Purple Eclipse

Purple Eclipse The mist came at six in the evening. It rolled in from the southern skyline the color of a bruise—slow, even, unstoppable—and it didn't behave like anything the wind had ever carried. The dogs went silent. The birds fell out of the sky. The people who breathed it in stopped being people. Li Yang was twenty-three, living with the old couple who'd pulled him off a street corner as an infant, fixing radios for spare cash. The only unusual thing about him was the pale purple birthmark on the back of his neck—the one that sometimes went warm for no reason. By morning, the old couple were gone. The apartment was wrecked. And Li Yang couldn't remember any of it. Just powder on the floor. Fine, violet, dusted across the wood where he'd been standing. He didn't have time to figure out what had happened before his childhood friend showed up at the door—bloodied, limping, having walked across the entire dead city to reach him. And then they had to move, because the things in the mist weren't the only things hunting, and the powder on Li Yang's floor wasn't the only thing that didn't make sense. Something woke up when the world ended. Something that had been waiting in the spaces between things, in the dark behind the shape of the world. It wore Li Yang's hands when he wasn't looking. It spoke in a voice he couldn't remember hearing. And it had plans for him that had nothing to do with being human. They were heading south. The roads were full of things that used to be animals. The shelters were full of things that used to be people. And Li Yang was starting to understand that the mist wasn't the disaster. It was the door. And the door was already open.