Little Dead Monsters (20 page)

Epilogue.

She walked in between the shadows of the dead city, bathed in the moonlight’s evanescent glow, her long black dress trailing behind her.

There was a time when she once feared the shadows and the darkness, but now she embraced them.

It was where she felt safe.

Soon she would need to leave this place, but for now, she made the ruins her own secluded wonderland.

He followed close behind her, his fiery eyes never leaving her sight.

END.

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LORE

JOCELYN DARK SERIES: BOOK ONE

Coming Soon.

***

Chapter One: The End of the World

It was all a crock of lies.

Ms. Grey, with her chestnut colored hair and see-through sun dress, had told her class that the end of the world would be caused by rising sea levels due to global warming.

The truth was, the end of the world was caused by alien warships bursting through an atomic colored sky and eight foot monsters clad in black armor, firing guns and carving down people—good human beings—with long, polished blades. 

It made Jocelyn stop and wonder what other lies the schools had taught her. Did E really equal MC squared?

The end of the world began while Jocelyn was having lunch with her mother at a local diner. The first boom erupted in the sky in between bites of her cheeseburger. It was loud of enough to shatter the glass windows of the restaurant.

The other customers scattered like ants caught in a spring shower while Jocelyn and her mother sat in stunned silence.

The second boom knocked Jocelyn right out of her seat and onto the ground.

Jocelyn looked up at her mother, the shocked look on their faces mirror images of one another. They often said Jocelyn was a splitting image of her mom, a ten year replica of Mrs. Frost. She had her mom’s dark hair that flowed like a river of ink, the same blue eyes that sparkled like crystals in the sun, and skin the color of wild lilacs.

Jocelyn was as pretty as a picture, destined to become a breaker of hearts when she reached her teens. That was if she survived past the day.  

“Mom?” Jocelyn cried as she struggled back to her feet, searching for some kind of reassurance. Her mother was trembling.

She needed to get through to her. “Mom!”

“The sky…” her mother finally whispered.

Jocelyn’s eyes aligned with her mother’s gaze just as the cloudless blue sky ripped open, like a frayed piece of fabric tearing apart. Massive black objects drifted through the cracks in the atmosphere and filled the entire sky. They hovered like smooth onyx nimbus clouds eclipsing the sun, casting long shadows on the earth below.  

By the time Jocelyn realized these monstrous skeletal behemoths were space ships, the boots of the first aliens had already hit the ground.

They were completely different from what Jocelyn imagined aliens to be. They were not little nor green. They did not have giant oval heads on small bloated bodies and they were not cute in any way.

They especially did not come in peace.

The aliens deployed were at least eight feet tall with smooth gleaming heads and bright eyes filled with all manners of intelligence. Most had grey skin, the color of old stone. The bony structure of their faces reminded Jocelyn of gargoyles—minus the horns—typical perched high on gothic buildings.

Not all of them shared the same skin color, however. The ones barking orders in their surprisingly lyrical language had flesh the color of ivory. They were the most ferocious of the lot.   

They moved and spoke with such an eerie calmness while massacring everyone around them. Beams of energy escaped from their large black guns, disentegrating human flesh and bone like leaves in a furnace. It was then Jocelyn realized how fragile the human body was. 

“Run,” her mother shouted as she bolted through the large broken window next to their booth, not bothering to wait for her own daughter. Scattered glass crunched underneath the soles of her feet as they hit the ground.

Jocelyn was still too stunned to react. She froze in place and watched as her mom fled down the street without her.

“Mom, wait!” Jocelyn cried.

A few feet away, a man in t-shirt and shorts, who had made the ill-fated decision to go out for a morning run, collapsed onto the ground. There was a giant hole where his chest once was.

Jocelyn screamed.

Her mom was now legions away, leaping over debris and the bodies of the dead with relative ease. Her mom had always been the athletic type, a track and field star during her college years.

Jocelyn willed her adolescent body to move.
One step at a time,
she thought. She escaped through the same window her mom did, though without the same deftness. An athelete she wasn’t. 

She ignored the sounds of gunfire and people dying erupting all around her, a symphony of catastrophic chaos that was pleasing to the alien’s ears.

Police officers had finally arrived on the scene and engaged in return fire. Their weapons were utterly useless and these brave men were shredded in a matter of seconds. 

In the midst of the carnage, Jocelyn tried to gain some ground on her mother, sprinting as hard as she could. It was no use. The distance between them was widening.

“I can’t keep up,” Jocelyn huffed.

She blamed the bronchitis she was just getting over. They had given her a blue puffer to help open up her airways. She wished she had it now.

Her lungs were burning and her coughs were deep and from the chest. She struggled to dislodge the phlegm in her throat.

“Please…” she murmured weakly. “Why are you leaving me?”

And by some miracle, it seemed like her mother had heard her and turned around, a long frown on her face. She stared at Jocelyn for a moment, her clear blue eyes focusing on her daughter’s face.

“Wait for me,” Jocelyn begged.

Her mother bit her lip, closed her eyes, and then did the unthinkable. She turned her back on Jocelyn.

“No,” Jocelyn whispered through ragged breaths. “No, please don’t.”

She had experienced heartbreak once before, when Danny Fitch didn’t send her a candy gram two Christmas’ ago, while she sent him a dozen. But compared to this, watching the person whom she loved above all else abandon her, this was absolutely crippling.

Jocelyn looked on with wide eyes as the woman who raised her rounded the corner of a grey-stoned building and disappeared from her life forever.

Her knees gave way and she collapsed to the ground, trembling. She was lost as to what to do next.

Jocelyn was so consumed by her grief that she failed to notice the long shadow of an alien brute, methodically stalking her. His breaths were heavy but silent as he took long, even strides towards her.

He stopped a few paces short and raised his gun, aiming his sight right at the back of Jocelyn’s head.

Salvation came in the form of screaming tires followed by a crash, loud enough to wake Jocelyn out of her trance. She turned around just in time to see the alien brute topple over the trunk of a police cruiser.

The vehicle grinded to a halt and out of the wreckage emerged a police officer clutching a shot gun in one hand. He held his injured shoulder with the other.

“Run,” he cried. “I’ll hold him off—”

His speech was cut short by a long metal weapon, spearing through his belly like a skewer through a piece of meat. The alien had recovered from the impact of the collision and was taking pleasure in his revenge.

The monster had forgotten all about Jocelyn.

She whispered a silent prayer for the policeman who sacrificed his life to save hers, and began sprinting in the opposite direction.

More warships emerged from the sky with loud booms that shattered the windows of buildings all around her.

She hadn’t gone more than a quarter mile before her body failed her, and she collapsed to her knees once again.

It was getting harder to breathe.

Jocelyn lifted her head and observed her surroundings; a wonderland of death and destruction.

There was nowhere for her to run.

Jocelyn closed her eyes and thought of her mother again, wondering if she was safe wherever she was.

Still images rotated through her memory like a carousel; her mom brushing her hair, making sock puppets for Jocelyn, pushing her on a swing, and reading her favorite bedtime stories.

Her mom was her entire world, seeing as how Jocelyn’s father had left them when she was still a baby. And now, she was gone as well.

How could she have abandoned Jocelyn too? Did no parent love her?

A rundown Honda Accord screeched to a halt beside her and a middle-aged man stepped out of the driver’s side. “Get in the car if you want to live. I know a place that’s safe.” He was a portly and bald, except for the tufts of hair on the sides of his head. His frayed sweater stretched over his large belly while sweat beaded down his forehead as he opened the passenger side door.

In the backseat were two children, a girl and a boy, similar in age as Jocelyn. From the look on their faces, they too were shocked by all that was happening.

“Come on, get in the front seat,” he urged.

Never get in the car with strangers,
Jocelyn’s mother had warned her.

“Look, I have children as well. You look alone and I’m only trying to help.” There was panic in his voice as he kept glancing over his shoulder. “I can’t wait here forever.”

Sure enough in the distance, a few of the aliens emerged out of the surrounding woods. They didn’t seem to notice them yet.    

The sight of the stone-skinned aliens was enough motivation for Jocelyn to leap inside the car. She’d rather risk being in the company of strangers than with a murderous pack of aliens.

When the man finally felt they were a safe distance away, he turned to Jocelyn.

“Where’s your family?” he asked.

Jocelyn felt her heart bleed into her stomach. She swallowed hard, fighting back tears, turned to the man and said, “It’s just me. I’m all alone.”

The man didn’t ask any further questions, allowing Jocelyn to cry a river’s worth of tears into the palm of her hands.

#

The portly man, who introduced himself as Mr. Ralph Leclair, had managed to get Jocelyn and his family out of ground zero of the invasion, bringing them to his private cottage on the outskirts of the city.

It was a good hiding spot as any, concealed deep within density of the forest.

She had never been to a cottage before and thought the experience would have been pleasant, if it wasn’t for the fact that the world around them had gone to hell—literally.

It took only a matter of days for all the major cities across the globe to fall, as reported by the news.

On day one of World War X (named after extraterrestrial) the combined armies of the United Nations were obliterated in a matter of hours. They simply couldn’t compete with the alien’s superior technology.

On the ground, soldiers were disintegrated like ants underneath a blow torch. They fared no better in the sky as the alien warships knocked fighter jets out of the stratosphere as an exterminator would do to annoying wasps.

In the alien’s eyes, the humans were nothing more than insects. 

Desperation called for weapons of mass destruction to be deployed (North Korea apparent had two). Nuclear missiles were launched in futile efforts to blow the warships out of the sky.

The collateral damage resulted in more harm to the humans than the aliens.

Rivers of blood flowed through the streets and the bodies of the dead were strung up like meat in a butcher shop’s window. It was the aliens’ way of instilling fear.

It worked.

The human race fell like paper dolls in the wind, and along with it, any remnants of their fighting spirit.

Luckily Jocelyn, who hated violence—was insulated from all the horrors of the alien war. Eventually the televisions stopped working and as they say, ignorance became bliss.

Jocelyn spent most of the time with Sandor and Danielle, Ralph Leclair’s children, salting meats from his hunts, building more insulation for the cottage, and gathering wood for the winter.

Winter would be their biggest challenge, Ralph warned them. If they were to survive the cold, they needed to be prepared.

Jocelyn had grown close to both Danielle and Sandor so when the latter was the first to perish amongst them, she was devastated.

With a lack of medicine and antibiotics, Sandor didn’t stand a chance against pneumonia.

It was tragic because over time, Jocelyn had grown fond of him. In fact the seeds of something else were blossoming: childhood love in a dangerous time.

Some nights, when Ralph and Danielle were asleep, Jocelyn and Sandor snuck out of bed and headed towards a neighboring cottage a quarter mile away.

The cottage was small in size—a modest six hundred square foot domicile—but the contents inside made it the wealthiest home Jocelyn ever knew. It housed collectables of all sorts—comics, bobble heads, baseball cards, and books (so many books)—which to Jocelyn, who didn’t have a dime growing up for hobbies of any sorts, was akin to buried treasure.

The most valued prize in Jocelyn’s eyes was the vintage record player in the corner of the cottage along with the milk crate full of records.