Prompt Lost
Going Dark
One night, decades ago, I was driving through southern Florida, near the swamps and the still, brackish waters where the manatees live.
Earlier that day i had bought fireworks at South of the Border. You might know the place. It’s a chintzy Mexican themed roadside stop on the southern edge of South Carolina.
Fireworks are totally legal in South Carolina, and at South of the Border you can buy just about every kind you can imagine, at a steep roadside premium of course.
I loaded up on roman candles and bottle rockets, stuffed them in my trunk, and continued on south, down toward nowhere.
That night, I’m driving around near the swamp land, on these dark, empty roads. I’m looking for a place to dump my fireworks, cause at a road-stop in Tampa, I googled firework laws in Florida and found out I was committing a crime just having them in my trunk. Fuck South of the Border.
It was a moonless night, with thick clouds in the sky, and swarms of bugs smashing into my windshield as though they were making a concerted effort to blind me with their kamikaze assaults.
I came to a corner and ran a red light. There was no one else on the road for miles and the damn thing wouldn’t change. But right as I went through, a cop turned on his lights and started coming up behind me.
I don’t know what came over me. I really don’t do this kind of thing – hadn’t up to that point in my life and never did again – but for some reason, I floored it.
I raced away from that cop as fast my crappy old engine would go. It must have taken the cop by surprise because he took awhile to speed up. Maybe he almost decided not to give chase. But eventually he did, and I could see the hint of his blue and red lights a quarter of a mile behind me.
Now I’m panicking, right? I’m running from the police with illegal cargo in my trunk. How the hell do you get out of that situation?
But then inspiration struck and I acted on it. I came around a tight corner, almost lost control, and drove right into the shoulder, right down towards the water, so my drivers side wheels were just slightly touching it. I shut off the engine and all my lights, and just sat there, in the pitch blackness, waiting.
The impenetrable darkness of the road was touched, at first by a hint, and then with the full blown glare of the cop’s roof lights. Then the police car itself sped past, a colorful blur of danger slicing through the muddy air and disappearing down the road, trailing a comet’s tail of carnival light behind it.
I waited until it was pitch black again, popped my trunk, got out, dumped my fireworks, and then peeled off in the opposite direction, my days of crime firmly behind me.
Why am I telling you all this?
16 months ago we received the first word of a large object flying toward our planet. Three months after that, a NASA probe I was lead engineer on discovered the object was a perfect cube. One month later a signal was detected emanating from the cube, and all hell broke loose.
We have no idea what the cube is , who made it, what signals it is sending out, or to whom. But when we confirmed that, in less than 12 months, it was on a course to do a fly by of our planet, that story of mine came to mind.
Starting in a month, and lasting for six months after that, as the probe makes its fly by, planet Earth is going to turn off the engine and sit by the side of the interstellar road with it’s lights off.
It’s going to be extraordinarily difficult to pull off, but every country on Earth is on board. Folks aren’t happy about it – can’t blame them, living in the dark ages for half a year – and they’re only gonna get less happy. People will die, and it weighs heavy on me.
But in the end, given the alternative possibilities, this is the only logical path. The alternative is getting caught. Caught being alive in the great black emptiness. Caught by a civilization exponentially more technologically advanced then our own.
That’s a risk we simply can’t take.
If You Enjoyed This Story – Or Any Of The Hundreds Of Other Legends From The Multiverse – And Want To Give A Dollar To The Madman Behind The Curtain Who Writes Them All:
Subscribe to the RSS feed or leave a comment anywhere on the r/LFTM subreddit with “!subscribeme” or “subscribeme!”, and you’ll receive a notification whenever a new story or continuation is posted.
READ MORE FLASH FICTION
| ACTION | APOCALYPTIC | DARK | ESTABLISHED UNIVERSE | FANTASY |
| FUNNY MAYBE | HORROR | MISC | WTF IS THIS? | SAD |
| SCIENCE FICTION | SCIENCE FANTASY | TWIST ENDING | RANDOM |
READ LONGER STORIES
| THE DEMON’S CANTOS | INCIDENTAL SUPERHERO |
| BENEATH | THE HUMANITY SAGA |
| THE TRAVELER | I, LYCANTHROPE |