Welcome to my Monday Minis.
This is where I review short stories and flash fiction.
For today I’ll be telling you about Just One Day
by Jacob Prytherch
My Review
This story reminds me of the movie Ground Hog Day.
A man relives the same day over and over. Except this goes on for years!
Trapped on a space station overrun with flesh eaters, the engineer begins each day the same as the one before. He navigates obstacles and zombies, trying to keep more people alive each time.
While he knows he’s repeating the same day all over again, the other survivors don’t and it doesn’t seem to help when he explains it to them. Each morning he begins again.
“His calm demeanor was the resignation of the damned.”
Each time he anticipates what he learned the previous time, making it a bit further towards safety and keeping more people alive.
“It was just one day, one more, then it would be over. How many times has he said that?”
But the engineer begins to doubt whether he can do what he wants. Whether he can get most of the people to the escape pod and safety. He’ll just have to keep going through it until he reaches an end, if there is one.
For a short story this has a lot going on. Black holes, time travel, and space zombies!
The beginning is a calm introduction to the engineer and what’s going on. Then it quickly becomes a nail biting adventure with people screaming and fleshies gnawing on the poor saps that don’t survive that day.
It’s hard to find a zombie story with a unique spin on it. Kudos to the author for doing just that, plus giving me an ending that had me reading it twice. I wanted to be sure I got it right.
3 Stars
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Synopsis
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