Tales from the Flashback: "And Let Loose the Beasts of Prey"

Erik peered out the window at the corpse, noticing how the falling snow was beginning to cover it, as it had his forgotten toys, and noticing, too, that the monsters, the velociraptors, which bore nothing in common with the plush toys he had in his bedroom, were nowhere to be seen. Nor were the lights of his father’s car—or anything, for that matter; there was just the corpse (one hand of which seemed to reach for the sky like a twisted, dead tree branch) and the snow, which had whited out everything, rendered the world void.

“… this speaks for the most troubling aspect of what scientists are calling ‘the Flashback’: the sudden disappearance of people all over the world, including entire families …”

He looked at the sky, at the ceiling of snow clouds, amidst which the lights mentioned on the TV pulsed and glowed, bleeding in and out of each other, shifting colors, none of which he recognized, and knew in that instant—the instant before the raptor came crashing through the glass with its splayed feet first—that nothing would ever be the same; that he would never see his father and sister again and would never return to school and would never, ever be a boy, not even for an instant. And then the raptor did come, and he was knocked backward against the floor with a violence he could not have imagined, and after a moment there was a flurry of gunshots which blew the back of the animal’s head apart so that its full weight fell upon him and he was spattered with blood and brains. And the last thing he saw before blacking out completely was the monster’s dying eye, which stared into his own, an eye which contained in it the same colors as the lights in the sky—until they, too, faded and became as the dead.