Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

The air around them turned gray, the color drained from the world as if the sun had been extinguished. Dust swirled in unnatural patterns, forming shapes that reached and clawed. The taste of old blood and copper filled Amal's mouth.

They reached the car. Amal fumbled with the keys, her hands shaking so badly she dropped them. They landed in the dirt, half-buried.

Leave them, a voice whispered in her mind. Stay with us. Rest.

It wasn't a voice. It was a compulsion. A heavy, warm blanket of despair settling over her shoulders.

"No," Amal gritted out. She scrambled in the dirt, her fingernails tearing against the gravel. She found the cool metal of the key. "No!"

She jammed the key into the ignition. The engine roared to life, a defiant mechanical growl in the face of the supernatural silence.

As she spun the car around, tires screeching and smoking on the asphalt, she risked one glance in the rearview mirror.

The checkpoint was gone.

Or rather, the illusion of it was gone. The concrete walls had dissolved like sugar in hot water. The metal roofs had melted away.

In their place stood a mountain of bones.

Ribs, skulls, femurs, spines—millions of them, piled high into towers and ramparts. They weren't white and clean like museum specimens; they were gray and stained, fused together with that same dark, organic sludge Amal had seen on the ground. The structure pulsated, the bones shifting and grinding against each other with a sound like dry leaves.

And crawling over the bones, swarming like ants on a carcass, were thousands of watchers. They covered every inch of the structure, their red eyes a sea of burning embers in the twilight. They were feeding on the structure itself, drawing strength from the calcified remains of history.

And in the center of the mass, rising from the pit where the turnstiles had been, was something new.

It was huge —larger than the watchtower it replaced. A giant, skeletal figure made of fused bodies, with limbs that stretched impossibly long and thin. Its head scraped the sky, a faceless void that blotted out the sunset.

As Amal watched, the giant raised its arms.

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