Fantasy in the City

Beacon 666

Beacon 666 is a follow up to my first flash fiction - Hoovering.   I hope that you enjoy it.

...

Sally blinked. 

And blinked again.  

In fact she could not stop blinking.  Tears streamed from her red, raw eyes as she struggled against the stinging dust that enveloped her. 

"Help!"  she tried to shout, her voice rasping from her parched throat.  "Help!  Mom, help!  Where are you, Mom?  Where are you?"  

She did not know how long she had been alone in this parched wasteland.  After a flash of searing brilliance, Sally had found herself in a choking dust bowl of a world.  Torn from her mother with an incomprehensible suddeness, Sally had been forced to fend for herself in an environment that was utterly hostile. 

The ground beneath her feet grabbed at her as she toiled through the drifting, gritty fog.  With every step, she sank to her knees in a mat of clinging, dusty strands.  Was it grass she fought against?  She thought not, it was too tangled for that.  Embedded deep within it she would come across evidence of civilization even though there was little to see around her.  Pen lids, broken pencils, plastic building blocks, screws, fragments of glass or pottery, torn paper and food wrappers were all present in abundance.  Yet these dust encrusted artefacts did not attract her consideration for very long.  Instead, hate for the land absorbed her, as every stride forward exploded in another suffocating cloud. 

"Mom!"  she coughed and she sank to her knees in the spongy ground. 

"H-h-hello?"  an uncertain voice carried to Sally's ears on the feeble breeze. 

Someone else!  Someone else was here? Sally could not believe it.  Galvanized by this discovery, she launched herself to her feet in desperation to once again be with another human. 

"Where are you?" she yelled in the direction that she thought the voice came from. 

"Over here!" the voice called back weakly. 

Exhausted from her long journey, Sally waded through the skein, her thighs burning, shaking with every step.  Drifts of grey and ochre swirls obscured the way ahead but she wheezed a call every minute or so to try and locate her target. 

In what seemed like hours a gap in the churning fog revealed the first object that Sally had seen in this horrible landscape that wasn't a piece of discarded rubbish or the weird grass.  It was an obelisk, approximately two metres high, covered with a build up of dust that deformed its shape.  

However, hope surged through Sally when she spied an indistinct figure crouched by the obelisk, her shape almost hidden in the monochrome surroundings.  Sally ploughed forward and almost fell at its feet, sobbing uncontrollably, tears cutting swathes through the grime that smeared her face. 

"Oh, my!  You're only a child!"  the figure said. 

"I-I-I thought I was alone!  I thought I was the only person here!" Sally cried. 

A filthy hand reached out and swept Sally's hair away from her face. 

"Goodness!  It's Sally!  What happened?  How did you get here?"  

Sally looked up at the strange figure.  Her vision cleared a little and when it did she gasped with shock.  Crouching over her was a wizened, blackened creature, thickly clothed in the ever present dust.  Two piercing, blue eyes peered at her beneath a rats nest of snarled hair.  Despite all of this camouflage, Sally recognized the figure instantly.  How could she not?  Her neighbour didn't look very different from how she remembered her last, just a little dirtier.