Noisy Island

I can't take the voices in my head.  I can hear all the campers, chattering away loudly in the mess hall.

This entire island echoes with the loud hum of activity.

I know they're all in my head.  This island is secluded and secret.  It was their treat to bring the summer camp to here.  So much noise.  I never knew kids would be so loud.

They can't be real voices.  Only I know where the island is, where I live.  If people knew where it was, I would have been found by now.

Why is this island still filled with their loud, screaming voices?  It's supposed to be filled with silence.

I thought I killed them all.

Reverend Chad

Reverend Chad jerked awake; the sound of his cell phone ringing had snapped him back to reality.

“Another soul needin’ to be saved,” he muttered as he checked the number in a vain attempt to see if it was another repeat caller.

“Unknown number, eh?” he said, rubbing his eyes and answering the call.  “Thank you for calling Reverend Chad’s Pra-.”

“Are you a Holy Man?” a man on the other end asked.  His tone was strict, with a slight hint of enjoyment.

“I beg your pardon?” Chad stammered, no longer sure he was awake.

“You heard me.  Are.  You.  A Holy Man?” the man stated in a demanding tone.

“Yessir, I am.  How may I help you this fine morning?”

“I want you to say a prayer.”

“A prayer?  What’s your name young man?  Who would you like for me to say this prayer for?  Your mother, your father?  I can see troubled times.”  The reverend reached for a pad of paper.

“Not for me.  For you.  Your family.  The whole world.”

“That’s very kind of you.  I will keep you and the whole world in my prayers today.”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, sir.  What?”

“Not me.  Just, well, just the whole world.  They’re going to need it.  The apocalypse is coming, and you are the one, prophet—as you claim to be—to warn everyone.”

With that, the man hung up.  The reverend scratched his head in confusion.

“Who was it honey?” his wife asked, rolling over and placing her hand on his shoulder.

“A man, asking for me to pray,” he responded, flopping back onto his pillow.

“Isn’t that why you set up that prayer hotline?” she asked, rubbing his arm.

“Yeah, I guess I’m just tired.  It’s nothing.  Let’s get some rest.  We’ve got a big sermon tomorrow,” said Chad as he curled back up in bed.

***

Weeks passed, and the odd phone call was wearing on his mind.  He kept thinking that he had to tell someone, so he finally told his wife.

She laughed at him.

“I don’t know what kind of cuckoos you have on your line, but we both agreed when we started this thing that you wouldn’t let anything anyone said get to you,” she said, shaking her head.  “Now get ready, the storm’s headed this way.”

For the past week, bad weather had been ravaging the northern hemisphere.  Hurricanes, tornados, droughts, and floods.

Chad stepped outside, to check on his chickens.  As soon as he left his door, the tornado sirens went off.  Through the chaos of flapping chickens and thunderclaps, he was able to make out a huge tornado churning off in the distance, and headed his way.

His wife came out, screaming at him to get to the tornado shelter.

But he couldn’t hear here.

All the noise that was around him consumed her voice, and spat it out as nothing toward him.  The only sounds left were the swirling winds, slapping rain, loud sirens and houses being destroyed.

Chad could hear less than that, even.

He, a man who felt he had been disobedient to what the messenger had wanted him to do, could only hear the sounds of the tornado sirens.

To him, they sounded a lot like trumpets.

Muse Abuse

John turns away from his computer.  The characters in the story he is writing desperately want to be saved from the incoming meteor, but John doesn't like neat, happy endings.  When he comes back from the bathroom, he fully intends to finish wiping out the planet, which had been pock-marked by several smaller meteorites, the harbingers of this new, massive chunk of incoming rock.

Unbeknownst to him, the citizens of his fantasy world had a better idea.  John was writing about an advanced race, light-years from Earth.  He didn't know it, but the idea for his story was coming to him from them via their technology.  Whatever he wrote happened to them.

Dismayed that the one person from Earth they tried to get to help them let their planet become scarred and left in ruin, and was about to let their planet be destroyed, the moved to their "Plan B," which was to build a machine to teleport the meteor to a different location in space.  Before, they had no location in mind that would not possibly result in the loss of a valuable society.

As John returned to his computer to finish writing the story of how a planet he dreamed up one day was destroyed by a meteor, the citizens prepared their device.

They could still see what he was writing, and in all the gory details in which he described their people dying.

Fed up, they took over this process.  John gleefully typed on, by then blissfully unaware of what he was writing.

In his mind, he was writing about some far away planet, about to be totally annihilated by a massive meteor.

To the people of the advanced planet, what he was writing couldn't be any more true.

That's Final

You’re moving out and that’s final!

I couldn’t believe that, just like that, our marriage was over.  I mean, we didn’t get along anymore, but I didn’t know she had the papers drafted in advance.

I did love her, at first.  She just had a superiority complex that manifested after a year.

All things considered, though, I counted my blessings a few weeks after I got the boot.  Her house caught on fire, burned everything inside it.  My poor ex-wife included.

“I’m sorry,” I told her mother at the funeral.  She told me not to feel bad.  I don’t apologize unless I mean it, though.

Best Served Warm

My father wanted to force me into being a chef, like his father, his father’s father, and so on.  He thought I couldn’t cook, and was constantly berating me for not wanting to follow in the “proud” family tradition.

He would scream at me for wanting to do something, anything else with my life, and forced me to learn to cook.  I wanted to be a pilot.

One day, he scoffed at my cooking abilities, telling me that since I didn’t want to learn, I would never make anything taste above dog-food level.

I challenged that notion by baking him one of the tastiest apple pies he had ever eaten.  Best of his life.  Well, okay.  It wasn’t really that good.  After the first slice, he just couldn’t keep eating.

He didn’t think I was a good chef, but I think it takes a pretty good chef to hide such bitter poison in a pie.

With the Punches

I still don’t know what happened today to make me wind up where I am, but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with kicking my brother this morning.

It’s not my fault, I mean, well, I did kick him.  Pretty hard, in fact.  To be fair, though, he did flush the toilet while I was in the shower.  He’s a huge jerk like that.

Anyway, that’s not the worst thing that happened to me.  Today at school, my friend Steve invited me to join a group of people who were going to go to an old graveyard.  Something about fighting back the hordes of the undead.  My brother, naturally, was going to be the leader of this expedition.  He had a history of leading us to victory against school policies and bullies, so he was a shoe in for the position.

Well, I only remember heading to our house and then my brother pulling out this old book.  He started reading to us, and the next thing I knew was I was staring down a horde of skeletons.  There had to be at least ten of them, and their bones rattled through the air.

I was alone.  Somehow, my brother had managed to separate me from the rest of my part.  I looked at the old club in my hands, and then back to the shambling bones in front of me.  I then heard my brother’s voice from somewhere, almost laughing at me.  He was so cruel.  I think he’s trying to kill me.

His voice echoed in the wooded area surrounding the graveyard.  He said the worst words possible.

ROLL FOR INITIATIVE.

Boil the Water

Stupid hurricane.

I’ve been stuck in this stupid house ever since this stupid storm decided to blow inland.  No, I didn’t leave.  I’m not a wuss.

Power’s been out for days.

No food.  Hungry.

No water, other than what’s flooded in.  Supposed to boil it.  Parasites or something.  Not worth the time, since there’s no power.  Just drank it raw.

There’s a lot of people out in this stupid storm, just wandering around.

I haven’t felt good since I drank all this water.  My eyes burn.  My skin is peeling, but that’s because my stupid house is practically underwater.  I just think of it as an all-day pool.

I am tired of this house.  I’m hungry.  I wonder what those people out there are doing.  Maybe they know where to get food.

I’m really hungry.  I think I want to see what they found.

It’s weird, being outside in a storm.  The sky goes boom.  The people here look worse than I do.  Some are missing parts.  What an awful storm.  They don’t look so good.

The people in that house do.

I think I found dinner.

One Question

David was perched on the edge of his bed, his bloodshot eyes darting around the room like a hummingbird.  He mindlessly picked at the myriad of scabs that dotted his arms and legs.  Behind him, there were books scattered about.  Some looked old, others new, and a few were his school notebooks.  At first, it looked like he had been doing research all night, but the candles and incense burning about the room told me different.

He had been acting weird these past few weeks, and tonight I came up to his room with several questions in mind.  Now, I had only one.

Where is my son?

Infested With Evil

My house is infested with demons and evil creatures.  It all started when a portal straight into the pestilent fields of hell was opened one summer.

It started slowly.  One or two little imps crawled through and made a mess of things.  Slowly, more and more started pouring in.  Soldiers, guards, and warriors started to mark in with all the perfection of evil.

We tried to get a priest to exorcise the demons, but he was horribly overwhelmed.  He called a friend, though.

That man worked miracles.  He told us my house was the most demon infested he had ever seen.  He had to use holy bombs and a special demon hunting suit.

After he was finished, he told me a sealing ritual, and the materials I would need in order to close the portal.

It was working well for a while, but the forces of evil are not so easily stopped.

Eventually, the barriers I had put up according to the man's guidelines fell apart and were breeched.

Now this house is once again infested with these demons.  I can’t sleep at night.  The crawl and dance on me in my sleep.  They eat my meals and taint my food.

I need to find the number of that exterminator.