Day 9 of my 13 Horrifically Silly Days of Halloween – Allison McWood

I Broke the World: A Rollicking Dystopian Comedy
By Allison McWood

CHAPTER ONE
Her strawberry blond eyelashes fluttered. Clarity Trout blinked the dreamy delirium from her eyes, pulling herself out of a dark, sinking sleep. A weird feeling suddenly clamped her ribcage, causing a flutter of panic. Out slipped a mousy gasp.
Am I awake?
What a weird dream.
With her head still sunk into her pillow, Clarity’s eyeballs lolled around the room. The concrete walls of her oppressively geometric bedroom intimidated her. The tiny, rectangular window offered little hope – in fact, it seemed to be squinting at her. Judgmentally.

“Fern?” Clarity said scratchily in an early morning octave. “Fern, I had a trippy dream.”

With a weary groan, Clarity turned her foggy head to face a potted fern placed meticulously on a mismatched bedside table. She blinked hard, as she was prone to do, bungling on her notable stutter. “Of course, it wasn’t real,” she said to the plant. “How could it be? How could it… be?”

Another mousy gasp.

Scrambling from her squeaky mattress, fumbling, entwined in her threadbare, floral sheet, Clarity dashed to her rectangular window. Standing on her tippy toes she peered outside. Her eyeballs quivered.

A desolate, deserted street. Not a single soul.

No one.

Anywhere.

A hauntingly red fug lingered in the sky.

A brownstone husk stood where the theatre used to be.

Outside, a flashing marquee was blinking the word ‘NO’ largely and boldly.

The billboard across the street sported the same message. ‘NO.’

Spray-painted across the windows of random, vacated shops, ‘NO.’

Searchlights scoured the streets from seemingly nowhere. Possibly the sky.

An eerie silence loomed thickly in the air like a terrifying margarine.

Except…

What’s that sound?

The throaty snarl of a… lion.

Wait, lion?

From the elusiveness of a dark alley, the indisputable figure of a sleek lion lurked around the corner and stalked the empty street. Each pad of his terrible paws composed the rhythm of a foreboding dirge. His ribs protruded hungrily, undulating through his amber fur with each step. Guttural threats emerged from deep in his throat as he lolled his mighty head back and forth as though patrolling the streets. For a split moment, Clarity thought she saw the ironic predator flash his unforgiving eyes in her direction.

“Fern?” Clarity quavered with a hard blink. “It… it wasn’t a dream.”
…