Bogleech.com's 2013 Horror Write-off:

" The Howl "

Submitted by Tatzlwyrm

You are forgiven. You were only doing what was necessary; what was right. We were lost, and in choosing our death you chose life for yourselves. It was worth it. It was worth our loss – our sacrifice – to keep you alive. How could you have known what you had wrought?

How could any of us anticipated what would happen? It took us by surprise – you covered it up, suppressed it, kept it localized until it was too late. You were trying to keep us safe. You thought it was infection; it wasn’t. You thought it was judgment; it wasn’t. You couldn’t have known it would end this way – that the streets would run over in gore, that the dead would rise up and strike down the living, that we would swarm and kill and eat each other.

When God wanted to destroy Sodom, Abraham begged him to spare the city for the sake of fifty righteous people. When he could not find fifty, Abraham begged God to spare the city if he could find forty-five. Then forty. Then thirty. Then twenty. There were thousands of us in the city, alive. Surviving. “For the sake of ten,” God told Abraham, “I will not destroy it.”

You killed the living and the dead. With the heat of the sun and the power of death you wiped the slate, leveled the cities we had built. You vaporized the dead in the streets and roasted the survivors in their holes. It was indiscriminate. It was slaughter. It was murder.

We burned and screamed and spent our lives burning and screaming. As the heat and the force shredded our bodies into starstuff, atomized our frail bodies like ants beneath a magnifying glass, we were sucked into the hot vacuum, pulled shrieking into the sky to melt and pulse in the fiery clouds, to roil beneath the welkin, to howl and shriek and tear the curtain of heaven. We burn and scream, and we will spend our life burning and screaming.

You knew not what you wrought. We lost all, and you live. Was it worth it? You are lost; you killed us, and you have chosen death for yourselves. We will do what we must; what is fair. You are not forgiven.

Now we are become death, the destroyer of worlds.