Halo Moon - (unedited fiction)

She remembered the moon.  It wore a corona that night, a halo her grandmother used to call it.  There was some wives tale about a haloed moon but she couldn't remember it.

Before the moon there wasn't much.  Someone had suggested they visit the bluffs.  She didn't know who the someone was.  Maybe there had been more than one someone.  It didn't matter now anyway.  Whoever they were, if they ever had been, they were gone now.

She would be gone too, she knew, if she hadn't had to pee.  She never wished she was a man more than when she was at an outdoor party.  At the bluffs the guys would just go stand behind a tree and take a whiz, but not her.  No, she had to some something thicker than the lanky willow trees around there.  To squat and pee she needed bushes to hide behind.

That is how she came to be hidden in the brush when the vessels arrived.

They looked a lot like the moon, glowing and white and round and giving off auras of light around themselves.  The sky lit up like a ball stadium at night.  Daylight bright.

She tried to pull up her pants, wanted to hurry back out where everyone was.  They had a bonfire, she remembered.  There was a radio playing something.  The actual song was another unimportant detail because the music was drowned out almost instantly by the screaming.

She didn't see beams, didn't see being, and didn't see what happened to the people she was with.  She couldn't remember their faces, but she could remember the screaming.  It sounded as if they were being not just slaughtered but tortured.  Maybe even flayed alive. 

She got her pants up and stood.  Her brain told her body to turn around and to run, to run away as fast as she could from the UFOs and whatever they were doing to the people at the bluffs.  That they were UFOs she had no doubt.  Shiny flying saucers had visited her fair city and they did not come in peace.

Her feet refused to heed her thoughts of flight.  Her legs trembled, but did not run.  Not at first.  Not until she saw the thing as it came towards her.

Human, probably a friend of hers.  Human, and maybe even the person who had brought here to this place of horrors to begin with.  Human, but alive when it should not have been alive, unable to walk because legs were missing.  Unable to talk because it had no face.  But it had hands, and it could crawl, and it left a steaming pile of something behind it that gleamed in disgusting inner body colors as the lights of the spacecraft made sure to light it all up.

That is when she ran.

She ran until she hit the river, then continued to run along in the mud beside the water.  She would have gone in except the couldn't swim, but she thought she might.  If the vessels followed her she thought she might very well jump in and breath in deep lungfuls of river water.

She jumped and screamed at shadows.  But the shadows were shadows.  The hellish non-sun daylight cast by the things in the sky were gone.  The river bank mud turned to stones and at some point she stepped on a nail, but she never stopped moving.  Even when she didn't know where she was moving too.

No that it mattered.  The sun was going down again, and there had been nobody all day.

She had made it back to town, made it home, but there were no people.  No humans.  There was not a single living person, but there was a stain in her house.  A long and dragging smear, and a hand print.  A palm, 4 fingers and a thumb in the deep dried maroon color of a scream.

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The words in bold in the story above were from The Sunday Whirl.  You should go take a peek at the other participants, and possibly write a whirl of your own.