When The Sky Rained Blood

Chapter 1

Arhaya was excited. So excited that she had forgotten her gloves at home, misplaced the book she had been halfway through, and tripped over her own suitcase, twice. Oh also, she had missed her bus.

Arhaya had turned 19 the previous month, and she had been given a spot in a camping trip organized by a local camping group, as a birthday gift from her parents. The group would be trekking and camping in the Himalayas, and the summer months were perfect for this expedition. She had prepped for this trip, gathering all the items she would need, plus training her stamina and strength. Everything was set and ready, but then when the big day arrived, everything went wrong, and now she was waiting at the bus station while the main group had gone on ahead. Her suitcase had been on the bus, but she and her backpack had been left behind.

‘Why does this happen to me!?’ she spoke to her reflection in the mirror of the empty public washroom. ‘All I wanted was a good camping trip. The Himalayas were calling my name! Now, the only thing calling my name are my parents who want me to come back home. Ugh.’ She splashed her face with cold water. Her phone buzzed in her bag, and she hurriedly wiped her hands on her jeans and spoke into the phone, ‘Hello? Yes, I’m so sorry. I was.. Yes! Really? You can do that? That will be amazing. Thank you so so much!’ She was smiling as she disconnected the phone and dialled her parents. The camp organizers had contacted another bus which would be going in the same direction, ferrying locals to and fro, and it had agreed to help Arhaya for a small price. She was going after all!

As she settled into her seat, she looked around the bus at her fellow passengers. There were 5 people; an old couple, a man reading a newspaper, and two women talking in low voices. Plopping her backpack into the seat beside her, she plugged in her earphones and put on her favourite playlist. Before long the bus started moving and all was peaceful.

A few hours later, she felt the bus starting up an incline. They’d finally reached the mountains! Excitement coursing through her, she sat up and opened her window, breathing in deeply. She really wanted to push her head and torso through the window and yell with delight. It was beautiful. Mountains to her right and to the front, a dense forest sloping away to her left and greenery everywhere. It was calm and serene. And then, there was a massive crash. The bus toppled to the left, and there was total chaos. Arhaya thought that she heard screams but everything was moving too fast to be sure. She was thrown towards the window and then all went black.

Her head was throbbing. Her eyes felt like they had been glued down. Everything just hurt. Arhaya managed to push herself up to her knees and took a moment to calm her rapidly beating heart. She didn’t know what was going on. ‘Rational thoughts only.’ She thought to herself. ‘Think this through. There was a crash, and I was thrown out. Of the window? I’m not sure. Get up now Arhaya, and look around. Get help.’ Talking to herself always seemed to work for her, and it did so this time as well. She stood up, a little shaky, her back sore, and right knee hurting like crazy. Brushing herself off, she checked for wounds. There were some scratches and scrapes along her arms and face, nothing major. Sighing, she looked around. She was some distance away from the road they had been travelling on. The bus was nowhere in sight, but according to the trail of damaged bushes, it had crashed through the woods and out of sight, the opposite side of the road. She decided to come up with a plan. She could walk up to the road and follow it till she reached civilization. But how far that was and how long that would take, she had no idea. She didn’t even have any supplies with her as of now, her backpack was in the bus. Suddenly she remembered her phone. ‘It must have fallen out somewhere here!’ she thought. Searching through the bushes, she finally found it. Slightly cracked, but working just fine. ‘Of course, there is no signal. Argh!’ she cursed.  Putting it in her back pocket, she continued to plan. She would first try to find the bus, and the other passengers. And then make her way back to the road with the others, and trek to safety. Unless the others had a better idea, of course!  ‘My trekking hiking whatever has started even before I reached camp lmao.’ And thinking so, she started walking, following the damaged foliage to the bus.  

The sight that greeted her was not a very promising one. The moment she stepped into the clearing that the bus had crashed its way to, all she could see were the bodies. The couple and the two women lay sprawled next to the bus. One of them had her neck grotesquely twisted. There was blood. Arhaya wanted to run, far far away. But she stood her ground. Barely daring to breathe, she checked the bodies for a pulse. There was none. All four were dead. There were still two more people though, and she felt hope bubble in her chest. Moving to the other side of the bus, she saw them. The driver’s head was smashed in, and the other man seemed to have crashed through the glass of the window, though his lower body remained stuck inside the bus. Shuddering, she checked them for any signs of life. Not finding it, she grabbed her backpack and sprinted. Running away. As far from this horrible place as she could.

She must have been running for 10 minutes, but it felt like hours. Winded, she fell to her knees. Breathing hard, she felt tears in her eyes. 6 people dead. She had just seen them alive and well, only a few hours back. ‘It’ll be okay. Just breathe, you’ll get through this.’ She spoke to herself. And then, suddenly, like a lightning bolt, it struck her. She had run in a random direction. Everything around her looked the same. Dense trees, similar bushes and shrubs, the sunlight barely reaching in. And it was only going to get darker as the sun sunk slowly. Groaning, she pulled herself back up and decided to start walking in the direction from which she had come. She was dreading every step it would take to reach the place of the crash. But this was the only way out. After a good half an hour of walking in what she though was a straight path, she realized that it was too dark to walk any further. Also, she was utterly lost.

And that’s when it happened. The wind picked up and her hair started whipping around her. Leaves got picked up off the forest floor and moved in crazy circles. The trees started swaying violently and she could hear thunder. She thought she could hear words. Focusing, she could make out distinct human voices. She was almost relieved until she realized that they were chanting something. ‘It’s a cult. It’s definitely a cult. And they’ve somehow summoned a hurricane.’ She screamed in her head. It was a crazy thing, but she couldn’t think of anything else at that time. Moving cautiously, she made her way towards the chorus of voices. She saw them standing in a clearing, several people in dark red clothing; robes that seemed to touch the floor and hoods to cover their faces. They were chanting in a language that didn’t make any sense to Arhaya, but she still listened. There was something magnetic, it seemed to pull her closer to them. She took a step, and then another. A few more steps and she’d be in plain view of those people. The next step she took felt different somehow. She couldn’t explain it, it was just different. Like stepping from the last step onto the floor and getting the feeling that you’re falling. That broke the trance she was in. Looking around wildly, she spotted a bush to her right, and hurriedly hid behind it. The circle of people hadn’t seen her yet, she thought. Or if they had, they didn’t show it.

That’s when all hell broke loose, as if hell hadn’t broken loose already. Out of nowhere, masked men appeared into the clearing. Dropping from trees, popping out from the forest floor, they were everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Moving fast, they fell on the circle of people as if they were hyenas hunting deer. Arhaya watched, shocked, as the black-clad group drew long blades which flashed in the moonlight, and slashed at the red-robed circle. For a second, Arhaya stood wondering where the moon had come from so suddenly, and why it was shining a brilliant blue instead of the usual yellow or white. Shaking that thought off, she focused on the scene unfolding in front of her. A total m******e. And then, one of the red-robed persons threw an entire fireball right in front of her eyes. Arhaya couldn’t believe it. It had definitely been a fireball. And it had definitely been conjured by the red-robed man, who lay limp in front of her. There was another bright streak, and she saw that the more of the red-robes had started to conjure flames and fireballs. Different colours and sparks flew all around, and it felt like a scene from some magic movie. She wanted to stay and watch it happen; it felt like another trance had trapped her. But it wasn’t safe. ‘And that was the understatement of the year.’ She laughed at herself, wondering if she had lost her mind. But just as she was about to move and run back to safety, she noticed a boy, right in the middle of the entire thing. He looked scared, disoriented. He was about her age, she estimated, and had messy hair that framed a pretty face. And then, the things she was seeing started to make sense. The red robes had made a tight circle around the boy, trying to keep him safe. The black clad guys were trying their best to break that circle, to get to the boy. To kill him, or take him. That boy was important, somehow.

Just as suddenly as it had started, the fighting seemed to stop. The red robes had fallen. Two of the black-clad were going around, checking for any signs of life, and slashing at random. The last black-clad was stalking his way to the boy, twirling his sword as he walked. Arhaya’s mind seemed to take an impulse decision. She had to save the boy. Blessing the camp leader for providing them with it, she pulled the emergency flares she had stashed in her backpack and struggled with them, her hands suddenly shaky. She couldn’t get the cap unscrewed even with brute force and lunged into her backpack to fish out her pocket knife. She slipped the knife into her pocket and pulled down the lever of the flares. Finally managing to light them up, she threw them at the black-clad men. One for the pair who was together, the other at the one who was walking towards the boy. Hoping that it would be enough of a distraction, she ran to the boy. As she ran, she could hear the shouts of the men. One of them had dived to the ground and rolled out of the way. Her plan had worked; the men had thought that one of the red-robes was alive and had attacked them. Still not daring to breathe properly, she reached the boy. Dragging him up, she pulled him with her and they ran into a thicket of trees.

As they ran, Arhaya could hear footsteps following after them. There was yelling and shouting, but all she focused on was putting one foot after the other. The boy had seemed to catch on to what was happening, and he ran alongside her, a determined look on his face. She couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to this boy. This pretty, good-looking boy with hair just waiting to be ruffled. ‘Now is not the time, ya doofus. Focus. Run.’ She scolded herself. And they ran. For a while it looked like they would make it out after all. But luck wasn’t really on Arhaya’s side today, and it made itself known pretty quickly.

Something seemed to hook around her waist and pull her back. For a second, she seemed weightless. And then she crashed into a tree. Before she could even understand what was happening, she felt herself in someone’s grip, a hand twisting her left hand behind her back, and the other wrapped around her neck in a chokehold. She tried to cry out, but the only thing that escaped was a wheeze. Trying hard to breathe, she took in the scene unfolding in front of her. The black-clad had caught up to them. Two of them were moving towards the boy, and he wasn’t even trying to escape. He just stood there. She wanted to scream at him, tell him to run. As she opened her mouth, the man holding her tightened his grip and everything just hurt. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t move, her arm felt like it was on fire, she couldn’t think. And at that moment, all thoughts about the boy, the red robes, the bus and everything else disappeared. Self-preservation instinct kicked in and sent her into an overdrive. Using all her body weight, she fell back, making the man stumble a few steps behind. She had hooked her leg behind his, and this made him trip. He crashed into the tree behind them, taking her with him. That is when she remembered the pocket-knife she had kept in her pocket. Grabbing it out, she stabbed the man behind her with as much force as she could muster. He cried and pushed her away. As she crashed onto the ground, she felt her hand come away slick with blood. She tried to crawl away from the man’s reach when her attention was caught by the boy. Her jaw dropped.

His hand rested on the shoulder of the black clad in front of him. Comfortable. As if they were old friends. But old friends don’t cause your skin to burn and blister and char away. Old friends don’t make you scream out in agony, yet keep completely still and silent. Old friends don’t make you crumble and die, nothing but a husk. This was beyond anything she had ever seen, and it frightened her.

Both the black-clad who had tried to attack the boy were now lying in heaps. The third man stood motionless next to Arhaya, unblinking and shocked. The boy came towards them, hand outstretched. The man seemed to come to his senses abruptly and tried to flee. But it was too late. Arhaya watched as he charred and burned and dried in front of her. She wanted to puke. Scrambling up, she walked backwards, away from the boy. He turned towards her, eyes half glazed, hand still outstretched, as if it had a life of its own and was searching for its next victim.

She kept backing away till her back hit a tree. ‘I can’t die here. Not this way. I have to run. Run.’ she yelled internally at herself. But as she turned, her path was blocked by a hand. The boy’s hand. He touched the tree with his left hand and raised his right arm towards her. For Arhaya, it was all happening in slow motion. His palm moved closer and closer towards her face; fingers outstretched. She wanted to do something, anything, but she couldn’t move. ‘I didn’t do anything; I was trying to help you!’ she shouted. ‘Please, I didn’t do anything.’ But he didn’t stop. Closing her eyes, she waited.