Situation: you are being followed in a deserted city

Detail: you have a laptop with you

Complication: there is someone accompanying you

Objective: you must save the one you love

~~~

The sand dunes that lay around the wasted city were always crumbling, making it nearly impossible to get out. The buildings were dilapidated, and filled with sand as well as dead weeds and other dying plants. Nothing was alive here. Not until we showed up.

Despite the fact that I often work alone, I ended up following the dark-haired moron standing next to me as we surveyed the remnants of the city. I was surprised that we'd managed to get up as many floors as we did without there being a lack of stairwell or something falling down around us. It was a large city, tall buildings that were once skyscrapers leaving their hacked off tops in the sky. The fading echoes of screams of the people who lived here once ebbing away in the sand as it continued to sink the city further into its desert clutches. We had to get out of here before we, too, died with this city.

Or before he found us.

The only reason the dark haired man beside me was tagging along was because he knew of the Dark One. He was a person, or a being, a phantom, a something. He dressed in all dark clothing, and moved at the pace of someone walking rather slowly. He had been following me ever since my fiance was carried off after the explosion. What many were sure was the end of the world had occurred, and the mutations along with the strange occurrences don't make anything better. The dark haired man, his name is Matt, knew of him. He had all these conspiracies based off of older books, legends that told us of this great end. He knew of it all before it even began and was prepared. He wasn't, however, prepared to run off with some random girl into the desert when the Dark One invaded the village they coincidentally happened to be staying at together as a break from travels.

Despite Matt's warnings, the villagers ignored him, and I would've too had I not seen that Dark One right after my fiance was carried off. I believed him, and we ran, only to look back several minutes later to find the evening sky lighting up with explosions and flames. From then, we continued running, travelling, telling our stories and learning who the other was, and what their business was after this casual ending of the world. It wasn't explosive, apocalyptic ,or anything like it had hyped up to be. It just created mutations and creatures far beyond imagination; some that even had a bone to pick with my fiance.

Matt had nothing better to do so he tagged along instead, telling me of how he came to find these readings and myths, tying them to truth just days before the end had officially hit. Some meteor that was predicted to fall out of orbit did, but about 200 years earlier than scientists predicted, and no one expected it. The result was lots of death, lack of food, and the terrifying creatures we thought we once knew.

The cities had been reduced to dust and ashes mostly, and a few were like the one we were standing in now. Only the place we were in was once Chicago, and it was not a desert city. That meteor had really done some damage to this planet.

I followed Matt's finger as he pointed towards the west, looking down at his compass and checking the laptop that I was holding. It was the one thing I had left of my fiance, and I had come to find out soon after his disappearance, or kidnapping, that he had installed a tracking device on it and himself. I'd been following him ever since, his little red dot residing somewhere in the west. Part of me wondered how he knew what was going to happen, and how he knew to install trackers on the one piece of equipment that wasn't going to explode in the fire; he built it himself to withstand anything. I knew, however, that I wouldn't get these answers until I found him.

An explosion from behind us made us both jump, and Matt and I sprinted across the barren floor of the building to the other side, all of the walls being ripped out as they had once been glass. We stared down through the streets, buried under the sand, and located the fire. It was distant in the city, but it only meant that the Dark One was getting closer.

It was time to move.

....

So, I was thinking of inputting my Idea Leaks as well into this book; they're basically just my bits of writing inspired at random, no real category or anything. Otherwise, they just may be prompts like this! 

Let me know what you think!

Have yourselves a frantastic week!

~Jay