Don’t be pessimistic about our chances. Hope is the only thing that’s kept humanity going these last five years. If we can capture your wife and sprinkle shadow dust on her, she will return to normal. The ancients tried to warn us and we turned their warnings into nursery rhymes and fairy tales. The elven kingdom returned and brought a plague upon us all. Seems they decided to reclaim their home world after decimating several other planets in the galaxy. If you carried even a drop of Irish blood you turned into a ravening zombie in the elvish army. What they didn’t destroy, the riots did. In three years the Elven Queen reclaimed over half of our world. The only thing stopping her now are the indigenous peoples of the world. They are the only ones who can create the shadow dust. They are the spark that started the fires of rebellion. The alley was suddenly silent. A middle aged woman wearing a ‘Hot Mess Mom’ tee shirt limped into view. “Karen?” Her husband’s face showed hope and fear. They threw a net over her and dosed her. Her eyes faded from red to blue and she looked around in confusion.
“Where am I?” Her husband tried to rush in but the soldiers held him back.
“You have to wait. Her hunger is still there.” Karen lashed at the net and tried to bite the nearest soldier. He leapt out of reach and she snarled. Suddenly she went limp and began convulsing. The soldiers pulled the net off her. She opened her brown eyes and lay still for a moment. When she caught sight of her husband, she pulled herself up and walked into his embrace. The entire process only took five minutes but it was incredibly dangerous.
The prompts for this short story:
zombie
it took five minutes
spark
shadow dust
pessimistic
Copyright 2019 Klaudia Grady
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