Good evening, I hope everyone has had a great Sunday! I am excited to be continuing my daily writing, although I might tweak a little bit how I do it, especially since I have continued to build on the habit of daily writing.
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Prompt: It was just a box of candy. But it created quite a commotion.
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic
Source: 10 Minute Writing Exercises Try these 10 minute writing exercises.
Time Spent: 20 minutes
Word Count: 575
Prompt: It was just a box of candy. But it created quite a commotion.
Grace Nial had been leading her small band of survivors for three years. It had started as her, her teenage soon, and young couple from the same apartment complex, but it had grown into a group that usually was a little more than 100 strong at any given time. They moved from town to town, with long pauses in the spaces in between, collecting supplies. Their wandering had one aim, surviving, with the stop in towns just to collect supplies and see if they could gain any information of what was going on.
It was unclear what had happened, but they awoke to a world in chaos and something happening to anyone in any kind of population concentration. Only those that were out camping, or where close enough to flee into the wilderness, seemed to have been spared. What happened to the rest of the people was unclear, as even their bodies were gone by the time to the survivors hesitantly approached their former homes. Grace’s hundred or so survivors were not the only such group, people seemed to be group up into small bands such as that, largely giving each other a wide birth. They also stayed away from large cities, as several of them at least seemed to be garrisoned by something, and would shoot and any who approached and refused any attempt to contact.
Grace’s band had just left the small town of Versailles and was heading out into the forest lands around when they came upon a clearing, at the center of which was a strange box, almost a chest. It was approached and test carefully, but when it was opened, it contained brightly wrapped candy. They had often enjoyed, admittedly stale, candy in towns, but these were like none had ever seen before. They setup camp in the clearing and sent out scouts to see if anyone was nearby or ascertain that it was some kind of trap.
People kept getting drawn to the chest, mesmerized by the colorful wrappers and the wonderful smells that came from it. Several years of cautious living kept this merely as fascination, until someone ventured close enough to determine that there was only enough of the candy for about 2/3 of their current group number.
Grace and her son had been out scouting when this was discovered. They returned later that day to see the camp a chaotic ruin, with the dead bodies of several of their comrades. The box was tipped over and empty. One of the wounded still in camp had relayed the revelation of the number of candies, and how quickly everything devolved into accusations, name calling, and then violence. A little way outside of camp, they found one of their other companions, candy wrapper clutched in his hand, dead and rapidly disintegrating.
Grace and her son fled, stopping only long enough to get the supplies they would need from their camp, joined by a few other survivors and those that had been out scouting. They did not stop until they were far deeper in the wilderness. What had they witnessed? Was that what had doomed the world? Who had made these strange candies and left them in the middle of no where? Those were all questions that Grace was beginning to wonder if she even wanted to know the answer to, especially since something had compelled her to put two of the wrapped ‘candies’ in her bag as she fled.
A fun little post-apocalyptic story, as much as such stories are fun, and I hope you find this one so and leave some comments!
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I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day; you get the chance to do or experience something creative, and I’ll catch you all on the next one!
– Jon
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