smacked the floor.