HORROR SHORT STORY: RAIN...blood rain pours and turns living beings into mutants...

08 Sep, 2026

Claire leaned back in her chair and took a sip of coffee. The warm smell was inviting and Claire felt quite comfortable at this moment. The sun was high in the sky, radiating heat and creating a balmy atmosphere. It was morning on a Sunday and the coffee shop was bustling with energy. Families with their children, chatting friends, a few elderly patrons occupied the space and Claire smiled slightly at the idyllic image. She looked over at her wife, Dawn, and her smile grew wider. “What are you thinking about?” Claire asked. “I was thinking about our trip to the Grand Canyon,” Dawn said with humor. “We never made it there did we?” “You got carsick and we ended up heading back early, but the road trip was worth it. We parked our car at night and laid upon the roof and watched the stars of Montana plains,” Claire said. Claire and Dawn had been married for about five years, after dating for about seven years before that. They had met in a coffee shop, similar to this one, and had bumped into each other, spilling both coffees. It had been a happy accident and an instant mutual attraction on both sides. Claire leaned her head into her palm, elbow on the table, and her attention was drawn to the sidewalks where it seemed to be raining now. She frowned, was the rain a different color? As the rain began to pool in shallow puddles on the road, Claire realized that it was a downpour of bloody rain. A dark shadow appeared above head as the clouds became a void of black. The sun was swallowed up by the ominous clouds and painted the entire sky with pitch-blackness. The smell of rust permeated the air, crossing their noses and causing many to cough at the pungent and heavy scent. The coffee shop was now suddenly quiet as they watched, by the lights of the restaurant, the blood rain pouring. A number of patrons walked up to the glass window, peering outside with cautious curiosity. “What is that…?” Claire asked, her eyes affixed upon the street. Dawn shook her head and grabbed Claire’s hand, gripping it tightly. A man opened the door and the smell of iron and rust gusted into the restaurant. Several others pulled him back and slammed the doors shut. “Somebody lock the damn door!” an elderly man with gray hair and in overalls cried out. Beads of sweat began to accumulate at the edge of the brim of his hat and his lower lip quivered ever so slightly. A waitress scurried to the main front doors and locked it shut. She retreated quickly, instinctively distrusting the bloody rain. A portly man in a white shirt and a nametag with the word manager written on it. Already his pits were stained with sweat as he took in the streets from behind the counter. “Everybody stay calm, there’s no need for panic,” he said forcefully, as if trying to convince himself of their safety. “I’m sure whatever it is will pass in a few minutes.” And then, a blaring sound emitted from everyone’s phones at the same time, shocking a few out of their seats. Claire, who had forgotten her phone at home, looked at Dawn and, with a great deal of panic, asked Dawn what it said. Dawn read the message a few times before replying. “The whole country is on lockdown, some kind of biological and chemical warfare has broken out everywhere. They are telling us to not leave the buildings and do not touch the blood at any cost.” A man three tables down from Claire and Dawn stood up and shouted. “Fuck this, my kids and wife are three blocks from here, I’m going to find them,” he said with fury. The manager lunged and held him back by the arms, forcing him to stay in place. “Don’t be an idiot, you’ll kill us all!” the manager shouted loudly, nearly braying with fear. The two struggled until someone else shouted to stop and look out the window. They stopped their wrestling and watched as a squirrel emerged into the blood rain, quickly becoming drenched. A moment passed without disturbance until it began. The squirrel strained its muscles and began shrieking, a sound so desperate and primal it sent chills through the patrons of the coffee shop. Its muscles and tissues began to expand, tearing skin as it could no longer contain itself. Claire grabbed Dawn’s hand and began to squeeze, tears of fear forming in her eyes. A row of vicious, bloody teeth exposed itself, lining the squirrel’s spine. In shock, no one in the entire coffee shop could utter a single word or sound. After a moment of stupefaction, a number of patrons bulldozed past the manager and ran into the rain to escape towards their cars. They stood for a moment in the downpour. One opened his mouth to say that it was okay when one of his eyeballs expanded outwards and squeezed its way out of the eyesocket, falling onto the floor with an unceremonious plop. Blood pumped out of his empty socket as his flesh grew bloated. He screamed all holy hell and fell to his knees as spindly legs burst out of his back. He flipped over, landed on his new legs, and scampered away on his back. Another escapee, opened her mouth and a new mouth emerged, again and again like a nesting doll. Her teeth gnashed and moaned in a delirious state of predatory instinct. A long, wriggling tongue emerged from her ruined mouth, flicking in and out, tasting the bloody air. Both her arms and legs fell off, dead and blackened flesh. Her torso elongated and stretched. Like a snake, she slithered towards a couple trapped in their car. She hissed and thumped her tail against the car in a fit of animal predation. With her tail, she bashed in the front window and dragged out a man to gorge upon for a meal. The coffee was quiet in a mutual deathly terror, incapable of making any kind of action. Claire turned to Dawn. “Is this real?” Claire whispered in disbelief. Dawn held her head against her chest. “It’ll be okay…we’re going to be okay…we’ll be okay…” Dawn whispered into Claire’s ear. Chaos. Utter anarchy. The only way to describe the scene out there on the street. Cars blared down the roads, crashing in different directions. People were running, seeking cover but unable to before the mutations. Panic ran rampant, people being ravaged by mutants, being torn open and feasted upon, mutilated and deranged beyond human comprehension. Screams of all shades were tearing through the air as tears streamed from Claire’s unbelieving eyes. Dawn’s face held a shade of grimace as she gripped Claire close to herself. “Shh…shh…don’t look at it, just look at me,” Dawn spoke in a hushed and soft voice. Claire buried her face into Dawn’s chest but could not escape the grating sounds of the outside. The manager blinked and stuttered before speaking clearly. “No one panic, nobody panic, we’ll be okay in here,” he said, a low current of trembling escaping his voice. No one in the shop could move or budge from their position. Tears of abject horror flowed freely down bleak expressions. And then, something in the sky changed. A colossal eyeball dipped down, wet and glistening, inquisitive and filled with alien sentience. An immense glow of crimson light exuded from its presence, returning vision to the surface. Claire screamed for but a moment before Dawn closed her mouth with her hand and shushed her. The eyeball had a black iris and pupil, veins of broken capillaries through the whites of the eye. It twitched like a severed nerve as it surveilled everything below. Like the cataclysmic advent of an ancient god, the eyeball struck mortals with pure horror and fear. The mere sight of it caused unmutated humans to fall to their knees in an unconscious supplication. Fresh tears ran down Claire’s cheeks as she stared at the sight, unable to comprehend what was happening around them all. Her skin crawled with the sensation of being observed, crawling at the chaos, crawling with utter terror. Suddenly, the plants began to shift and change in form. Giant maws extended downwards as they started to scream. Animalistic and nearly unrecognizable sounds emitted, sending cold shivers through them all. And then fleshy female genitals bloomed within each tree trunk. Branches formed fingers and they rubbed against their new clitorises. A mewling came out, rising in chorus with all the trees, like cats in heat. Moaning, pleasure, ecstasy. Before the restaurant could all fall into stupefied horror, a fresh dose of the deranged appeared before them. Several children, decapitated, bearing demented flesh, ran through the streets with their heads in their hands. The heads were giggling and tittering, gangly tongues dangling from gaping mouths. Many decapitated heads sprinted around in an insect fashion with legs out of their chopped necks, following the children in the spirit of play. Claire grabbed Dawn’s arm. “Is this real?...” Claire asked in a hushed voice. Suddenly, a policewoman, in uniform, stood up. “We need to barricade the windows and entrance,” she said with force, successfully masking her own inner turmoil and fear. The others, grateful to have some kind of authority, quietly began dragging the chairs and tables against the windows. After some time of shifting furniture, they all sat in the silence, unable to bring themselves to break it. Quite some time passed and the blood rain continued and the lidless eye watched them with intense light. Finally, they began talking to each other in near whispers. “What the fuck is going on?” a man asked. “What the fuck is this?” An old woman, clutching to a bible, replied. “It’s armageddon, it’s rapture, god watches us now and has deemed all of us as sinful black sheep," she said with an insane glint in her eyes. “You’re fucking crazy,” a young teen girl said. “We need to get the fuck out of here.” “What about you?” a man asked, directed towards the police officer. “You gotta know somewhere we can go, somewhere safe.” “We aren’t going anywhere,” the cop replied. “We sit, we wait and we watch. No one is going out in that rain, no one is opening that door.” An argument began that Claire and Dawn had no interest in participating. As they rattled off endless babble and hypotheses, suddenly a voice came through the radio on the cop. But words did not get through. Instead, a series of dark and ancient tongues rang out in the coffee shop. The sound pierced everyone’s chest with ice cold fear, a sound that none had ever heard, a sound that felt slick and black with darkness. “What was that?” someone asked in a louder voice than they were all comfortable with. The cop gulped and struggled to find words in her fear now eclipsing any type of control. As they all argued, Dawn whispered to Claire. “We have to get out of here, we’re no good trapped in this place. Things are going to go south quickly. We can’t stay here,” Dawn said. As if on cue, one of the men tried to wrench the gun out of the cop’s holster. Shit went sideways. Immediately, a riot broke out in an effort to get the gun in an irrational frenzy fueled by fear. A few rounds popped off, fracturing the windows. The stench of dense blood flooded in, making everyone gag and cough. People grappled with each other, struggling in an effort to gain control of the cop’s gun. Dawn grabbed Claire’s hand, used her jacket on her arm to break off glass fragments in the windows. Cloaked by the rustle and tussle of violence, they jumped out, staying underneath the awning of the coffee shop. To their great luck, their car was covered under a carport and they jumped in, shielded from the blood rain. Dawn turned on the car and peeled away, her hands shaking from adrenaline. Blood rain doused the front window and the wipers struggled to keep the front window clear. Numbers of mutants began chasing them but Dawn accelerated and escaped them when their attention turned to a lone woman screaming across the street. Divine calamity had imploded all semblance of human nature. Mutants ran rampant, attacking each other, tearing and ripping flesh in a terrible conflagration of violence. It was impossible to not gaze in arrested fear at all the spectacles of grotesque forms that defied biology. A man humanoid had rows of tentacles extending from his head, flicking in and out, tasting the air. Another mutant, unable to distinguish from man or woman, was on all fours with a serpent for a throat, studded with rows of eyes that twitched, surveilling all around it. Another one was severed at the waist with huge arms that it toddled around on, with a baby face that was screaming and wailing. More and more depravities met them on the road as they deftly maneuvered their way through the disastrous streets. Dawn gritted her teeth and wove in and out of danger as they drove on. When they got home, they stocked up on supplies. Wearing a poncho and umbrella, they went to their RV and got inside, grateful for safety from the outside and accessibility for escape. In fear, they crouched under the window and slid down the wall of the RV. They shut the windows but could still peek through at a certain angle. They watched the neighborhood disintegrating into anarchy. The buildings were burning in infernos as mutants crashed through windows and doors, seeking only to feel live wriggling flesh in their teeth. A few dragged a woman out of her door, kicking and screaming, and they eviscerated her with their talons. They pulled out her organs and intestines and decorated themselves, laughing with glee as they danced around her torn apart corpse. Claire and Dawn watched as their neighbor, upon seeing his torn apart wife, ran out into the rain and shot himself in the head. Claire closed her eyes to escape these corrupted visions and Dawn held her against her tightly, whispering gently to comfort her. But she could not shut out the noises. Screams, of course, were sounding everywhere but what was more disturbing was the sounds of humans being torn apart, breaking bones, crashing vehicles, blood gurgling in wet throats, blindly begging for mercy. The trees and grass sang with ridicule, drifting through the din of the downpour of blood rain. Claire was sobbing into Dawn’s chest, no longer able to withstand the carnage around her. Dawn, barely able to maintain reason and rationality, refused to cry. She would protect her wife, for as long as she could draw breath as a human being. “We have to get out of here,” Claire whimpered through her tears. “We can’t, not yet, there’s too many of them out there,” Dawn reassured her, petting Claire’s head. “Just stay quiet, very quiet.” Claire nodded, wiped her tears, and regained her composure slowly. They waited in the RV, trying futilely to block out the sounds outside. Dawn and Claire both grabbed a kitchen knife and wielded them in their clenched hands as they attempted to ride out this storm of the deranged and insane. Hours passed in the macabre carnival of sounds as they held each other close, a small modicum of comfort that they clung to desperately. And then there was a knock at the door. Dawn peered out to see their neighbors, Drew and Nancy, desperate for safety, dressed in ponchos and umbrellas. Dawn opened the door and let them in. They removed their outer gear and set it aside, unable to stomach the dripping blood. “Dawn, Claire, thank you. By god, thank you,” Drew said in a trembling voice. “Thank god you had that waterproof gear,” Dawn replied. “We didn’t know if it would work or not but it seems like if the rain doesn't make contact with skin, it won’t change you,” Nancy said. “What the fuck is happening?” Nancy murmured to herself like a madman, unable to stop trembling. “What the fuck is going on? This can’t be real. Is this real? Are we really here?” Drew and Nancy held the same expression, a look of fractured sanity, grown desperate for safety. “There has to be somewhere that’s safe, somewhere safe from the rain and those…things,” Dawn said. “I saw that there were refugee centers in the midwest where there’s less people on my phone before we lost service,” Drew said, his expression slightly changing enough for Dawn to pique with suspicion. “We have to leave the city, it isn’t safe here,” Nancy said quietly, her eyes wet with fear and twitching nervously at the sight of the knives in Dawn and Claire’s hands. Dawn frowned as her intuition began to creep into her mind that she had made a grave mistake by allowing them inside.
“The roads are filled with crashed cars, it’ll be impossible to get through them,” Drew remarked, pondering on their options. “We can take the back roads, there’ll be less people. Once we get out of the city we should be good in the more rural areas around here,” Dawn said, carefully watching them. Drew stretched out a hand. “Give me the keys,” Drew said. “I’ll navigate for us. I know the area the best.” Dawn paused. “I’ll drive,” Dawn stated, her eyes drawn to their hands, especially the baseball bat in Drew’s hands and the axe, used for chopping wood, in Nancy’s hands. Was it her imagination but were they twitching slightly? Were those fingers preparing for action? No, no, this was not turning out well at all. Dawn struggled with her thoughts, desiring only for Claire’s safety. Nancy’s hand squeezed down on the handle of her axe. “Just give him the keys,” Nancy said, nearly stuttering upon her words. Dawn frowned. “No,” she simply stated. “If you want a ride then you’re going to follow my lead. The door’s always open if you don’t want to.” Drew’s and Nancy’s expressions suddenly changed and the air in the room pivoted with frightening speed. Their intentions were laid bare as their eyes squinted slightly with animalistic fear. Drew pushed Dawn back and cocked his arm to swing his bat towards her head. He swung but Dawn dipped down to narrowly avoid it and she bull-rushed him. She collided into his chest with her shoulder and kneed him swiftly in the crotch. He gasped out and doubled over. Claire, now awakened from her stupefaction, looked over at Nancy as she raised her axe to land it square on Dawn’s head. Claire leapt forward and grabbed the axe handle. She struggled with Nancy, attempting to gain control. “Give us the fucking keys, you fucking dykes,” Nancy hissed in a way that neither Dawn or Claire could have imagined their entire time knowing them. As Claire and Nancy struggled, Dawn and Drew were throwing blows back and forth. The RV was too cramped for the baseball bat, restricting Drew’s usage. Drew’s fist connected with Dawn’s chin as Dawn’s shin connected with his groin once more. Drew stumbled forward as Dawn wrenched the bat from his hands, throwing it across the RV, understanding it was useless in the RV. Drew bit Dawn on the forearm, digging into her flesh and making her cry out in pain. She gritted her teeth and punched Drew on the head again and again. Finally, he released and roared in fury. Dawn flustered for a moment, shocked by his animal bleat that she would have never expected to come out of a neighbor’s mouth. And then, Drew got the higher ground and knocked Dawn onto her back. He straddled her and thrust his thumbs into her eyeballs. Dawn convulsed in agony, screaming in a primal utterage of sheer suffering. Nancy stopped and screamed for Drew to find her keys. Claire was reeling at the sight of her blinded wife and seized Nancy’s axe in the commotion. Drew got Dawn’s keys after patting her down and threw open the door to the RV. Drew tossed out Dawn’s unconscious body into the blood rain and Claire screamed out. She grabbed one of their umbrellas, held the axe, and jumped out after her. Claire stood under the umbrella as she watched Dawn become drenched in the rain. Nancy and Drew drove off in the RV, leaving Claire and Dawn stranded. “FUCK FUCK FUCK DAWN!” Claire screamed. Claire watched as the rain began to dissolve Dawn’s skin as she writhed on the ground in incomprehensible pain. The raindrops fused into her, as her skeleton broke through her skin. First, her ribcage pierced flesh and exposed itself. It cracked open her gut as her entrails piled out with a wet and heavy thud. Dawn gurgled as her spine shot out of her mouth. Dawn flipped over on all fours, released a grunt, and Claire watched in horror as a sick malformed creature deposited from Dawn’s vagina. A small child still connected to Dawn by the umbilical cord emerged, blind and mute with a mongoloid complexion. Its throat clicked as it struggled to move and breathe and Claire could not resist stomping on it but it slithered away and rode the back of Dawn’s changed form. Dawn’s eyes were drawn to Claire and with her last sliver of sanity Dawn spoke. “I…love…you…” she struggled. Claire was sobbing and was about to reply when suddenly Dawn’s eye exploded out of her head. A crater fissured her skull and a giant insect crawled out, laughing at Claire as it leaped towards her. Claire held the umbrella with one hand and grasped the axe in her other. With a cry of grief and fury, Claire slammed the axe edge into the abdomen of the insect, slicing it in half. Dawn galloped towards Claire with a guttural horse throat blathering nonsense. Claire fell to her knees and weeped like river shores. She accepted her death by her alien wife. Just inches from Claire’s face, Dawn abruptly stopped, her remaining and bulging eye twitched and looked to the West. Claire, trembling with fear and adrenaline, looked up and watched as the eye closed its lid, descending all in a sheet of pure blackness. Blinded, Claire could only hear the patter of rain on her umbrella and felt the heavy breath of Dawn upon her face. And then, as suddenly as the light was extinguished, a crimson beam cracked the darkness in the West, splitting the seas of the black and pulsating on a frequency that responded in every organic flesh upon the earth. The light grew in intensity as the earth beneath all began to quake. Claire was now sitting upon her knees, tears streaming in incomprehension of the fear poisoning her blood. In a hellish carnival of ruby and crimson, the lights reflected upon the blood rain, dousing all those able to see in miles and miles of every direction with horror. Claire bore witness as cracks of golden light appeared. Four seraphim from north, east, south and west, emerged from the darkness. With flaming wings and trumpets of gold, they opened their mouths and released a shrieking voice with a booming sound that blew Claire onto her back, nearly giving her a concussion. She coughed up a small amount of blood and could feel the weight of the sound upon her aching chest. They raised their trumpets in unison and called forth a tower of flesh and blood. It rose high into the sky, higher than any mountain, nearly piercing the sky. The shape of a giant nude woman emerged from the ether. Her comely figure was smooth and adorned in huge flowers across her entire body. Her eyes opened, glowing and weeping tears of gold. She frowned, ever so slightly, and those tears ran down her cheeks, leaving behind trails of divine beauty. The seraphim approached with heads bowed, their cloaks flowing in ivory, and pinned a jewel in her hair one at a time. The jewels gleamed in a celebration of color that she accepted with great nobility and solemnity. Claire sat down and watched as Dawn shuddered, twitched, and went off galloping into the direction of the tower goddess. There was nothing left here. Claire dropped the umbrella and weeped and stared into the downpour as her flesh began vibrating visibly. Her skin began to slough off in wet chunks. Her muscle grew exposed and began to twist her skeleton in all directions. A gaping mouth appeared on her abdomen, it grew fangs and chomped, gnashing on the air with flicks of the tongue. Claire let loose a guttural bellow and her eyes went dead. …Where am I… …Who is that… …Who am I… Claire floated buoyantly along the fringes of insanity within the womb of chaos. Her feelings came from far away and she could barely feel her body. Claire could feel her life force seeking out blood and blood and blood. Like a projector against the night sky, Claire could see the world that she had willingly exited. She watched as she hunted and tore down innocent humans but felt very little for them. More deeply she felt anger, a deep and abyssal fury that could not be contained to a single scream. She bellowed out from her soul in a rage that was not merely her own. Within her voice were millions, billions of songs of suffering that sang out in a holy cacophony, the demonic playground of the laughing old man on the moon. History flowed through the melodies with reckless abandon. Claire watched that holy sound paint itself across the art of bloodshed and carnage. Earth became a mere pinprick upon the canvas of the universe and Claire began to understand the ancient history of a single cell organism. Indeed, Claire felt connected to all organisms in this moment as her corporeality faded out of memory. Her identity became meaningless to her, a human adornment that she abandoned now. She allowed herself to dissolve and assimilate into this new consciousness that beckoned towards her so entrancingly. She came to understand that this was the response of Nature to the raping, miserly, pathetic humans. They had dug too deep and awakened Nature with such reckless foolishness. Nature had only replied in full for all that wounded her for so many years. She must provide equilibrium once more. Months passed after the incident. Months became years, centuries became millenia. And then, one day, the blood rain ceased. It came abruptly and left with an unceremonious halt. The din of raindrops had suddenly stopped. The sky had been permanently changed. It was black outer space but drawn with godly intention and circumstance. Celestial bodies slowly rotated in view, with divine orbs and floating waves of aurora colors. From infinite distances, a soft singing melody could be heard from the humming voice of Mother Nature. All that remained of the blood rain was the balded earth, now devoid of all life. Humankind and all had been finally destroyed and it was time once again for Nature to reclaim its space. The tower of flesh had remained and a giant flower upon the top bloomed. Mother Nature gently placed that flower into the desert ground. She blew on it gently and life re-emerged. And in this way, the history of earth began to turn once more.