The Red Horizon

Robert's life changes forever unexpectedly. Writer's Cramp Winner!

Robert had always lived on the 14th floor of the South Side high rise, the kind of building with cracked tile in the hallways and elevators that worked more on prayer than machinery. He worked nights as a janitor at the UIC Medical Center, and most mornings he’d come home, microwave a breakfast sandwich, and watch the fog roll in over Lake Michigan before sleeping through the daylight hours. The world had always seemed big, but distant. Now it was crushingly close.

The siege began on a Thursday. No one was ready. Robert had been sweeping glass from the ER entrance when the first reports started pouring in; automated drones flooding North Avenue, black quadrupeds the size of trucks leaping through concrete barriers, turning cars into steel coffins. Within hours, the power grid failed. Phones went dark. The sky, always a faded blue in Chicago, now glowed with an eerie red haze as some power plant far off in Cicero, Illinois burned without restraint.

By the second day, Robert had barricaded the apartment door with an old wooden table and his cousin Greg’s old weight bench. He found an old solar powered radio tucked under the sink, left by his ex, probably, and listened to the emergency broadcasts on loop. “Do not engage. Stay hidden. Urban centers are compromised. Extraction zones unknown.”

He stopped listening after that. It only made the silence louder.

The real horror wasn’t the machines themselves; it was the waiting. The grinding, rust slick anticipation of something metal brushing the doorknob at 3 a.m. The hollow footsteps in the stairwell that never echoed back. Distant whirrs, like mosquitoes made of titanium.

Food ran low by the fifth day. He found himself eating rice straight from the bag, chewing the grains slowly like some act of rebellion. On the sixth, he drank warm tap water from the bathtub. On the seventh, he considered leaving.

He didn’t. Not yet.

He spent hours at the window instead, watching his neighborhood burn in slow motion. The schoolyard down the street was a grave of twisted swings and scorched hopscotch lines. A boy’s red bicycle lay on its side for days before a patrol bot crushed it underfoot like a tin can. A woman once emerged from the neighboring building waving a white sheet. They didn’t shoot her. The robot just stopped, scanned her for a long, terrible moment, then walked away. She stood there long after, shaking.

On the ninth day, the silence broke.

It started with knocking. Soft. Rhythmic.

“Robert? You still there?”

He froze. That voice...it couldn’t be.

“Ms. Gibbons?” he croaked. His voice was dust.

“From 14C. I got a key from the super’s office. My place collapsed. I didn’t know where else to go.”

She was in her seventies, always wearing a Cubs jacket no matter the weather. He opened the door slowly. Her face was lined with soot, hair matted with ash, but her eyes were still sharp.

“I brought some soup packets,” she said, as if they were having tea during a blizzard and not squatting in a mechanical apocalypse.

He let her in.

They didn’t talk much. Shared soup. Shared silence. Took turns sleeping on the mattress while the other watched the hallway through a crack in the door. Sometimes they played cards. Sometimes they didn’t. But for Robert, it was the first time since the sky turned red that he remembered he was human.

Two days later, the building shook.

A loud metal clatter, like something enormous had landed on the roof.

They looked at each other. Ms. Gibbons gripped her rosary. Robert held a kitchen knife. They heard it moving above. Heavy, deliberate steps. A hiss of hydraulics. And then...nothing. Just quiet.

But that night, while they were dozing, the elevator moved.

It was impossible. There was no power. No reason.

The soft ding at the end of the hall snapped Robert awake. The elevator doors creaked open. He didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.

Something stepped out.

He couldn’t see it; just its shadow on the wall, stretching long and mechanical. It turned toward them. The hallway light flickered once. Then held.

And the machine walked past.

No scanning. No killing. No orders.

Just...passed by.

He waited hours after it vanished before speaking.

“Maybe it didn’t see us,” he whispered.

Ms. Gibbons shook her head. “Or maybe it did, and didn’t care anymore.”

He didn’t know what scared him more.

By day fourteen, the machines were gone.

No fanfare. No rescue. Just...gone.

The broadcasts said something about “Satellite Overtake” and “Rogue Military AI's Neutralized.” Robert didn’t care. He and Ms. Gibbons climbed down all fourteen floors. It took them nearly half a day. The streets were a war grave; cars melted, walls scarred, windows like empty eyes.

They found others. Survivors.

People with backpacks full of nothing and memories full of too much.

No one shouted. No one cried. They just looked at each other with the knowing silence of those who had lived through something they didn’t have words for.

Robert never went back to the medical center. There was nothing left to clean.

He spent his days helping rebuild a relief station in Bronzeville. Hammered nails. Poured water. Carried supplies. Sometimes he sat with people who had nothing to say and listened anyway.

Sometimes he visited the rooftop of the new shelter.

From there, he could still see the bones of downtown, still blackened, still jagged against the sky. But between the ruined buildings, he could also see life creeping back in. Smoke trailing from cooking fires. Kids kicking cans in the streets.

And once, he swore he saw a flash of red on the horizon.

Not fire. Not blood.

A sunrise.

The first one in weeks.

And Robert sat and watched it until the sky turned blue again.

Written for: "The Writer's Cramp" 
Prompt: "

WINNER and NEW PROMPT - Due Thursday, May 29"