Letterbomb by Solomon Blaze

This has got to be faster than the speed of sound...I think as I carve my way through the atmosphere, back to Scabhampton. It takes less than two minutes for me to arrive; you can always smell it when you enter my hometown – and I mean really smell it.

- Which is lucky, because it doesn’t look like it did when I left...three days ago...

Hovering above the streets at this height, I can easily make out the centre of town; an epic riot has broken out. I follow the stream of bedlam beneath me and quickly realise that the entire town is ablaze with the fires of what I have to believe is more than just frenzied chaos.

‘Holy shit!’ I shout to the wind.

~ Wow, I guess Shane was telling the truth... ~ Echo chimes through the walls of my mind.

‘But...’ I pause, absorbing the distant site of my home being ransacked – My home! I think, shuttling my thoughts into a torrent of paranoid horror; shuttling myself half a mile across the sky to my own neighbourhood.

My house is as untouched; thank fuck!

I drop myself onto the concrete in front of my driveway with a thud and flash round to the back door; I can’t see anyone and the sliding door is obviously locked, so I telekinetically smash the glass pane –

- Penn steps out from behind the fridge the second I step over the threshold, brandishing a bread knife and screaming like a banshee – for a second, before realizing it’s me and dropping the knife on the tiled floor, looking absolutely flabbergasted, ‘Brother!’ he yells, running towards me and constricting me with his manual worker’s arms, ‘we were sure you had to be dead!’ he carries on, holding me at arm’s length to get a good look at me; has it really only been three days...?

Ignoring all of the truly important factors here, I say ‘Penn, what’s happened to the city? Where is everyone?’

‘The others are all upstairs. I stayed down here voluntarily....Do you seriously not know what’s going on...?’ Penn looks puzzled.

‘No!’ I shout desperately, flaying my arms to the side like this is some young couple’s hysterical argument.

‘They know dude...’ Penn says cryptically, ‘they know everything.’

Pure terror cascades over me with cold realization; oh, shit...