Day 1

They came like a swarm of locusts
We could hear the swell of their footfalls
Smell the unrest in the air
Finally we heard their song
a lulling moan resonating against our windows
We call it Satan’s Tail now
It began with the children
Playground chants of hopscotch and hand claps
Dissolved into ruptured echoes of screams
And the most painful laughter I have ever heard
For a matter of seconds it seemed as though they were playing tag
But they did not touch
They grabbed gnawed bit chewed
Blood splattering like squeezed juice boxes
The screams of childhood banter
Aged into shrieks of terror
I have never seen such innocent destruction
As they hunted
Their legs forgot how to hold them up straight as they ran
So it more closely resembled an infants wobbled steps
The small hands clenching for each other’s throats
Their eyes grew wide and stopped blinking
Their necks sprouted veins like roadmaps to hell itself
But their mothers still ran to them one last time
If I do not live to see the end of this
I will be grateful not to dream of this day ever again
I nailed my cabinets and dressers to the windows
The whole time thinking
Wood only works on vampires
I drug my furniture in front of the doors and waited
Until the screams stopped
In a neatly packaged ball rocking myself to insanity
I began to sing so I couldn’t hear them
The echoes and silence patience and grace
All of these moments I’ll never replace
No fear of my heart absense of faith
All I want is to be home….
Later they would say
It was no disease
No cannabalistic virus grown in a lab
It was much more formidable
Inescapable
It was a force of nature
The Earth’s response to the unchallenged dominance of mankind
It was the one thing we could not stop
It was evolution