I was now looking at the fiery man as he floated above the traffic. People shouted out of their cars telling him to get out of the road, but he simply silehem by sending his ray into the engine, blowing the car up from the ihis happened several more times before people learo be quiet and stay quiet, and then the fiery man turo the apartment plex. He looked with mild amusement at where the car had shattered the wall, and raised his left hand and threw it downwards. I saw the ray of light e from the sun and plummet into the apartment building, and I saw the bomb go off as it struck the top apartments. It was like witnessing the detonation of the atom bomb from across the street from ground zero. I saw the mushroom cloud rise into the air, and I saw that it was entirely made of light, and as suo colteral damage would befall our fiion. I also felt no bst of air or pressurized dust, and the light disappeared within a mihe apartment building had been pletely disied, and no one was left alive. The cars that had been driving on the road had survived, probably because they had not been hit directly by the bst. The drivers and passengers had not, of course. I saw the cars flip over as they made their st movements pletely untrolled by drivers. I saw piles of dust that had once been humans fall out of the cars as they turned over each other and crashed into everything that they could. Still none came my way, although a few did clear the hole in the fehey sailed past me as I kneeled in the grass like the praying mb about to be sacrificed so the harvest could be fine and fallow for the ing year. As they moved past, I imagihat they were the other sheep who had bee running through this p order to be sacrificed along with me. I thought that the fiery man was the torch lighter, and he would soon send his gift that way for the gods to listen to. I did not pray, and so I stared at him. He turned and looked towards me, and he seemed genuinely surprised that I was there, either because it was unusual for people to have survived this long or because I did not have superpowers. Either way, he did sacrifice the mbs, which had been galloping for some time. Some of them had been turned all the way around, had found themselves in holes the size of small businesses, or simply stopped due to some malfun. The rays of light that came from his hands passed over my head, and I threw myself to the ground to try and avoid everything that was happening. I felt the car-mbs fall apart, their meical bleats screaming through the ndscape as they were destroyed. I imagihat they thought in their st moments about their short lives, and they wondered if it had been a good one and if it was honorable to die in this way, or if it was honorable to die in general. I felt the st of the car-mbs disappear. I looked up at the fiery man and saw that his attention had been turned elsewhere, and he shot a ray of light towards something in the distance. Slowly I heard the whine of a fighter jet e closer, and I heard it crash into a field somepce distant. The fiery man had kept his attention towards the dire of the jet, and shot a small ray that way. I imagihe pilot had ejected, and now was dead. The fiery man floated down to me and I saw his eyes for the first time. They burned bright, almost like miniature suns, and I could tell that the fire reading to his brain very slowly. I raised my hooves in a half-hearted surrender, and the fiery man made a chug hat seemed to arise from nowhere Earthly. It seemed to arise from the bad pces that no one wao think about, the alleys, the rooms with a screaming child, the houses only poputed by a woman and her friends who did not really exist, and who would at any point. He raised the voices of the living damhe people who had a stake iy on a teicality but did not actually own any of it. I smiled and bleated at him, trying to tell him that I really would like to live today, and this form of mine was actually just a mistake and I would surely transform bato a human in no time, and to prove it I shouted, and somehow a human voice came out.
“Please don’t kill me! I don’t deserve it, unless you think I do, in which case I probably do…”
The fiery man examined me up and down, back to front. He read my life like a book, examining all my as, past and present, and decided that no, I did not deserve it. I would live for now. The fiery maurned into a ball of energy and flew off into space, and I still did not see Sarah.
The cars started to move again, and the men who were driving the cars were still angry. I hadn’t realized how lovely the silence had been until that very moment when the screaming and shouting started back up. I figured I could y ears and eyes again and just start waiting again, maybe listen to a song that no one else could hear. I could have screamed, but I decided against it because it wouldn’t ge anything. I instead watched as the same ses happened as before, as the cars tore each other apart with their gigantic metal mouths. I figured that the fighting would never be over, because there was nothing to fight for. If you could vince a group of people to fight over nothing for no reward, they would fight forever. These people had been vio fight for eternity as prices and parking spots. I ehem and hated them. It was a quick life for them, one full of a and surprise, but I hated them because they were so simple and mediocre that this was all they knew. Except, of course, for 50% off deals on things they didn’t hey khat as well. I imagihem in the rain looking up at the stars and thinking, “What will I buy tomorrow? Must it be the blue shirt, or ihe red one?” I admit that I was at fault here as well. I was guilty of buying and ing miserably bad food because I just wao spend some money. I regretted the things I did, especially because I was trying to stay thin, and I could not handle my cravings at some points. I took the mohat I had been carrying since I left the house out of my pockets, resisted the urge to eat it whole, and threw it away onto the ground. Some of it fluttered onto the road and I saw the cars tear them to shreds, and some of the more entrepreneurial of the drivers leaned out of the windows trying to get at them, and when they couldn’t, they swore and one even fell out of the window and caused another se.
I looked towards where the fiery man had gone. Based orail of smoke, it appeared he had goo the Sun and perhaps brighte just a little bit. It upset me that I had wao eat the money, for I was not a mb. I started to panic again, stupidly. Because being a human had saved my life, I thought that a fleeting desire made my entire being uable. But as I thought about it more and more, I thought about how good money really did taste, and I crawled over on the ground in order to tear into it. It really did taste good, really really good. The smooth cotton fvor, the greeure, the perfect bite. If humans khat it was made of cotton instead of paper, they would probably be more likely to eat it every now and then. And once a few started eating it, then it would go up to the extremely popur who followed every crazy health trend in order to appeal to everyone, and then everyone would see how good moasted.
I was interrupted by a tap on my shoulder. I turned around, my bloodshot eyes momentarily blinded by the Sun and then revealing a sheriff. He was aremely normal man. Light and patchy facial hair, blue eyes, extremely blue eyes, small crop of hair on his head. He was looking down at me, and from where I y, he appeared to be the most normal man in the world. He spoke to me in aremely normal voice as well.
“Hey honey, why are you doing that?”
He spoke in such a soft voice, so easygoing, that I thought he might have been a friend of mine from long ago.
“Have you seen my friend Sarah?”
The sheriff smiled at that, and I nearly gasped at the sound of my own voice. I had sounded so anding when I was yelling at the fiery man, but by that point my voice sounded childish, high but not feminine, and weak, so very weak. He looked down at me and spoke again.
“No sweetie, I haven’t seen your friend. I think I find her, if you just e with me.”
I agreed, and obediently followed him. He took my arm in his and walked towards the road with me in tow. I asked him quite sweetly, “Where did all the men in the apartments go?” He stood there, stunned, and then said with a hint of suspi, “They’re all still there, ’t you see them?”
“No, I ’t. The apartments were destroyed by a man.”
The sheriff released me from his grip and shoved me back towards the forest. He then drew his gun while looking quite scared, a a message through his radio.
“Dangerous child, actually, more than a child. Probably mentally inpetent in some way. Do I have permission to shoot?”
The voi the radio crackled out, telling the sheriff, “Yes, permission to shoot is granted.”
He raised the gun and shot at my chest. There were no bullets in the gun. The sheriff messaged through the radio, “Adversary jammed my gun, do I have permission to engage in hand to hand bat?”
“Of course. Kill it if you have to.”
The sheriff threw his gun at me and began charging towards me, with the voice yelling, “Kill, kill, kill!” I noticed that the voice sounded very robotid not altogether human. I rao the corpse of the burned man and pulled the k of his head where I had left it. I saw the sheriff pause, and then tio charge forwards, probably at the behest of the voi the radio. I was about the same height as him, so I grabbed his halfhearted attempt at a hairstyle and ran him through the neck with the knife. He grasped his neck for a moment, then colpsed to the ground. His blood covered me, and covered the knife in a thick coating. On the road all the cars stopped moving, and they did not create a crash. They turo face me, and they stared at me for some time, their eyes and mouths unmoving in mog unterror. They knew what I had done, and now it would happen to me. Their mouths curled up in a devilish smile, and they all winked one eye at a time, off and on, off and on. They had no actual problems with murder, it was just easy to cim self defense and murder me at a time like this. They charged forwards, engines revving and grass tearing uhe wheels. I decided to jump on top of the first car that reached me, its driver yelling out an expletive and turning his car into another in order to try and kill me. Instead of killihe maneuver killed everyone else. The motion caused a wreck that totaled every car that was streaming into the wilds, and I saw heads sptter against the windshield and men die ht right then and there. I jumped over the wrecks and ran away from everything, only falling on the way down and not getting hit by anything while I sped away. I found refuge behind a tree, where I saw men fighting as they were getting pasted by cars, still vihat they were in the right. I thought that I would wait irees for a while, at least until all of these people died and it was safe for me to e out again. I slumped against the trunk, listening to the age behind me.
