CreepyPasta's

The Black Fog

Everything, all of this chaos and madness, all began with the Black Fog.

It was just an ordinary day when the news reported a strange phenomenon, a wispy black cloud of fog, steadily making its way toward the west coast of the country from over the ocean. Nobody really cared at first, as you’d expect. It wasn’t hurting anyone, except maybe the sailors and planes flying over the ocean, but life for everyone else continued as normal. Whenever the news would talk about what we now know as “The Black Fog”, people would nod, show mild interest, say something like “Oh yeah, that’s interesting,” and be done with it.

Until the Black Fog hit the west coast.

Cities on the seaside were the first to be hit and covered with the Black Fog. The news went crazy, every station frantically pointing their cameras at the Fog to capture footage of the unique event. Personally, it always looked like a thick cloud of smoke to me instead of a city covered in fog. The news said that nobody from the “outside world” could contact anybody in the Fog. A nation-wide panic was beginning, and it grew fast. People who had previously disregarded the Black Fog now looked for ways to leave the country as the news reported that the Black Fog was still heading east as though determined to devour the entire country.

With mass hysteria of this magnitude, it can safely be assumed that plenty of doomsday prophets came forward with “explanations” about the Fog’s origin. It quickly became obvious to me that these “prophets of the apocalypse” were nothing more than crazies who walked into the news stations from off the street. Nearly every scenario imaginable was told as a reason for the Black Fog’s existence: God’s wrath on humanity, the apocalypse, aliens seeking a safe place to land their spacecraft, the Black Fog was simple fog mixed with pollutants in the air, it was a publicity stunt for a new movie, it was the government using the Fog for some purpose, Cthulhu was rising… We heard everything, but none of the theories seemed to make sense.

There was a few more days of chaotic news reports, and then the Black Fog came to my town.

I was walking home that fateful afternoon, turning a streetcorner to see my 2-story home come into view down the street. Cars breezed past me at a steady pace. Coming toward me down the sidewalk was a mother pushing a baby stroller with an enthusiastic little boy running ahead of her, cheerfully telling his mommy to hurry up. The grass was bright green in the warm summer atmosphere, and there were only a few white clouds in the sky to distract from the wild blue yonder above. A red car, the sides splattered with a thick mud, raced past me. The bright yellow orb in the sky beamed down on the world, covering us in sunlight. If there’s anything I remember from that day, it was the colors.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a dark giant stood up over the horizon and loomed over the city, blotting out the sun. Cars stopped in the middle of the road, leading other cars to crash into them. People began to scream. Some hysterical woman wailed, “It’s here!” as I looked up at the Black Fog blotting out the sky. It swept over the city quickly, shrouding me in a cave of blackness. I stumbled through the Fog, unable to even see my own two hands in front of me. The world around me looked as though it were covered in smoke, but I could breathe in it normally. I heard people screaming, the sound frightfully clear. There was the screeching of tires as cars stopped and the crunching of metal as other cars crashed into each other.

In my mind, I could picture the street as it had been before the Fog hit. My house was a few yards down across the street. If I could find my way inside, I could wait the Fog out and see if it would disappear and leave the city.

I began walking toward my house uneasily, still hearing people cry out for help. It was as though I had become blind. I took my steps with care, and tripped over a blunt object when I was halfway across the street. I climbed to my feet with my sense of direction disoriented. How close to my house was I? I just gave it my best guess and made my way forward. I had to walk around a parked car and, after tripping over the curb and falling onto the sidewalk on the other side of the road, my shoes felt grass beneath them. I wasn’t entirely sure if it was my yard.