Author: Barnaby Taylor

Author and Academic

The Eleventh Film – Horror/Science Fiction Flash Fiction Series

windy desert

The Eleventh Film XIV

The world looks small now from above and beyond, just another doomed star earmarked for destruction.
The years that followed the angels’ response saw the world’s vitality seep away.
Seas froze over. Temperatures decreased. Glaciers spread. The world’s surface grew a new skin. A tetchy and desperate dermis. Unwilling or unable to nurture any more.
It was like this for a lifetime and then we lost contact with the Library and everyone knew that this truly was the end of days.

The Eleventh Film – Horror/Science Fiction Flash Fiction Series

lumiere 1

The Eleventh Film XIII

And so the world begged. Like the world’s last radio show. A montage of lips, mouths and eyes.  The sounds of no hope.

We are very sorry.

Isn’t there someone who can stop this?

Queríamos envejecer juntos.

Who is in charge ‘round here?

I can’t find my mammy.

Je ne veux pas mourir.

Can we talk about this?

Are you’s all angels like?

What did we do to deserve this?’

Are you kind-of like aliens?

How dare you!

Please don’t do this to us.

My wife died this morning.

We’re not afraid.

I think my parents are still alive.

Et absterget Deus omnem lacrimam ab oculis eorum. Mors ultra non erit neque luctus neque clamor neque dolor erit ultra quae prima abierunt.

I refuse to say anything.

And then she died.

I have always been ultra-compliant with my taxes.

… for my Bible tells me so …

Is this an advert?

And no one helped him, he just lay dead in the street.

Isn’t this illegal?

So this is what the Rapture is really like?

How long have I got?

Say goodbye, children.

Did I miss the referendum?

Quanto àqueles que rejeitam a fé, eu os castigarei com terrível agonia neste mundo e no Além, nem terão ninguém para ajudar.

What happens if we all say no?

You absolute bastards.

But she was too young …

If only I had told him earlier.

If anyone is listening, please do something. Tell the world what is happening here.

Ég er svo ein.

When you walk through a storm …

I don’t have any shoes.

She meant the world to me.

After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands.

I need a drink.

I am so so scared.

She was only a wee thing.

Is this gonna hurt?

Has anyone seen my brother?

What happens next?

Bonvolu, ni petegas vin. Bonvolu forigi la infanon. Ni feliĉe mortos, sed ne ŝin, bonvolu ne!

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Once a week the monsters come.

They hunt all night.

In the morning they’re gone.

That gives me six days to get ready.

Then they come back again.

When the world is destroyed by a weekly attack of mysterious monsters, a young girl and her father are forced to fight for survival. Once her father has been seriously injured defending their house, the young girl must find a way to get them both to safety before the monsters return.

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The Eleventh Film – Horror/Science Fiction Flash Fiction Series

glitch 1

The Eleventh Film XII

We should beg, said some. Plead for our very existence. We need do nothing of the sort, said others. We have been too weak for too long. We should engage with them on equal terms. Someone thought he could cut a deal. Others disagreed. We have never left to bargain with, they argued. What could we ever offer in return for our lives?
There was no answer to this question.
The angels saw the distress flare generated by the bees.It was faint and inconsequential. A sputter in the void.
An ancient dial tone rang out in the darkness. It sang like a song from the grave. It was the angels. They had deemed to respond.
A broken desktop computer flickered into life. A grudgingly grainy image formed.
This was it, some thought. This was the chance to renegotiate the terms of our demise. The world was expectant. The world’s survivors held their collective breath.
But the low-res response only further served to undergird the hopelessness of the world’s plight.
The ultraviolet light killed the hive stone dead.
The angels were in no mood to parlay.

The Eleventh Film – Horror/Science Fiction Flash Fiction Series

glitch 1

The Eleventh Film XI

Someone suggested that we simply ask the angels what it is was that the world had done to warrant such attention.
If we do this then we might know, they said.
And if we know then we might find favour with them by stopping doing what it was we did to incur their wrath in the first place.
But how to go about this? The digital was now an obsolete concept. That whole new world was now just more relics and ruins.
Millions of dead devices piled high like cairns and contours. Redefining eyelines in every direction. All those memories and images and files lost forever.
The world hung this particular hope on a beehive.
An elderly beekeeper suggested that his last remaining hive might be able to generate sufficient electrical charge to reach out to the angels. It was their particular sensitivity to electrical current that made them an unlikely source of succour.
Bees and flowers are oppositely charged. Without even trying, bees build up a positive charge on their bodies as they fly. Flowers are negatively charged and that makes their pollen stick to bees through static electricity. But the electric field is more than just that static charge.
If such a field could be generated once more then perhaps the angels would see the the tiny drop of energy and interpret it as a signal for parley.

The Eleventh Film – Horror/Science Fiction Flash Fiction Series

windy desert

The Eleventh Film X

It was always thought that certain corpses were offered a special dispensation by which divine intervention would prevent them decomposing as a sign of their evident holiness.
Saints and knights. Kings and clerics. Holy corpses used to inspire nations.
It was simpler then. Hierarchies were still in existence. Religion was a binary affair.
With all boundaries broken now, society had nothing to left to regulate itself with.
And in any case there were simply far too many corpses for any such distinctions to be relevant any more.
Any intervention now was far from divine. There was no purpose to such a distinction.
And so the survivors did what people have always done. They hid among the rubble. The constant reminders of collapse. The deluge of debris.

The Eleventh Film – Horror/Science Fiction Flash Fiction Series

glitch 1

The Eleventh Film IX

The scars that the Earth now bore could best be seen in the varied spores of decay. The shift from life to death is laid before us like a portrait of the end of the world.

Each mould sits heavy like so much paint on the canvas. Or hangs like a poisoned star in the sullen night.