Threnody (011).

(This is a 500-word-a-day novel project.)

On the floor were waterlogged receipts and menus and old photos of children in Halloween costumes; she unearthed a notebook whose pages were written on from margin to margin with grocery needs (milk, bread, Mike’s cereal), and next to the word eggs was doodled a chicken happily extending a feathered middle finger. Under the chicken was a crude sketch of a multi-legged reptile, and eggs again with a question mark. She closed the book and left it.

When she stepped into the long hallway, she found a hand, the skin ragged where it had been torn off; stepping carefully over it Jesse entered the bathroom, finding a bottle of aspirin in a drawer and dry swallowing several. The next door was to a bedroom, but the overturned baby crib and the bloodied children’s toys sent her retreating quickly to the living room, where she sat and blew on her hands, wondering what she was supposed to do now.

A whooping series of cries brought her back to full alert; the calls were then repeated a dozen times over by others in a higher register. Jesse walked to the window on rigid legs as the house began to vibrate; plaster dust sifted down from the ceiling like hourglass sand. Across the street was a house that had burned to charcoal timbers; behind it, spreading like a red inkblot under the unchanging clouds came a rolling wave of blood-colored darkness at a diagonal drift; brittle crop stalks were flying apart as unseen things at the forefront rushed between the rows, their shrieks and roars like ripping metal.

Jesse darted back to the kitchen, kicking through the debris in search of a weapon, finding the rack but none of the knives, and a small toolbox that had been dumped clean of everything. The feral sounds were becoming earsplitting; she snatched up the remnants of a drawer and threw it across the room to strike the wall and break apart, and slumped down on broken crockery, hugging her knees tightly to her chest. They’re going to eat me, she thought. They ate all of the people and now they’re going to eat me.

Just as the darkness descended on the house completely, the predators became strangely quiet. She heard their grunts and snorts as they rooted, their claws tapping on pavement; from next door something crashed startlingly, and this was responded to by an outraged screech and the thundering steps of something skittering away.

A man’s scream came out of the new darkness; his cries of denial abruptly cut off.

There was the sound of tapping on the roof; Jesse looked up at the light fixture that swung from side to side, and gaped at the millipedes as long as her arm and several times as thick enter the room, defying gravity as they adhered to the ceiling – they were covered in dark purple shells that dripped foul oil; feelers that drooped from the sides of their vibrating mouths became erect, sensing the air.