26 May Red Balloons

Posted at 11:00h in Strange and Unexplained by CreepypastaStories.com 0 Comments

📅 Published on May 26, 2023

“Red Balloons”

Written by Eli Pope
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by N/A

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🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available

⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 15 minutes

Rating: 10.00/10. From 1 vote.

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A loud thud exploded in front of me. The precise spot which seconds earlier would have landed my body had it not been for the fate from the faint whine in the sky forcing me to halt in my tracks and look up. I would have been pounded by the dead body that just fell. Splattered in all its messy pancaked ending in a syrupy red pile of mixed flesh. Mere seconds before—there wasn’t so much as a gnat’s ass passing gas for a breeze—and then suddenly—from nowhere—came a rush of air hitting my cheeks from below, followed with a moist mist wetting my entire face. This entire episode took me by complete surprise and shook me to my core in a nanosecond, leaving my throat gasping to catch my breath while I attempted to regain my bearings.

The atmosphere this evening was hanging heavy and stale, dry as scorched desert sand. But that fact instantly made this wet cloud raining upward from the ground into my eyes and penetrating my lips feel strangely odd. Squirt was the word that came to mind. Like a pimple being popped. A salty taste across my tongue. I almost vomited.

My world had been silent with the only negligible sound being one of a small engine from an aircraft flying several hundred feet overhead. I know it was a plane because I halted my step and looked up, watching it slowly fly past. Its sound stopped me in my tracks in wonder of its relatively low-level crossing through these mountains. Dangerously low. Lucky for me I’d stopped to take in the sight because the hum of its engine is exactly what forced my forward motion just in time to be missed by the crashing corpse.

We live in a world that is changing quickly. Faster than in any other period since the beginnings of written record. I know what you’re thinking—it’s been said a million times over by each generation claiming the one after was destroying the earth. But—have you ever just stopped and thought about all the things that are already lost today? Kid’s playing out under the streetlight, the freedom to go out with your friends without being tracked by your cellphone, “for your safety.” Hell, we don’t even carry cash anymore, it’s all stored in a tiny chip melted into a rectangle piece of plastic slid into your wallet. And don’t even get me started on this damn music today. Let me just say one thing before I move to more serious points—in thirty damn years—the radio (if that will even still exist) won’t be re-airing tunes like Old Town Road by Lil Nas and Billy Ray Cyrus like they still do playing the great ballads like Eric Clapton’s Layla!

Okay, it’s official, I’m an old geezer. A badge I suppose I wear with a tiny shred of pride. One of the last of the “good ole boys from the good ole days.” I dug growing up hanging out under the streetlamp with the neighborhood gang who were all called home to eat dinner by a bell hanging on their outside wall by the back door. Every damn one of us. And I remember when Layla was released as a single 45 in 1970 by Derek and the Dominos. A sad song about Eric’s love for his friend, George Harrison’s wife Boyd. It wasn’t about some dumbass half-baked country singer and rapper riding their horses on the Old Town Road. “It’s ridiculous! And can’t nobody tell me nothing!” I spoke aloud and then smirked. I also drove a 1969 Pontiac GTO with a sixpack carburetor. Finish-wrapped in 26 coats of candy-apple red metal flake and deep enough gloss to get lost in after smoking rolled-up doobie, not a fucking Tesla that takes more oil to produce the dang thing than driving it saves. Thousands of slaves mining that Cobalt shit to make the goddamned batteries… but I digress. We smoked illegal weed because we wanted to get high, not purchasing it legally with a bullshit medicinal card because the government finally figured out, they could make money from it to line senator’s pockets even heavier.

Now we’re letting God-dang red balloons from China blow over our ‘f-n heads just as freely and willy-nilly, collecting data on us or dumping virus’s in our air. All the while our tyrant leaders are making deals and trading gifts with other maniacal dictators so they can fill their personal coffers…hell…bodies falling from the sky for Christ sakes, along with debris from satellites that fail and trash our outer cosmos. Only launched into orbit our planet to keep track of everything but the real threat… Congress! The end is near boys and girls. Dig in deep, prep for the new world order because the old one is being pussified and stolen away quietly under our noses. Hidden in the backstory headlines, barely audible under the football scores.

We are willingly being interred into the matrix of feeding this monster who controls our every thought and move. Manipulated by tiny chips we carry and worship like gods. Google filling our brains with thoughts and products we’re told are innocuous. Our technology lurks boldly over us, unhidden and willingly without any fear of our reprisal. Too drunk with its need. And it’s a monster, friends. Every bit as evil as a vampire or werewolf and shifty as ghosts. The beast busily makes zombies of us by seducing our brains with its mindless digital entertainment to dull our senses giving us nothing but a hard-on to distract us from what is really going on behind the scenes. Playing us like fiddles to tunes we don’t even care to understand. Keep playing that energy-sucking game with your head buried willfully into the flickering lights of your cellphone with its hypnotizing rhythms. Ignore the fact your wrists tire and become painful from the repetitive actions of punching tiny buttons for no other reason than we’re dumb enough to succumb to it. Numbing muscles and tendons with crippling carpal tunnel, stealing our attention away with what is happening right next to us.

I turned my cellphone off and left it on the nightstand. I realized the beast was still capable with its other ways of knowing where I am or what I was doing. Somehow leaving it powered down silent and face down on the wooden table, gives me a small feeling of comfort and solitude. A time to catch my breath and clear my thoughts, while the bottle of Jack Daniels helps soak in that false sense of freedom, I know I no longer have as I once did. I remember when I could afford the more expensive finer whiskeys, but they’ve even robbed me of that joy. Our world feeling much like Soylent Green portrayed it back in the 1973 dystopian film. Truth-stranger than fiction. Harry Harrison the author of the novel Soylent Green was taken, tried to warn us when he wrote Make Room! In 1966. A journalist with the Washington Post wrote in 1984, that writer Harry Harrison was better at “… evoking the personalities of lizards than of people.” I reckon he should now feel vindicated by the fact the literary world was wrong back then. He was a genius. We live with the pain of not listening to his prophecy guised under the science fiction genre. His death is still to this day marked “undisclosed.” The monsters are surely behind it in some way.

I most always walk alone in the desert at night. It’s the only time my mind feels clear and free from the poison spat at us from the rectangular box which hangs on almost every wall in American living rooms. It’s difficult to tell anymore just exactly where the demon resides. It’s grown so many faces in its time of rule. CNN or FOX, MSNBC, it matters not. All misinformation to keep our brains puzzled and lost in any truth. If only our forefathers had have recognized it for what it truly was and quietly snuffed it from existence while in its early youth. It’s used the old Trojan Horse concept that we should all have been taught and remembered. I think that story has likely been squelched dead from the mouths of history teachers. Those books deemed information we need not remember. Now all we learn about are that we are nothing if we aren’t connected to the world’s web. Education, enjoyment, employment, medical and criminal records, even the purchasing of food all tied to a fuckin’ digitally linked chain stronger than those shackled slaves linked together while forced to work fields they held no ownership of. Sadly, we don’t even fight being locked by this link that confines us. We are in fact, addicted to being tethered, satisfied like puppies too tired to pull at its resistance to keep us from freedom. The monster quickly grew very crafty and wise enough to convince us that we need this connection badly enough that we’ll actually pay a monthly fee for it. Put me on the plan! Enroll me now!

Even those who have no place to call home at night, no pillow to lay their head, nothing but a prayer for the compassion of others to feed them, are still fooled enough by the beast to spend anything they have begged for, to be connected in some way to that chain that keeps them as heavily dosed as those who can afford the faster, more expensive gadgets to sedate them. This tells me we have been trained expertly from every angle to be connected like slaves to apps and instantaneous but touchless and anonymous networks in order to survive.

I now wonder about the body who took the plunge from the plane. Maybe they ended up not quite as “connected” as they were fooled to believe? I was certain it was tied to the monsters. Of course, the television news goons bought and paid for would weave a tale into drug czars or crime bosses. But I knew. Nobody was fooling me. I had them all figured out. I had been washed in the blood splattered on my face. The blood of a brother who broke away from the digital link. Likely the only real crime he committed—was being unfortunate enough to get caught being removed from the yoke.

Back when I saw this earlier in my life, when I might have been young and crazy enough to resist more than just mentally, I was called a conspiracy theorist. I think those fools back then would find me more of a disciple of the truth now. One that lacked the guts to follow my own prophecy. I chose to follow the call of the flesh instead; those urges stronger within. The monster helped exploit my weakness and used it in the form of shapely blondes and brunettes—beautiful redheads that—let’s just say I succumbed—and leave it at that. We all suffer our addictions, don’t we?

A voice that speaks out is a difficult row to hoe. One must realize who to speak with and choose carefully. Poor choices make irretractable mistakes, like plane rides that end in ways unwanted. Entire commercial airlines have just disappeared from the world’s existence. How can that be in today’s modern tracking abilities unless they weren’t wanted anymore by—it? We get fed and seduced by at least six generations of old technology that the military likely used a decade ago but have tossed to the side. One can try to imagine what abilities the monsters have now that us on the outside of the circle know nothing about. If they can handpick one individual working against them, how can they lose entire aircraft full. No, I say it’s the monsters. It’s the way they work, the way they do business. I believe one day even an old geezer like me will taunt them one time too many times with my now idle and harmless rants. One day, I too will be taken for my airdrop, given anything but a parachute. I often ask myself if I’ll jump on my own accord or fight the devils until all hope is lost.

It’s no longer myself that I worry about, not that I ever really did. It’s my son. What does he have to look forward to? He’s already lost more than he is aware of never having. Each generation gets freedoms whittled away in small increments. So small they can’t be noticed in comparison to the shiny new toys made available. By no choice of his or mine, he comes from the period in time where those small bits were no longer enough to keep the beasts bellies filled. Their hunger becoming too overwhelming to be satisfied slowly. Their greed’s thirst forcing quicker changes and harsher outcomes for anyone who makes noise or stands in its way. Freedom now as extinct as dinosaurs, re-invented as social networking. Questions asked and answered instantly with no proof of validity other than Wikipedia.

It’s become impossible to fight a winning battle now, not that there are any soldiers to be found willing to man the front line. The young slaves who fought hard in the sixties, placing everything on the line for righteousness, ended up giving birth to coddled babies who have grown too drunken with trinkets designed and mass-produced with the intention to consume their desire of remembering what the past used to be. Morphing into massive lines of workers to give more and more of themselves with a colorful promise of greater entertainment on the horizon. Bigger racetracks and grid irons that are brought to you by the makers of highly publicized beer makers and tech firms. Any conglomerate willing to sell out for a piece of the action using us mindless lemmings busy punching the clock. Feeding the mental addictions to the shiny gadgets meant to keep us in step with the machine. Rump. Bump. Rump.

We’ve been cultivated into assembly robots growing into positions and never aware of what life was supposed to be to us—or our kids. Nothing but consumers of anything put in front of us. Friends, we failed as guarding soldiers of the freedom our forefathers gave their lives for. Failed as parents, me included. Our children never had a chance because we, like the generations before us, slowly caved into keeping up with the Jones’s. Buying into the one with the most toys in the end wins the race. The legacy passed down year after year until we didn’t even see the trap laid out openly and advertised by the one percent. Now they own it all—all the cash, power, and manicured lives, all from the spoils of our backs. We only feel the trickle of rain when they choose to urinate, sprinkling their unwanted waste over us as if it were gold.

Yeah, these are the things I contemplate when I’m on my solitaire desert walks. I reflect on my failures to this world. Sometimes I spend the entire time daydreaming of those days of smoking a doobie from Columbia instead of some genetically altered medical marihuana enhanced to dull the pain and remove my memory. Those times of my past are nothing but red balloons hovering high overhead and taunting me from a reach too far to grab the string and be pulled away by the breeze. Very pretty swaying in the breeze and smartly creative at drawing our attention from our realities. Distracted by their shiny colors while spreading their seeds of hopelessness through genetically created virus’ we unwittingly allow to be ingested. All because of age old magic and the sleight of hand.

I saw the first sign today. The typical black SUV with darkened windows. It was parked a few hundred feet down the street. Again. They rarely attempt to hide or break their well-known image that we’ve all grown so accustomed to. I imagine everyone who take, no matter how obviously parked, binoculars pressed against the glass, are just hoping it’s not for them, that they aren’t the ones being “observed.”

I know it’s really for me, though. I’ve felt very different. It’s funny how attuned I am. I think I knew the morning after I was almost obliterated by the corpse exploding in front of me. I was likely on the watch list already. But—all I could do was run—or of course wait. Sit around until I was renditioned by those who expedite such quiet disappearances. Small aircraft without registered flight plans and payloads dropped naked onto the desert for the buzzards and coyotes

to feed on.

I was thankful now for several things. The first being how my wife and I had foreseen the writing on my wall years ago. She’d chosen to take our son and leave. I think she knew for quite a while that these kinds of times were in my future. A man can’t help what skin he is born with. He also can’t be held accountable for being unable to shed the resistance passed on to him from his father. I knew she wanted no part of that for our boy. I knew it years before when she was unable to keep her college days going of rebelling against the beast like I had. She chose instead to live alongside it quietly with all the others. But she always knew I couldn’t.

I’d been angry at first, but deep down inside I knew she was doing what was best for him. For them. I told her at the time to change her name and evaporate into the scenery without a trace or telling me anything. I didn’t want to risk the possibility of giving them up under painful duress. Hopefully we would meet up again in the next world, if the faith we both shared actually held the promise we’d put stock in.

I miss them both and pray nightly they are as safe as possible in this crazy chaos we all share in our existence. I try and picture their faces in my head of what they likely look like now, but the images I see—well—they’re stuck in those mental snapshots of our last moment we shared before they turned and walked away. My son and her both looking back one last time briefly, likely wondering the same thoughts I held. Would we ever see each other again?

A sudden overwhelming feeling of loss and loneliness surrounded me. I felt like the blindfolded man awaiting the firing squad. “Take me now,” I cried aloud, “… I need to find them. Hold them tightly in my arms again.” I awoke like countless other mornings from the same dream—or nightmare.

‘How many years had passed,” I asked myself under my breath as my eyes opened for yet another day of wondering when and if we’d ever be together again.

The sedan wasn’t parked in the same spot this morning. I’d become accustomed to seeing it there and the whole thought process of the spot now being vacant sent instant shivers throughout my body. I would now need to be more watchful today on. I wasn’t sure why I was worried. It could have just been a fluke. After all, I’d been silent about the monster for quite some time. Could it have been another resister they were watching? But then again, was there really any others left in this dark world who cared enough to risk everything? I’d felt like an island for years now. Abandoned and left to watch the monsters drop every last survivor of a free soul to its death.

No, it’s me they were watching, I was assured of that. There were no others left to threaten, other than me. It was likely my turn to take that last flight over the dark desert night.

I rounded the corner from my house on my way to a morning cup of joe before getting back to writing in my journal. I’d fallen into a routine that was very predictable. Foolish I knew, but too old to fight the urge to give it up.

Everything went down so quickly that I don’t even know how it happened. They were very experienced and all-too-well practiced. I didn’t have time to fight much, let alone my bones being too tired. I think my mind almost wanted it to all be over and done with. Resistance can only live so long if it’s not fed with encouragement from others. I’d likely lost the real taste for fighting the day I lost my family. My entire hope was given up with a sad goodbye. My lack of belief in the way this world was being swallowed up and regurgitated back out on its people was just too much. We’d all become sedated with the lies and distraction. I’d made my choice while my family made theirs. It had just been a different one. I’d chosen the dark resistance for as long as I kept the resolve, while my wife had chosen to give the façade of happiness to our son. Her decision had hurt, even though I understood. The monster had succeeded in dividing us much like most of the rest of the country—the world.

The hum of the familiar motor became a loud whir as the side hatch opened and let the wind noise mix every sound together into a massive roar. I peered out into the darkness and became quickly very aware that I would soon be on the outside instead in the safe quiet interior. Would I be given the choice of jumping or would the two goons merely jettison me through the opening against my will? If there was a choice, which would I choose? To exit quietly like a proud soldier or the struggling frightened prisoner of a war I’d become.

It seems like a quiet calm would be all you’d hear as one soars through the dark abyss. No other human around, no traffic or laughter. No conversation or screams after the gunshots. Only gravity sucking my body downward towards the earth’s cooling sand as if it were a vacuum breathing me into the endless black hole. But it’s not.

At first my body hurled end over end in such a frenzied tumble that I feel like I was a wadded-up piece of paper being tossed into massive headwind blowing across a starless desert. Once my mind overcame the shock of my predicament, I quickly attempted to fall with grace. Funny thing to think of at a moment such as this, but I managed to gain control of my body and maneuver it into the shape of a wing instead of a tumbleweed.

The air surrounding you screams into your ears with such loud hissing, it fights to erase and steal your final attempt at viewing your life flash before your eyes. I wanted to see those moments in my mind’s eye. It was, after all, my final moments. Chaotic yet almost cathartic. I pushed away the thought that at some point everything would end in a sudden jolt. “It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop.” I smiled, remembering my father telling me that silly comical fact of what was now about to happen to me.

The wind is biting too sharp for me to open my eyes, so I am unable to understand what direction is up or down. I just aim my frame in different directions enabling me to feel as if I am soaring free like an eagle through the night. My panic becomes absent, choosing instead to focus my fleeting thoughts of early experiences such as falling in love with my wife and that first kiss. The bright glimmer in my newborn son’s eyes as I hold him swaddled tightly in the cotton cocoon that gives him the feeling of safety. The world before I became tainted by its evil and pain. Times before greed and power was understood. In this dying moment—I was free. More independent than I’d ever experienced before.

It’s funny how such a tragic ending could bring the strongest feeling of being untethered to anything of this world. I couldn’t remember ever feeling like this before. Flying at what felt like Mach speeds performing twists, rolls, and turns that dramatically shoved my stomach into the corners of my cavity at 4 g’s. The feeling was intoxicating. I didn’t want it to end. I laughed out loud, gulping in the massive volume of air rushing into my open flapping lips, knowing that in some way, the monster had failed in giving me one last dose of fear before I would disappear from the hell, the final act he’d forced my world into. The beast would be the one left to choke and suffer on what they’d created. In their greedy ignorance they blindly let me escape to the next level, my heaven. Overwhelmingly happy memories broke through the terror they believed would be my end, overtaking the loud hiss of the wind that infiltrated my head. I chose to think it was the screams of the monster realizing in dismay how he was the one who had truly lost the battle, leaving me victorious as I flew through the night turning just in time to see the faces of my wife and son as they peered back at me, racing towards me—this time with loving smiles swallowed with hope instead of the fear and loss that I’d remembered as they’d walked away all those years ago. We would be together again. Love did overcome hate and allow us to prevail in their end, our beginning.