All right, this is pretty fun! Novelist Chuck Wendig posted a flash fiction challenge (that’s a short and fast written piece). It is a 5 part challenge where many authors add 200 words to a story previously posted. I missed Part I of the challenge but was able to drop in for Part II. I hope you enjoy!
The rules are simple:
Look through the 200-word entries from last week. (They are here.)
Pick one.
Add another 200 words to the story.
This is the entry by Jim Frankin that I chose to add to and you can find on his blog here:
The plunge into the ice-cold water, hit Derry like an avalanche. A fading knowledge of the film ‘Predator‘ had informed him to lower his body temperature so that the alien won’t see him. Though, he hadn’t realised how cold the water would be, how the flow of the water would drag him away from the bank or how his thick woolen coat and boots would become the rocks that pulled him down.
It’s worth noting at this point that in Predator, the hero was a hardened military veteran with experience in guerrilla-warfare, while Derry worked in the Accounts department for a large national fish exporter, and the most alien thing he had encountered in his life so far was the perpetual lack of sticky notes in his office. Being woefully terrible at making quick decisions, preferring an hour or two to mull over every eventuality also goes some way to explain his poor choice of hiding place.
His limbs stiff, his breathing now wheezy-gulps, and his head now spent more time underwater as his legs struggled to move. Derry panicked, with a thought that he didn’t have hours to mull over…. he was going to die.
And my added two cents:
Finding himself now at the bottom of the river, Derry couldn’t move a single limb in struggle against the pull of death. He strained to see something, anything in the water that would pull him from this nightmare. He felt the slow pound of his heart within his chest as the last bubbles of air left his mouth.
Unexpected warmth flooded in from his ears and spread to his extremities. Excitement coursed through his veins. Life! He knew he had been pulled from the abyss, someone had saved him from hell. Derry’s eyes shot open only to blink in surprise. The water was clear, he breathed. He lifted his hands, pulling off a glove to view his webbed fingers. A glance up and he could see the rush of the river ahead though he stood on the bottom as if he was on land.
Derry was sure then that he had died. No amount of calculations would save him from the truth. A salmon swam by and nipped at the glove still clutched in his hand. Derry reached out and felt the cool scales pass beneath his skin. His heart skipped a beat and he put a hand over it, oddly comfortable with its off-beat. He took in a deep breath preparing to choke only to find that the air did not arrive in his lungs through nose or mouth but from gills.
Author Lisa Barry 