A science fiction short story about a mysterious substance that rains from the skies

Harry woke up before the alarm and instinctively woke his wife, Jacinda, too. 

‘Hey Jac, come on, you’ve got a long day today, you’re on lates.’

‘What? Huh, oh God, my head hurts.’

‘I’ll let you go in the shower first, and I’ll go down and make you a coffee.’ He got up out of bed and made for the door.

‘Wait up, hun,’ Jacinda said, clumsily tumbling out of bed. She threw her arms around him and kissed him eagerly. ‘I’m sorry about last night, Harry. I was drunk. I just saw you chatting to that girl, and I just lost it. I’m such a dick.’

Harry relented and kissed her back. ‘You’re going to have to talk to someone about this jealousy of yours, Jac. Promise me you’ll go to the doctor.’

‘I will, I will. I’ll ring them today. I’m going to cut down on my drinking too. My anxiety has been really bad the last few months. I’ll ask them if they can up my meds.’

‘Do that. Do you want to take the car today?’

‘God no. I’ll still be way over the limit. I’ll run in, it’ll clear my head.’ She grabbed his hands again. ‘Seriously. Thanks, Harry. I don’t deserve you, I really don’t.’

‘Go on. Get a move on, and I’ll make you that coffee.’

Jacinda went over to the bedroom window to open the curtains. Some light and fresh air in the room would help clear her head. As she did so, a peculiar sight greeted her. 

‘Harry, come and look at this,’ she shouted. Falling from the skies was a blizzard of what looked like huge snowflakes. At least, they thought it was snow, but quickly realised they were too big for that, and besides, they were a soft pink in colour.

‘What are they, Harry?’

‘They’re like moth balls,’ Harry suggested.

‘No, they’re too big for that. They look like marshmallows or candy floss.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Jac,’ Harry teased. ‘How can candy floss rain from the sky?’

‘I said that’s what they looked like, not that’s what they were, you idiot.’

‘Well, what are they then?’ 

‘Dunno. I’m going to put some clothes on and take a closer look.’

Minutes later, they were stood in their front garden, holding them in their hands. All their other neighbours were in the street doing the same. Harry pulled one apart. It felt soft and mildly sticky. Completely harmless, he thought. Jacinda smelled one but detected no odour of any kind. 

‘What do you think they are, Harry?’

’Not a clue. I’ve heard of phenomena like this, though. Frogs raining from the sky or fish. Maybe it’s something like that.’

Jacinda shouted over to her neighbour. ‘What do you think they are, Mo?’

‘Not got a Scooby, Jac,’ he said. ‘Maybe something out of a nuclear reactor. We’re all doomed,’ he laughed. ‘Probably some science experiment gone wrong, knowing our lot.’

‘Ha ha, you’re right there, mate,’ Harry said, squashing a handful of them together into a ball. He tried to throw it like a snowball at Mohammed, but it fell lamely a few feet in front of him. ‘Too bloody light, they are. No good for snowball fights.’

‘At least they’re not hailstones, though, eh? Could have put the windows out.’

Harry and Jacinda went back indoors and put the TV on. Maybe there was something on the news about them. They tried all the channels, but there was just a single message on all channels saying ‘we apologise for the disruption to our services’. 

‘Nothing on TV either, Jac,’ Harry said. I better get to work anyway. Why not bike in with all this snow, Jac?’

‘Nah, I need to step my miles up if I’m going to do that half marathon next month. A run will do me good. It will stop soon.’

Jacinda got dressed in her running gear and quickly set off on her five and a half-mile run into work, while Harry bid her farewell and took the BMW M60 electric car. At first, the pom-poms, as she’d mentally christened them, didn’t bother her. Although visibility wasn’t great, they were light underfoot and gave her no resistance. As she ran, she saw children on their way to school playing with them. They squashed them into large snowmen shapes and rolled around in them, laughing and playing. It all seemed perfectly new and innocent. People were curious, some were wary, but the kids thought they were a fantastic and fun new addition to the world.

Gradually, however, they began to become quite a nuisance. They were still falling quite heavily and were becoming quite sticky underfoot. After a while, they were almost six inches deep and covered most of the ground surfaces and rooftops. Jac stopped running and took stock of her situation. Bizarrely, the temperature was typically warm for this time of year, when all her faculties were telling her it was snowing and it should be cold. Still, cars were backed up bumper to bumper on most roads, so she’d made the right call not to take the car. Bikes were struggling to stay upright too, and she was not the only pedestrian struggling to wade through the sticky sludge. 

‘Best ring work and let them know I’ll be late in,’ she reasoned. She took her iPhone from her arm holster and dialled. No signal came the reply. ‘Damn it. I’m still three miles away.’ She looked around and spotted a small café nearby. It seemed like a good strategy to take shelter in there and grab some breakfast. She made her way over and pushed the door. The place was packed out. People were even standing and leaning back against the walls. She couldn’t even get to the service counter to order. There was no way she was going to get served here. 

‘There’s no chance of getting a cuppa in here, pet,’ an old man said next to her. ‘You’d best get yourself home if you want ‘owt to eat.’

‘What the hell’s going on? What are these things, do you know?’

Another man turned around. ‘Some are saying it’s a secret weapon from the Russians. Personally, I think it’s climate change.’

‘Difficult to see how the weather could cause these. They look artificial to me,’ Jacinda offered. ‘Has there been anything on the news?’

‘Just to stay indoors and not to go out unless it’s essential travel. They’ve no idea what they are. The signal’s been playing up though. The The TV keeps going off.’

‘My phone’s not working either.’

‘No one’s is. Something to do with satellites they reckon.’

Jacinda wondered who the hell ‘they’ were. They always seemed to have an opinion. Well, there was no point wasting time in the café. She made the decision to head back home. When she opened the door, she got a shock. The pom-poms were now approaching a foot deep in places, and because of their sticky texture, they were becoming hazardous to walk in. Still, she’d better make tracks for home or she’d never make it. 

On the other side of town, Harry was getting nowhere in the car. The traffic was so backed up, he realised it was fruitless trying to keep going. He spotted a gap at the side of the road to park in and took the opportunity. Judging by the shops nearby, it was probably a double yellow line, but hey, he couldn’t see the lines, so he figured he’d get away with it. Anyway, that was the least of his problems. Instinctively, he took his heavy weather coat from the boot and put it on. It wasn’t cold in the slightest, but he wanted some protection from these bizarre floating creations. Luckily, he had his hiking boots in the back too, so he put them on. He even took his rucksack with his water bottle in. He figured it could be a tricky journey home. He could barely see his way through the blizzard, but he made a best guess and set off, using the line of cars and the buildings as his compass. 

Jacinda was not so well prepared as Harry. She was trying her best to keep on walking, but her legs were getting tired of wading through the sticky gloop that was constantly chafing against her calves. Still, it couldn’t be more than a mile to home now. She could just about make out the primary school near where she lived. Thankfully, no children had braved the journey, and the place stood empty, a pink, fluffy blanket wrapping itself around the doors and rooftops. She stopped and leant against the gates to rest for a moment, but as she did so, she glimpsed a terrifying sight in her peripheral vision. She saw an orange glow in the skies, which quickly turned to flames. The whole sky began to light up like a fireball, and it was headed her way at a terrifying pace. Next, she saw that the cute, pink, pom-poms all around her were catching fire. The whole ground was being ravaged by a sweeping furnace of flames. Whatever they were, the pom-poms were highly combustible. Something had ignited them, and they had become a vast incinerator. She turned to run, but the pace of the blaze was incredible. It swept towards her and engulfed everything around her in seconds. Mercifully, she didn’t have time to feel any pain or respond. She, and everyone in the town, had been consumed by a massive fireball of destruction. 

Harry saw the flames too, but luckily, he was walking alongside the river at the time. As the ferocious wall of heat struck, he just had time to throw himself into the water to take cover. The water acted as a barrier to the flames, which roared above his head. He held his breath under the water for as long as he could before he burst to the surface, gasping for air. The flames still roared above, so he dived under the surface again, repeating his actions again and again until the melee above him subsided. When the flames stopped, he pulled himself clear, and he surmised that it was as though someone had poured petrol on a campfire, creating a huge fireball that dissipated quickly. This gave him a clue as to what was going on. Perhaps these mothballs were made from some sort of plastic substance that was highly flammable. It wouldn’t explain where they came from, but it would explain what they were. When it was safe, he got out of the water and surveyed the landscape. Everything around him was black, and covered in pools of melting hot liquid. Flames danced around the dripping, molten hot destruction, and acrid smoke billowed from charred vehicles, buildings, and trees. It looked like something from a horror movie. Barely able to breathe, he followed the direction of the river, taking cover in the water when he needed to and trying to avert his eyes from the scenes that engulfed him. Bodies of people, animals, and birds were burned and blackened with sticky tar. Flames began to thrive from the body fat of their victims, and the stench of cooking flesh putrefied his nostrils. And then the mothballs started again, some igniting as they hit the ground, others acting like a shroud to hide the deathly furnace they had just inflicted. He kept his head down and walked on, his soaking wet clothes and the river offering some protection from the remnants of the heat all around him. His mind began to think of Jacinda. She’d have been running in that furnace. Her flimsy running gear would have offered her no protection. He didn’t see any way she could have made it. He tried not to think about it, but could come up with no alternative solutions other than her grisly death. At least it would have been quick, he thought. 

It occurred to him that there was no point trying to go home. Home was gone. Everything as far as the eye could see was going up in flames. The only safe place was the river. He’d been walking downstream, and so he reasoned that if he kept in the water and followed its path, he would eventually reach the sea. The ocean seemed like the best place to be right now. His mind began to try to calculate where he was and how far away the coast was. Too far. Maybe miles. He didn’t know. He tried not to think any more about that and just kept going. Eventually, he waded around a bend and got lucky. There was a marina with a few small boats moored there. They looked a bit charred, but were still seaworthy. The first one he tried was fibreglass and so had warped and melted in the heat, but another was wooden and so had fared better. It had a small outboard motor still attached to it, and with a bit of fiddling he managed to get it going. Clearly the owner had been preparing to go out in it, but he didn’t want to think about his demise. His hands were shaking. He was in shock, but he knew he had to keep going. He started the engine and set off towards the sea. 

It took him a few hours before he reached the mouth of the bay. Thankfully, most of the river on the way down had been lined with trees or industrial buildings, so not much in the way of grisly human remains to haunt him. The pom-pom’s as Jac called them, were still falling thick and fast, but the river seemed to consume them as they didn’t lie on its surface. He swept them from the hull of the boat every now and then, but they looked harmless and insignificant. He could hardly believe they had been the cause of so much death and destruction. 

The skies above the horizon looked grey, heavy and foreboding, laden with tons more of their deadly cargo, he reasoned. The coastline was beginning to look innocently pink again, but he knew not to get too close. Since his boat wasn’t equipped to go too far out to sea, he hugged the coastline, meandering aimlessly, with no real plan, purpose or conviction. In truth he didn’t know what to do. He pulled his coat tightly around him and became suddenly engulfed with sorrow. He sobbed huge bellowing tears, and pulled his knees up to his chest. He cried for the longest time, and then night fell all around him. 

He awoke at dawn to the site of a large blue and white ship approaching him. He’d drifted further out to sea than he would have liked, but the ship seemed like it was a scientific research vessel. It had ‘survey’ written in bold yellow lettering and R.V. Calliope on the bow. When they got close, they pulled him in close to their ladders and helped him aboard. He was greeted by a fresh faced young woman, with rosy cheeks and a mop of red hair. 

‘Professor Quinn,’ she said enthusiastically, shaking his hand. ‘Judy. We saw you drifting out there. You been on the water long?’ 

Several other scientists joined her. 

‘No,’ Harry mumbled. ‘Just since yesterday. I got caught up in the fireball. Used the river to make my escape. Do you know if there were any survivors in the town? My wife…’

‘Oh God, I’m so sorry. No, we haven’t heard of anyone else making it out. I’m amazed you survived at all. It was like a furnace. We were lucky. We were out at sea when it happened. Look, let’s get you some dry clothes and a nice hot cup of tea.’

Harry was led inside, where he was glad of the warmth. They gave him some dry clothes and a sandwich, before other scientists came over and started asking him questions. 

‘What time did it start? How quickly did they cover the ground? What texture were they? Did he notice a change in temperature? When did they ignite? How fast did the fire spread?’ The questions kept coming and coming as the scientists made notes and recorded his responses. Eventually, Judy came over and put a stop to them. 

‘Ok guys, that’s enough questions for the time being. We’ve got plenty to go on, and with the samples we have, we have enough to be getting on with. Harry, do you want to get your head down? Get some rest? We have a bunk you can use.’

‘No thanks, I’m ok. I just can’t stop thinking about my wife, and all those poor people back there. What I saw was horrific. Every time I close my eyes I see their faces.’

‘I bet. I can give you a sedative if you’d like. Or a drop of something stronger?’

‘No thanks Professor. Do you think anyone could have made it out alive?’

‘Well, you did, so that’s something positive.’

‘What are your first thoughts about what these things are? I was thinking they must be some sort of plastic?’

‘It’s a good guess. In truth we don’t know, but early indications are they are bio-organisms evolved from complex hydrocarbon chains. But how polymers such as these have created life forms we don’t know. And how they got into the atmosphere in such vast quantities is another mystery.’

‘Is this a local event Professor?’ he asked nervously. ‘Do we know if it’s happening anywhere else?’

‘From what we can tell, it’s a global phenomenon. Apparently, other countries have been reporting them for some time, but they were dismissed as hoaxes. We know satellites are affected, but radio is working, so at least we have some form of communication. Several government organisations are trying to muster resources and the military is involved in rescue operations. As you can imagine, it’s pretty chaotic.’

Later that night Harry wandered onto the deck of the ship. Struggling to sleep, he’d taken up Judy’s offer of a sedative, and even found a bottle of rum, which he was now swigging greedily. His mind was in a dark, dark place and he was falling into a pit of despair.

‘It should have been me in that fire,’ he thought. ‘Jac didn’t deserve it. She is such a great girl. Honest. Kind. Loving. It’s me who is the shit. I’ve been lying to her for years, going behind her back, cheating on her with other girls. I’ve known she had mental health problems, watched her struggle with anxiety, and still I’ve treat her like dirt. What kind of man am I? Now she’s gone. The world is screwed. Civilisation is never going to recover from this. What kind of future will there be? It will be a life of struggling for food, living in shelters, and scrapping for resources. I can’t do it without Jac. I can’t live without her.’

He got up and stumbled towards the railings at the stern of the ship. He hadn’t planned on doing anything nefarious, it’s simply that he was incoherent with grief and inebriated with drugs and alcohol. A wave of despondency overtook him. Falling into the water seemed like a kindness. It would all be over soon and he could be with Jacinda again. He entered the water with hardly a sound.

A makeshift, emergency rescue centre had been set up not far from the research station in the mouth of the river. The pom-pom’s hadn’t taken foothold there, and snow ploughs had managed to clear what little there was. Although they had stopped falling over the last few hours, another worrying development was emerging. They were beginning to solidify. At first they were quite brittle and easy to dislodge, but over time they became harder and harder. Hitting them with hammers seemed to strengthen them, not weaken them. Casual experiments with bullets showed that they barely made an impact. The cute, fluffy blanket that at first seemed like a fun, frivolous phenomena, had now become an impregnable tomb that encased everything in its path. What land remained was an exception. The rest was completely inhospitable. Bizarrely, tall buildings and high-sided vehicles defiantly stuck out from their plastic prison, offering at least some shelter for the poor unfortunates who had miraculously managed to escape.

Jacinda was one such miracle. If it wasn’t for the quick thinking of the school caretaker she would have been fried along with everyone else. He had gotten all the teachers into a storage cupboard and had spotted Jacinda leaning against the school gates. The fact that the storage room was windowless protected the inhabitants from the pyroclastic flow of the molten gas and liquid. 

She sat on a camp bed in a drab, featureless warehouse on the edge of the dock, thinking of Harry. If anyone could survive this it would be him, she reasoned. He was so strong, so fit, he’d have done it. He was brilliant. By comparison, she went on, she was weak. Both mentally and physically. She was pathetic. She was only alive because she’d been lucky. It took someone else to save her. Harry would have saved himself, she was certain of that. 

About a week later they found Harry’s body, washed up in the bay near the dock where Jacinda was staying. Professor Quinn identified him, and it was only much later that Jacinda found out he was dead. To learn that he’d survived the blast, only to tragically fall from the ship made her angry. Why had he been given drink and drugs when he was clearly in no state? How could they have been so reckless? He was dead, but it wasn’t his fault. He’d made it out, only to perish in a freak accident. She had been right. He was the strong one. Over the coming weeks and months she spun more and more stories about him, turning him into the kind of hero he never was. In time, what started out as grief subsided into a steely determination to never forget Harry and to forge a new world in his honour. She would find the courage to go on, she would face her fears, emulate his strength and bravery. The new world we create will grow out of great people like him, she thought, not inferior, weak-minded people like me. 

She never did find out the truth about her beloved Harry and somehow it didn’t matter. The stories she told herself were far more effective than grief, and they made for a much better outcome than the cold, hard, brutal reality. 

Lies. Sometimes, they destroy us. Other times, they are the only thing that gets us through the day. But Jacinda was wrong about herself. She wasn’t weak. It takes enormous strength and courage to live with fear and anxiety and yet survive. And that’s what she was. A true survivor.