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Gavin wakes up next to the glowing blue skeleton of his girlfriend, Danica. For a few minutes of deniability, he wonders if Danica could be alive somewhere else, and someone placed this skeleton in his bed as a twisted joke. Deep in his heart, he knows this isn’t true.
When he leaves his house to check out the rest of the neighborhood, Gavin finds skeletons everywhere he goes. He seems to be the only one who survived a disturbing end-of-times virus that melted skin off bones. For a short while, he hangs onto his sanity by a thread. Then he discovers that he might be able to find other living souls by following a trail of bones and excrement.
The short e-book Trail of Bones and Excrement was inspired by a science fiction/fantasy contest looking for stories involving fewmets—the feces that hunters use to track an animal—at the end of time. Though the subject matter is a tad weird and a bit yuck-inducing, author Marilyn Peake manages to weave an attractive story around it.
Gavin’s character realistically deals with the crisis, first going into denial, which is followed by a minor slip of sanity, then moving on to acceptance before he gathers his strength to find answers, leaving you with the feeling that twisted adventures await him.
With a masterful hand, Ms. Peake conveys the fear and growing loneliness that Gavin feels upon finding himself the only survivor in his city. You can almost hear the wind and the roar of silence sweeping through a town bereft of souls with Gavin at the center of it.
This strange short story comes alive in vivid detail with subtle, shocking waves of horror brought on by the ravages of a modern-day plague—yet it also contains a hint of beauty in chaos, which you’ll witness in the blue glow of the skeletons that have been left behind by the virus.
Much like the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Trail of Bones and Excrement is sure to be one of the short stories found in dusty old books a hundred years from now—the kind that people still comment upon long after the author’s death. Read it, and you’ll understand why.
