Dystopian fiction/ Apocalypse/ Children

She Unmade the World with a Thought — Part Two of Two

First Line Fiction Prompt #86

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This two-part story — which can be read as a standalone — belongs to a series of short tales that serve as a prequel to my novel Blue Smoke. I write these stories partly to spend more time with my characters and get to know them better, and partly to build a more believable and internally coherent dystopian world. Many things I wasn’t aware of while writing and editing Blue Smoke came to the surface.

In this story, we meet ten-year-old Ludmilla at a turning point in her life. We also learn more about her family’s secrets and how they, along with a global catastrophe unfolding around them, shape the way she sees the world.

**Not a Medium member? Read the full story here.**

*Start with part one.*

The little blond girl didn’t know she had the power to crush the entire world.

Yet that was exactly what happened after she had uttered her ardent prayer in her mind: “Let Mom and Dad die! Both of them!”

The whole room, not just the door, was rocking now. Seconds earlier, the air had filled with a deep, guttural noise — as if Dad’s angry roar had grown so loud it had spread all over the planet

Boom…boom…

Heaving. Mad swaying, as if she were in an enormous swing. It took her some time to realize that her room was the swing: the entire building was acting as if it were being thrashed about by gigantic ocean waves.

Lucy grabbed the legs of the desk she was crouching under.

She grabbed them hard.

A door crashed before her, battering against the desk chair. She flinched.

The wardrobe door! And that… what’s that? The chandelier falling? My beautiful chandelier in the shape of a rose? And my books… the books are flying… all of them…

Lucy shut her eyes tight, trying to isolate herself from what was happening. If she could empty her mind, maybe it would stop. Wasn’t she the one who had brought it forth?

Dad was no longer yelling at her. He was screaming in terror now. Mom, too. Somewhere in the other room. Their horrified voices soon died down beneath the deafening thrashing and banging coming from every direction: things were falling, things were breaking, things were crashing into one another, and the world kept rocking, and the desk was pressing against her back — the desk, or what was left of it — and finally, when silence came, it was even scarier than the noise.

It took some time for her to stir. First, she tentatively stretched an arm out to see if she could do it, if her body wasn’t completely broken. It wasn’t. She raised her other arm and pushed the wardrobe door away. Dust fell over her face and hair. Lucy stood up and realized her face smarted with tears and blood.

She stumbled through the remains of what had once been her room. The wall leading to the living room was torn open, as if a giant knife had made a cruel, deadly incision. She stepped through the opening, her bare feet stomping over sharp rubble. She barely felt the pain.

“Mom? Dad?”

No answer. The living room was a mess. Nothing could be distinguished among the heaps of broken furniture, plaster covering shattered bricks and tangled cables hissing with yellow sparks.

Wait… what’s that over there?

A leg?

Under a long piece of wood, a female leg stuck out — a long, beautifully shaped calf and a bare foot wearing a pink slipper with a white tassel.

“Mom…” Lucy whispered.

She looked away, choking on something between grief and heart-tearing guilt. Part of her told her she should sit down right there and wait for her own ending, because she had killed both her parents and deserved the same fate, but another part urged her forward, farther away from the ominously hissing cables.

She obeyed the call of life. Sobbing, she sneaked through the debris and reached the open terrace, now transformed into a concrete ramp leading to a street filled with smashed cars, fragments of buildings, the wails of people and dogs, and the distant screeching of sirens.

The little blond girl, who wanted to stay alive only because her youth demanded it, grabbed a solid-looking pipe running along the concrete ramp and slid down it until her bare feet touched the street below. Her hands stung. She wiped the blood on her denim shorts and looked around.

She was looking through a fog of dust. All around her, buildings stood half-collapsed, parts of rooftops, walls, and glass clogging the streets and pressing against crushed car roofs. Bluish flames caught her eye somewhere nearby, maybe two blocks away, and her tiny nose wrinkled at the heavy smell of burning steel and plastic.

She saw a woman passing by — disheveled, bloody, a mad look in her eyes. She was clutching a baby in her arms, staggering through the debris. Lucy stared at them, wondering whether she should go help, and then decided against it.

Maybe if I go near them, I’ll kill them too. Just like I killed Mom and Dad.

There was only one place she could go. One place where she could find answers to what had happened.

It wasn’t easy to reach the school, although it was just behind their apartment building, across the big boulevard. Normally, it took her ten minutes to get there, traffic lights and all. Today, it took her almost an hour.

She had to walk extremely slowly because she was trying to avoid glass and sharp metal that could cut her already bleeding feet to pieces. She had to find her way through enormous heaps of what had once been useful to people but was now only obstructing her road to life: tons of bricks, chunks of concrete, and twisted metal. She had to avoid all those hissing cables, too. She had to give the occasional passerby the slip — she noticed a few of them, mostly kids her age or a little older, staring in her direction wide-eyed — and she had to climb over vehicles crammed across the boulevard in one final grand traffic jam.

Finally, Lucy found herself there.

At her school.

Her refuge from the horror at home. The place where she could talk to Milen for hours, where she could listen to the teachers revealing to her the secrets of the universe, where she could hide in the library and lose herself in the thousands of fantasy realms inside books.

Her dear school — everything to her — was now gone.

The fence was missing. The yellow building was cracked in half like an open egg, spilling out its once nourishing contents — desks, chairs, computer boards, hundreds of paper books, toys for the smaller kids — but, thank God, no people. No dead teachers, because it was Saturday. Nobody was here except…

A guttural cry escaped her lips. She thought it couldn’t possibly belong to her. This cry belonged to another girl — maybe she could call her the Big Blond Girl now. Yes, that’s right. Can I remain Little after what I saw?

She had recognized the backpack immediately. A black one, with a picture of Mickey the Robot on the front. Next to the backpack lay his long, slim body. He was wearing his favorite blue T-shirt and red shorts. His head wasn’t visible — it had been crushed beneath the warped iron frame of the football goal.

A lonely football rolled nearby. It was covered in white dust.

Lucy ran forward and knelt beside the body. Her tears suddenly dried up, vacuumed away by the terror engulfing her. Tears were no longer a sanctuary. They couldn’t help in this new world.

“Big friend,” she whispered. “Hey, big friend… it’s me… I came to play football with you… with Krassimir and Peter too… hey… hey…”

She squatted there, her hand slipping tentatively down Milen’s bare calf. She felt the skin — still warm, but not as warm as the skin of a living being should be — and then sharply stood up.

She ran, jumping over rubble, not noticing the blood trickling down her feet and leaving red traces behind her. Her eyes scanned the entire schoolyard madly. How many boys had come here to play football? Usually, their whole class gathered here on Saturdays. The boys, that is. About fifteen kids. Milen had been trying to convince her to join them for ages.

“I know you love football. Come have some fun. Drop those books for once. I don’t want to see you so sad all the time, little friend.”

Lucy ran and ran until she bumped into someone’s body. She jumped back and then looked up, panting. Her lips convulsed as they tried to express an emotion far bigger than her and utterly inexpressible.

Four boys stood before her, about seventeen or eighteen years old. Their clothes were dirty, but their faces were surprisingly calm and composed. She saw large wooden crosses hanging from their necks. They held torches in their hands.

They’re from the United Church! All those big boys and girls who kept coming to our school, telling us we shouldn’t live the way we were living because something bad would happen, and Miss Clara kept screaming at them and telling them to bug off because our school wasn’t a place for fanatics, and they were warning her because Miss Clara wore short skirts to school and…

“Are you okay?” the taller boy asked. “Is there anyone else with you, child?”

Lucy shook her head. She suddenly felt the mountain she hadn’t realized she had been carrying for the last hour fall from her shoulders, turning her into a little girl again. A little blond girl who needed help.

“No…” she sobbed, the tears finding their way back to her eyes again. “I’m… I’m alone…”

“Okay. I’m Alex. What’s your name?”

“I’m… Lud… Ludmilla…”

“Okay, Ludmilla. Do you know what happened? There was an earthquake, a very strong earthquake. About nine on the Richter scale, as far as we know. Most official communication is down, but we, the members of the United Church, still have our local network. We managed to organize ourselves pretty quickly. We’re looking for survivors. I’ll take you to a safe place now. Okay?”

The tall boy gave a few short instructions to the others, and they continued the search. He took Lucy’s hand and then, when he saw the grimace of pain on her face after her first step, lifted her into his arms.

“You’ll be safe, child,” he kept whispering in her ear while carrying her through the ruins. His embrace was strong and warm, his voice soothing, and Lucy realized this was the father she had always wanted but never had.

And in the next moment, she decided she would forget all about her real father. She would forget that she had caused that horrible earthquake with her prayer because if this wonderful young man only knew that she had such thoughts in her head — let alone the power to turn them into reality — he would immediately throw her onto the road to die.

She didn’t know much about the United Church, but she knew the Ten Commandments, and she knew the Church didn’t tolerate people who broke even one of them.

It didn’t tolerate them one bit.

To take your mind off life’s seriousness and its grim reflection in fiction, I suggest you read a really enjoyable FLF story by Val Francis:

[embed]The Ménage à Trois First Line Fiction Prompt #89.medium.com

And if you are interested, you might read another Blue Smoke prequel about Ludmilla — fourteen-year-old already — here:

[embed]A Ball and a Rebellion Gone Backwards First Line Fiction Prompt# 57medium.com

Thank you!