This came out of a writing exercise while the Plot Medics were away enjoying themselves in the wilds of Scotland (thus the late posting of this week's flash - we were Beyond Broadband). The exercise involved taking three pictures at random from a stock of images and writing for 20 minutes, including all three images in the story. I got a woman in a red dress, a young man perched on a framework seeking something in the distance, and...well, you'll see.
A Storm is Coming (996 words)
“I keep expecting someone to shout, “Unmask, Unmask!” The woman in the red dress complained.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” Her companion, a chunky, middle aged man, danced quite well, but the woman in red, whose name was Gwynneth, was beginning to realise he was a bore, at least by her rather exacting standards. She didn’t want to be stuck with him all night. “Edgar Allen Poe? The Mask ofthe Red Death?” He looked blank.
"Is that something else we're supposed to be worried about?" He said. "The Red Death? I thought what with all this.." he waved at the shuttered windows, "we had enough problems."
"Never mind," Gwynneth said. "But you never know, do you? Everyone's been talking about climate change for years, but I don't think anyone expected this, either."
"I certainly didn't," he said, his tone indicating that his very lack of expectation should have prevented any of this from happening, if the world were properly organised.
Gwynneth excused herself to go find a drink.
The bar staff had obviously decided to go for broke – they’d just loaded a table with everything in the cellar and scarpered, God knew where to; it wouldn’t be outside, at any rate.
Gwynneth poured herself a generous glass of a fairly decent merlot that the scavenging hordes had missed, and looked around for anyone interesting. She had no idea how long she was goingto be stuck here, and with the television reception erratic verging on nonexistent, and consisting mostly of weather reports, there was no point sitting in her room.
She couldn’t see anyone she fancied talking to. It was just her luck, she thought, to be caught at a hotel largely given over to a conference of timeshare salespeople. Several had already tried to interest her in property in Greenland.
The only other people seemed to be a stag-night, one of whose guests had tried to grope her but had been so drunk he had missed, and a small, morose group of car-salesmen, who were huddled in a corner drinking away the last of their wages and hoping to avoid being spotted by any of the other trapped guests. She only knew they were car-salesmen because she had seen them arriving with another man, who in a moment of drunken fury, had jumped onto a table, told everyone what he did, and started ranting that it wasn’t his fault and why did everyone blame him, he was just trying to make a living?
The remaining hotel staff – there were still a few around at that point – had bundled him out, but she was pretty certain at least one of them had put the boot in, and she hadn’t seen the man since.
Gwynneth wandered out of the badly decorated and rather chilly ballroom and down a side corridor, pushed open an anonymous white-painted door and found a set of worn-carpeted stairs. For lack of anything better to do, she went up them.
The patchy paint and dull colours seemed to suggest that these were staff quarters. Further along, she could hear a much livelier party than the one downstairs.
No harm in trying, she thought. She still had the rest of the merlot, it might act as a party-passport. She glanced at a window as she passed; the flat middle-of-nowhere landscape was already darkening under its fuzzy orange haze of pollution.
The room was crammed with people in the hotel’s blue and lavender uniforms, and several in the white of porters, cleaning staff and cooks. In the middle of the room, an iron staircase led up to a roof opening. Several people were clustered around it, looking up.
It was still open. Gwynneth raised her eyebrows, and pushed her way through the crowd. Despite the fact that it was obvious from her dress, no-one seemed to notice or care that she was a guest.
She drained her glass, paused for a moment, then shoved the corked bottle in her bag and climbed the narrow stairs onto the roof. The sky looked ill and bruised. Against it, she could see some kind of iron framework where a young man was perched, peering south. People were yelling at him to come down.
“We’re shutting the hatch if you don’t,” someone shouted.
“Just a minute,” he yelled back. “I want to see if I can spot them.”
But the wind must have changed. The first toad caught him on the back of the neck. The few people still on the roof screamed and scrambled down the stairs as he flailed and lost his balance, tipped forward, and held on with one hand, legs kicking. He just managed to catch a foothold when the rest of the stormfront came in, and toads began to pelt from the sky, splatting against the roof.
People were screaming to shut the hatch, shut the hatch. “Oh for Christ’s sake,” Gwynneth said. She pushed through the yelling, arguing mass and ran up to the top step, and held out her arms. “Jump! I’ll catch you!” He looked at her panic-stricken and his foot slid from the railing. She tried to catch his flailing legs but they were too high up. “Come on!”
He dropped, right onto her, knocking her back down the steps into the room below. A dozen people slammed the roof hatch shut, while more stamped on the few toads that had fallen through. The noise of them hitting the roof was like wet thunder.
Gwynneth, winded, dragged herself out from under the young man. A toad had landed in her cleavage. She picked it out, and looked at it. It looked back with bright, gold eyes. All around people were screaming and killing them. “Poor thing,” she said to the toad. “It’s not your fault, is it?”
She got up, took the wine out of her handbag, left it on a table, and carefully put the toad in instead. Then she left the party, shutting the door behind her.
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