Storm of the End: Book One

Chapter XXI.I: Glimmer of Hope

I felt a strange feeling, one on the border of unease and annoyance as I watched the two glowing red spots circling in the sky through the rear-view mirror.

It was the owl-thing again, but it seemed to be just flying off in the distance. It wasn't paying attention to us as far as I could tell, and it didn't seem to have any particular goal in mind, it just kept gliding in circles.

"Alright!" Jared exclaimed, "We're on Arthur Street, the radio station is less than two minutes away."

I nodded and smiled, and I saw that everyone else was smiling. A fire of hope warmed our hearts. People, food and security was only two minutes away.

I glanced back at the owl-thing and my smile slightly faded. What was that thing doing? Why had it been waiting for us outside the door this morning?

For some reason, the creatures with seemingly nonsensical motives freaked me out the most. As terrifying as the sadist, the fairies, the eye-thing, the invisible thing and the feline beast had been, at least what they had done made sense.

They wanted to kill, either because of some twisted pleasure they derived from it, because they needed to eat or some other unknown motive.

But the dogs, the orchestra, the pterodactyl, the weird metallic humanoids, the sunflowers, the giant and this owl-thing... I couldn't even start to imagine why they behaved the way they did. Trying to find a link between them all only made my head hurt. The giant especially.

"Wh- What's going on?" I heard Aaron mutter.

Sarah gasped, "Oh my God..."

"What?" I asked as I took my foot off the gas and turned to see them staring out the back window. There was a purple glow of light coming from around where we had stayed the night before. As the van slowed, I saw the light grow in intensity.

"Do you... hear that?" Jared asked, uncertainty in his voice.

I listened, and heard a low whistling noise coming from the distance. At first it sounded like the wind, but as it rose in volume along with the growing light, I knew it was definitely not just wind. I could still make out the two red dots of the owl-thing's eyes, but as the sound reached its limit, the owl-thing faded away into the darkness.

Then, the entire world behind us became a flash of brilliant purple light, the whistling noise transformed into the sound of an explosion and the ground beneath us shook, making the van and our bodies tremble.

I shut my eyes at the sudden blinding burst of luminescence and blinked rapidly as I tried to regain my sight.

Our mouths gaped as we saw a massive pillar of that same purple glow go from the ground to the sky and tear through the clouds. Chunks of asphalt, houses and other debris was thrown into the air and came crashing down in the surrounding area. A piece from the roof of a house even came smashing into the apartment right next to us.

Then, slowly, the purple glow began to fade away and... I saw something in the gap that had been made in the dark clouds. An icy tingling shiver crawled its way down my back. It was vague enough that it could have just been my imagination, it could have just been a coincidence, it could have just been me seeing things in the fading light... but it looked like... it looked like there were hundreds of arms, all formed of vein-like light reaching out as the glow faded. Before I could even begin to process it, the clouds quickly filled the gap that had been made by the explosion, making me doubt what I thought I saw, making it seem like there had never been a hole in the sky to begin with. Slowly, purple embers began to fall from the sky, dancing together with the precipitation.

"What... I..." Sarah mumbled.

"And that was... just where we were sleeping... just last night..." Aaron said.

"Can you imagine if we had been delayed there for whatever reason? Or if we didn't decide to leave this morning? With even a few minutes difference... we probably would have been caught in that blast! Whatever that blast even was..." Jared said.

"Well," I said, putting my foot on the gas, the vision of the hands tugging at the back of my mind, "Let's just be glad we managed to get away from there in time."

I started to drive forward, but let off on the gas when I saw the owl-thing standing in the middle of the road, its wings wrapped close to its body. Its glowing eyes stared directly into mine and, again I may have just been imagining it, but I am almost certain that I saw an expression of relief in them. It spread out its wings and took off, flying towards the East.

"Is that thing going to keep following us?" Aaron asked, slight worry in his voice.

For some reason, I didn't think so. "Who knows, in any case we must be pretty close to the radio station right? They must have heard that explosion, I wonder if we'll see them outside."

"Yeah, I think I can see the radio tower from here," Jared answered as he pointed ahead.

My heart was beating faster, there wasn't even a minute left before we'd be safe.