I've started a book! I feel so pleased with myself

Here's a teaser for you guys...

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The year was 1873 and Henry Mitchell sat on his horse and looked with apprehension at the horizon. At the edge of his sightline he could see a great cloud coming towards his small homestead at a rapid pace. He’d seen dust clouds, clouds filled with rain, clouds filled with ice and he knew what they all looked like. But this one was new: it was blackish yellow with odd lights dancing in it, like light reflected off of shards of glass. A faint hum filled the air as well, making his ears pop. It looked like it was snowflakes, glittering with light and yellow color. But it looked, wrong…”

“What the ######…” he said and then turned his horse around and trotted back to the homestead a little faster than necessary. As he rode, he kept watch for the cloud out of the corner of his eye, watching with mounting anxiety as it crept forward across the landscape. He watched as grass, the river, hills and a barn disappeared into the murky depths of the cloud. The sound was louder now; defiantly audible and a kind of buzzing that came from the cloud. When he saw it cross the river, he spurred the horse into a gallop that took him all the way home.

He could see his wife, teenage daughter and seven year old son out in the yard, His wife and daughter planting seeds in the dry earth and the little boy chasing the chickens around them.

“Get inside!” he yelled waving his arms franticly. His wife stood up, and caught sight of the cloud, she called to her daughter and scooped up the boy in her arms before dashing inside.

He rode as fast as he could, but distances could trick you on the Great Plains and it took him much longer to reach even the fence then he originally thought. When he dismounted to open the gates, the first one hit him.

Thwap.

“Gross,” he said and pulled with insect from his cheek, it was the biggest grasshopper he had ever seen and it flapped its wings, creating a buzzing sound similar to the clouds noise. “God ######,” he breathed before the cloud hit.

It was like hail born on a motionless breeze; the insects pelted him with their hard bodies and crawled all over him. The sky grew dark with their forms and the buzzing was like that of a fire in ######. When he opened his eyes a crack, he could see, through the mass of bodies on his face, that the sun had disappeared behind the swarming plague. He did not dare to open his mouth in fear that the insects would crawl inside of him and buzz around in his stomach and they died.

He fell to his knees and lifted his face in prayer.

“God Almighty! Why have you delivered us into the hands of Lucifer?”

Why do you pray to your god? The voice came from all of the buzzing wings, the vibrations making words that where seared across his mind.

Only we can save you. We are The Locust. Here, in this place, there is no God. There is no Devil, there is only Us.

Quickly Henry made the sign of the cross but it did nothing to stop them coming. The insects made a laughing sound. Quietly, he passed out, his last sensation was that of the insects bodies rupturing beneath him.

XxX

He awoke to a scene of devastation. The world had been stripped bare, trees had no leaves and the parry had been eaten down to the ground, leaving dust and chalk. His crops where gone, the water was thick with drowned insects. The wood of his plow have even been eaten away. He stood up, to find that his cloths had been gnawed off of his body. Slowly, dripping green, he staggered back towards his house.