It’s been a bit since I’ve dropped a scene from my idea journal onto the blog. So let’s do that. This is a work of fiction, it is entirely my creation. Feel free to comment or share but don’t steal. Be cool.
The darkness descended so quickly on the seventeenth day that she didn’t have time to prepare. On all the other days there had been a warning: a subtle shifting of the light, a chill that blew through the clearing, or the increased need to squint at whatever she was doing. But on the seventeenth day, none of that happened. One minute she was reading along on the e-reader, the last one with any battery power left, and the next she was plunged into darkness. It was as though the sun had gone completely behind a cloud. Like a solar eclipse that brought with it complete and total darkness.
She waited, counting the seconds out in her head. Something in her mind told her this was going to pass. It was a cloud or some other thing blocking the sun. She just had to wait it out.
After sixty seven seconds she started to worry. She felt her body heat increase with the adrenaline brought on by the fear. Each night since the people disappeared the sun had faded into nothing and dropped off for the night. Each night it seemed as though the number of hours spent without the sun were longer, those with the sun shorter. But she had no proof, no way of checking. She hadn’t had a watch with a battery in years, having replaced hers for the smart kind. Of course the smart one had died out on the second day with nothing to plug it into. She hadn’t made it a priority to get another one when she raided the stores before leaving the city. At the time tracking the hours and minutes seemed so mundane and unnecessary. Time passing as it always had seemed like the one reassurance she could give herself.
But now, three hundred eighty two seconds after it had gone fully dark on the seventeenth day since all people had disappeared from the planet, she wasn’t so sure.
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