FOG

FOG.

Until a couple years ago, I was a normal person, with a normal job, few but good friends and one or two ordinary goals, like a promotion or a new TV, but then something happened to me.

Life hit me in the guts: Almost all of my good friends died when they were together in a van hit by a drunk driver. Six people out of six billion people, nearly all my human contact with the world, lost in one minute.

The accident left a mark on me, the kind you can’t simple wash clean with counseling or a book. My depression, which I always had, become stronger, but I still could live a almost normal life. Then, less than a year later, my parents died in another car accident. This time I had to do the identification of the bodies, and I admit, I wasn’t strong enough to overcome that. My life went down-hill; I abandoned my job and become a shut-in, living in the house where I grow up, in the darkness. My inheritance granted me the freedom to live without working or having any human contact.

Everything, from food to tooth paste was ordered from shops that did home delivery.

As usual, I spent many nights awake, incapable of sleeping, and soon I become fond of darkness. The absence of light was pleasant, and never scary. Without ways to keep my mind busy at those sleepless nights, I would sit near the window on the second floor, and watch the silent streets crossing below.

Drunks, couples, dogs and groups of teenagers, all of those parade in front of me in those streets, and I observed them with interest.

One night, past midnight, a dense fog like no other I ever saw appeared suddenly. Soon the street bellow me disappeared. The fog was heavy, it kept bellow the street lamps, so I could see shadows moving inside it from time to time.

Those strange shadows look like tall, silent men, but they sprinted in the fog like dogs playing. I was wondering how anyone could move so fast there without falling over his face, when the movement of those six or seven shadows stop suddenly. The last thing I saw was those shadows disappearing in the fog, like a crocodile sinking in the muddy water of a river.

Afraid, I hid behind a curtain and hold my breath, did they saw me?

No, what they saw was an elder woman walking her dog. I could see while the old woman entered the mist. Her dog, a little pug, strictly refused to follow, but the woman had no time for her rebellious dog and bend over to grab him. Was when the tiny dog bitted her furiously: the little dog barked, bitted and twisted himself out of the woman grasp.

I saw blood dripping of her hand, when the fog begun to move like it had a mind of its own. Soon the old lady was surrounded by fog, and I couldn’t see anything but her shadow. The other six or seven figures reappeared, silently surrounding the woman, and now they looked far bigger than before. Now they could be shadows of a bull, a raging bull.

With blinding speed they danced around the elder, in an inhuman and frightful spectacle, one of then got closer of her, and I could hear the screaming full of pain and fear.

It only made the shadows dance faster, then like a choreographed ballet, they all rushed over her at the same time. I heard a last dying call from her before the street become silent again.

I didn’t moved from where I was sit until the first sunlight bathed the street and the fog disappeared completely.

 More curious than precautions, I leaved my home, sprinting to the site where I saw the old lady for the last time. I searched inch by inch of the street but I couldn’t find any evidence her existence. No blood, no marks, nothing.

I was trying to convince myself that everything was just a dream, and was about to return to my house, when I saw the only, but undeniable proof that something strange and evil took place in front of my eyes:

A little dog, a pug, shivering in fear, his leash stuck in a branch of a bush. His white fur had a small red stain, the only thing left of a human being.

Fin.