Rolling blackouts drench the city in summer's sticky stupor as heat pumps fall silent and fan-blades pause their endless hunt for blood. Lights fail. Staying indoors is impossible. Rooftops sprout bodies desperate for the taste of the wind; parks fill with exhausted wanderers.
Insomnia is the way of things. Too hot to move, too hot to sleep. Hallucinations blossom, skittering over skin and slipping through the corners of awareness, crowded and frantic. Nothing real moves; nothing real can muster the energy to do more than breathe and look up.
City-light weaves a false sky, an unwanted shield against the truth, but as city-light dies the true sky is there again, whispering that it's always been there, that it's just been waiting for the right moment to bare its teeth and taste the world beneath.
The death toll is incalculable: it's been a long time since the city bothered to budget for the calculation of things like that.
Tens of thousands of lives snatched away. Millions of hours of labor ruined as buildings fall upwards into the hungry stars. These things happen.
It's a long time before the power comes back on, and then the survivors start to scream, loud enough to be heard over the din of flickering lights and engorged heatsinks.
The city leaves them to it. It knows that people need to get the horror out of their system.
And far, far above, the moon winks.
It's going to be a long, hot year.
Plenty more chances to feed.
