[For some background on these stories, please see this post [link] over at my blog.]
Brainstormer prompt: Madness / Rotting / Downtown City (Word count: 250)
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“The Destroyer is nigh! He approaches!” At the junction of First and Main, The Harbinger rang his handbell, announcing Wolfe City’s doom. “Leave now if you’d live. No mercy awaits.”
“Look at him out there,” Clara said to Dolly in her lap. “Hasn’t been payin’ attention to his surroundings, has he?” She peered through the paneless window frame of a firebombed nail salon. “Do us a favor, Destroyer, and nullify this rubble.”
The doll, polyester batting poking through stitching that once held button eyes, said nothing.
The bell rang on, as it had throughout the three-days’ long proclamation. “Be gone if you’d not be destroyed. Stay to rejoin the void. The choice is yours.”
Since morning, people had been leaving their squattingplaces in the surrounding ruins; most pelted The Harbinger with rocks as they left. Ben Carter, the ex-physician who drank to unconsciousness every night, surprised Clara by departing, too. She expected he’d’ve welcomed eternal nothingness.
“Stay or go, Dolly?” Clara thrashed the doll against the floor when it failed to respond. “Now you’ve lost an arm, haven’t you? Well, if you’re not going to ask me please to pick it up, I shan’t.”
“‘Last call,’ said the barman,” The Harbinger bellowed.
“Fact is, Dolly, you’d only slow me down.” After setting the doll on the windowsill to blindly face its demise, Clara gathered her treasures—hair ribbons, a mummified canary, 60 Days to a Commanding Vocabulary—and joined the exodus west.
–30–