Spastic Spontaneous Stories of the Short Kind

STORY FIFTEEN - Specks by @_MeltingSnowflakes_

The rope's too short. It's not going to bring us back.

The last day of my life started when my sister's head went through my bedroom wall in an onslaught of plaster and wood. And screaming. Lots of screaming. Too much, in my opinion. And as my mother yanked her backward through the hole she'd made, I felt something in my stomach shift. Something that made me cringe with nausea. I almost went back to bed, and I should have.

But I didn't.

The morning was slow, filled with traffic and my mother swearing at a driver who almost ran us off the road even though he couldn't hear us. We spent the morning in the car, tethered to our seats in case of a car accident, in case we went through the windshield. When I was little, I wished we could drive on clouds. Never had I thought of my younger self as stupid until that moment.

And then we'd pulled up to the facility, changed our tethers over to the metal railings lining the pathway to the door, and we bobbed over to it, feet swinging freely. It would've been fun if it was normal, but it wasn't yet. People were still dying, floating away to whatever lay where our ground used to be. They think our cities and our homes are still down there, waiting for us to return, but nobody's ready to risk it.

The only ones who survived were the ones who lived close enough to the floating stations that had been bought in preparation, who had taken in as many people as possible and let the world fall apart around them. They were larger than anyone had realised; entire floating cities hovering in the sky, waiting for it to spiral into destruction.

Thankfully. Or we'd all be dead.

We'd marched up the stairs as best we could, clinging to a handrail as our legs went over our heads. We could've tied ourselves down, and my mum did after three stairwells, but I didn't see a point. It would take too long, and we couldn't afford to be late.

The Shift had cut down over three-quarters of our population. It had sliced off billions, left to go flying off into nobody knew what. I still don't think we'll ever know, truly, what happened or how it was possible, but we'll look. We'll search. We'll go to the ends of the failing Earth if we have to, and we will. I'm sure.

She'd left me outside the office, wrapped me in a tearful goodbye and disappeared. I had cried for almost five minutes straight when I decided that it was useless. That it was wasting time we didn't have to waste. And I listened, I let him brainwash me into going through with his suicide mission. I was to go to the roof with a camera, see what was up there. 

But he never told me how many people had died doing that. All of them. He was shaving off the weak, the pathetic, the useless. Teenagers being forced into this mess before they knew what was coming. Me. People no older than twenty, drifting to their deaths. Except there were three people stuck up there, their tethers drawn taut, on the brink of snapping.

And up I went. Drifting, slowly, through the air until I hit the ceiling with a thud and they opened a door. I had latched myself to its underside, and as I swung out into the open, what I saw almost killed me all on its own. Children, no older than ten, hanging limply in the air, arms raised above their heads, hair standing on end. But they were breathing.

"Hey."

Nothing. 

Slowly, my rope had unfurled, and I floated towards them, hand outstretched. A small girl stirred gently, and then her eyes opened, and when she saw me she pulled away from me. So hard and so sudden that her tether creaked, and I froze. And I stared at her, and she stared straight back, locked in a silent battle for heart-stopping moments.

"Hey," I said again. She started to cry, shy away from my hand.

"Don't you wanna go inside? I'm here to take you inside."

"Don't touch me."

She dragged away from me, sobbing, verging on screaming. But I persisted. I had to save her. She was scared, and I was meant to be brave. That's why I'd signed up, wasn't it?

"You don't need to be scared of me. The man inside said-."

She broke into banshee-like wails, screaming and thrashing. "The bad man makes us go out here every time you save us! I don't want to go inside! The bad man will get us!"

And then her tether had snapped with an ear-splitting crack, and her shrieks broken into silence. She drifted. Slowly, up she went. And then I felt the adrenaline kick in like it was a pill I had physically ingested. I reached down, clutching the spare rope they gave me and unhooked myself.

With a terrifying sensation like I'd been plunged into icy water, I started drifting. Up. Up and up until I was close enough to reach out and grab the broken rope hanging from beneath her. She trashed against me, but it didn't matter. I held her tight, dropped the anchor in the form of a rope with a magnet on the end. It plummeted for a few seconds. All it had to do was come within three metres of a metal railing and it would hook on. 

And I waited. Waited. Unaware of how I had drifted off too far to be saved. And then it hit me, as the rope came gliding up towards me.

The rope's too short to bring me back.

And the girl knew it, too. And she screamed her throat raw, and my ears tired. And we drifted until the air ran out. We drifted into specks.

A/N

OK. If you want me to be honest, I hate this story. I'm really not very happy with the outcome, but I tried, so points for effort? I had no idea how to write this and I probably put this off for a bit too long considering I almost ran out of time to have it written and published, but I did it so... yay me?

Also, you can go check out the next chapter of my book Fight on my own account of which I published a new chapter earlier today! 

~Anna ^-^