Story 1241: No Lights, No Mercy

Blackout City earned its name on the night the grid fell.

Miles of once-bustling streets lay silent now—no neon signs, no buzzing streetlamps, only darkness thick as fog. But for the survivors, it wasn’t the absence of light that terrified them.

It was what moved within it.

Riley crept down 12th Avenue, her flashlight sputtering in her hand. She had two batteries left. That meant one more hour of vision before the dark swallowed her whole.

She pressed her back to a broken storefront, ears trained on the silence.

That’s when she heard them.

Click-click-click. The unmistakable sound of bone on concrete. Not footsteps, not claws—something worse. Something deliberate.

She killed the light.

The clicking stopped.

For a moment, she hoped it had gone. That maybe the dark had exaggerated it. But then she felt it.

Breath. Hot and rancid, close to her ear.

She ran.