Prelude to Nothing – 00 [Pilot]

Talk about bare bones. There is no plot, no main characters, no main character names, no setting, no title, no nothing. This is merely a pilot for something I don't even know if I have enough to write about. I have no plot, no main characters, nothing. It is just writing. Oh yeah, it's not fanfiction. It's big boy writing – original.
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He stumbles through the darkened alley. The alley is completely empty, empty not of things, but of people. A rank dumpster and several precariously placed rusted silver trash cans line the alley. Boxes and crates are stacked lackadaisically. The contrast between the blackness of the alley and the whiteness of the sunlight outside is stark, similar to one staring at two poorly juxtaposed colors for too long.

He kicks one of the trash cans. A dent appears in it. A rat scurries away in fright. He places a hand to his forehead, as if tending to a deep, impenetrable ache.

He begins mumbling to himself. “I built this. Didn’t I? When I lost her, when I lost everything… I swore to myself that I would destroy everything!”

A massive military plane hovers by in the sky. Its hum drowns out everything else; its hum freezes the world in its entirety with its ubiquitous drone. Everyone stares at it. Save for that one fellow.

He stumbles out of the darkened alley. The world is massive outside, bright. Across from the alley is a cathedral, high, erect, proud. Its highest steeple just barely eclipses the sun. The church basks in the sun’s rays.

Pigeons gather in the big square outside the cathedral. They shuffle about mindlessly in a crowd of its fellows, pecking, pecking, pecking at little tiny beads of rice thrown on the ground by the elderly. Occasionally a mischievous child or an inconsiderate adult bulldozes their way through the midst of the birds, causing them to fly, wandering into the vast reaches of the big blue sky.

He finds himself standing in front of the church, staring up at its grandeur. A young boy tugs at his shirt. The main character looks down. The boy is holding an ice cream cone in his free hand. By the color of the ice cream, it appears to be strawberry.

“What are you looking at, Mister?”

“The birds,” the elder man replies with a handsome, proud, and most of all, intelligent voice. “I like watching the birds fly. They’re capable of flight, of transcending the skies, but so many of them wander aimlessly about, with no clear direction. And even when they do fly with purpose, it is only in response to some outside stimuli, such as the changing seasons.”

The boy continues to look puzzled.

“They move only when higher powers tell them to move. They can fly, and yet they don’t do it of their own accord. Their talent is wasted…”

The man shoves his hands in his pockets, mumbling the last few utterances of his speech. He walks away, leaving the boy behind, thoroughly perplexed. His mother hurries towards him, steering him away from the strange man.

“Yes,” the man mutters to himself, “what is a life without a purpose?”

The ubiquitous humming of the military plane stops. The blast disrupts the entire peace of the existences below, captures all attention. Burning fragments rain down from the sky. The flag of the nation is the first to fall to the ground, flames greedily sopping up its existence in the material world.

Panic consumes all in the world below. They run about, not knowing where to go, not knowing what to do. They merely lend their fear to the situation and make it more dire. Men lay on the ground groaning as blood seeps from their bodies onto the ground. Women grasp desperately for their children, hurtled away from them by the rushing panic of flying bodies. Children’s crying fills the air.

A sharp piece of debris from the wreck pierces our hero. He falls to his knees, glaring up at the still-floating wreckage of the plane. It begins to fall, making one large arc in the air. He laughs as he dies. “I’m going to die again?”