The Red Sky

• Keeley-louise Dickinson, Grade 6, Mt St Particks Primary
• Short Story
• 2012

3rd in the 'Far Out 2012' competition

The sky was red......
and everyone knew what that meant. People prophesized in the 2000’s, then people worried in the 3000’s. But no-one knew exactly when it would happen.
Sirens wailed throughout the city like a pack of vicious dogs and people were panicking. The date was 1/1/4000. It was at midnight that the sky had first begun to change. The authorities had tried to hide it, but it’s virtually impossible to hide the end of the world. Medicine men in tribes thought it was the fault of the white people, and they were partially right. In fact, machines were the cause of the chaos, drills to be exact.
History tells that in the years 2010 to 2015 new greener sources of power were being invented. But those stories may only be legend, passed through the generations until no-one knew truth from tale. The elders (people aged 300 to 400 years) raised their shrivelled eyebrows and smiled in a knowing way when asked about the coming apocalypse. The young children understood, but still treated it like a game, pretending that they were great warriors and that the sky was filled with the blood of their slain enemies.
On January 13 threatening red clouds rolled slowly in from the west. As they drew closer, everyone prayed and watched them, prayed that it was just one of the usual storms. But this storm was anything but normal. This storm was deadly. This storm was malevolent. This storm was a killer.
Bloodthirsty hailstones dropped from the sky like red cannonballs. Their sheer size was unheard of! Nowhere in history had a storm like this ever occurred.That could mean only one thing, the end was coming.
Lightning seared the sky and thunder shook the world’s foundations to its roots. There was no escape.
After a week the storm cleared, revealing the devastation it had wrought. People, men and women and children, lay dead in the streets. Bodies of every shape and size littered the parks, and throughout all the homes was the smell of rotting meat. No longer were the cities filled with honking horns and angry shouts. Silence ruled the earth............and.........
the sky was blue.