Friday Flash Fiction: What Happened?

2 Feb 2012

(Friday Flash Fiction, from The One Minute Writer (oneminutewriter.blogspot.com). Prompt: You're walking down the street on a beautiful day. Maybe doing some shopping, maybe hanging out with friends, maybe going to see someone you love, maybe doing nothing at all. Suddenly there is a loud noise... and it is the last thing you remember. Several hours later, you regain consciousness in a pile of tangled metal and broken concrete.

What happened?)

Groan. I can hardly move. There’s scarcely any light around me. Was daylight before, so how long has it been? I hear sounds of some kind, maybe machinery, maybe voices. It’s all a fog, so I can’t really tell.

I make slight movements to see what works. Neck seems okay, although sore. Both arms move, left wrist is throbbing but no sharp pain when I move it. Legs seem functional, no wait, right knee is definitely not okay.

Not finding any serious damage, I start looking and feeling further around me. It seems I’m enclosed more than trapped. There’s enough light that I can see a structure of sorts about two feet away, all around where I’m lying. Some of it looks like twisted metal, maybe those steel two-by-fours they use in buildings now. There are also some I-beams curving over me. I can see broken concrete piled around, further away. I seem to be in a cage that’s protected me from being crushed by the rubble.

Have to climb out of here if I can. There’s some kind of mechanical sound in the distance again, a truck or something going past? It sounds different, though. Might just be my ears, still murky but clearing a little. I slide over to the edge of my cage and feel around in the fading light. Right there, a section I can probably squeeze through.

Another machine moving out there, outside? Not sure where I am, exactly, so it’s hard to tell what’s inside and out. This time, along with the sound of machinery, there’s a pounding I can feel reverberating through the ground. Almost like heavy footsteps. Too heavy.

Now I’m outside the cage and climbing up a pile of concrete toward an opening where there’s more light. It seems a bluish twilight, but not entirely natural. The day was so beautiful earlier when I walking to that new guitar shop downtown. It was early afternoon then, but who knows what time it is now. I feel my wrist: no watch. I pat my jeans pocket and find no cell phone either. My knee is complaining but still works.

Another ten feet and I’m at a larger opening. I can see the street now. It’s dark enough that streetlights should be on, but it still appears to be twilight with something extra. I have this urge to get out onto the sidewalk, but something else in my mind holds me back.

Just then I hear another one of those machines, pounding toward me from up the street. It comes into view, and my blood freezes. Looks like a mech straight out of a video game, but this is no game. It’s shining a bluish searchlight this way and that as it stomps past, shuddering the ground with each step. I can’t see who or what is operating it, but I have a lingering dread as the sound and vibration fade.

Staying in here seems a bad option. The building has to be unstable, and might collapse at any moment. But getting caught out there seems much worse. I’m mulling over what to do when yet another one of them stalks down the street. The blue searchlight swings over toward me.