Okay, I'm Old School AR from back in the "golden age" (my words) that you referred to in the other post when you called for more commenting on stories. I am absolutely, 100% behind that idea.
At the risk of donning the mantle of oldfart-ery, badly missed are the days when every single story produced a 20+ posting here on the board. One of the highest points I ever enjoyed in the early stages of my writing was a story I did for a contest here back in... 2005, 2006? Anyway, the contest theme was Super Heroes, and my entry was about a comic book artist who snapped over how the corporation was taking his character in a new direction. It ended with the guy on the roof in his hero's costume, telling his secretary that he really was the hero, jumping out into the night. To this day it is still one of my favorite flash pieces.
Must have been two weeks the discussion raged on over whether he fell or if he flew. (I never told, still haven't, lol).
For that matter the first story I ever posted here earned me a few solid criticisms over a really poor similie I chose to use, the first ever criticism I ever got as a writer and what turned out to be the first step towards me becoming an actual writer, not just a hopeful one.
So merry christmas, sit back, grab a cup of Earl Grey and enjoy a ride in the Wayback machine back to the glory days of critique, AR style...
From a technical stanpoint, there were a few issues that would have made the story work better for me. There were a couple of typos - (Eifel tower, not Eiffel, and Yersina Pestis not Yersinia Pestis, (although I grant you that one may have been purposeful). From a purely writing standpoint, I absolutely loved that you made the characters generic and nameless in order to have them be "anyone." Ordinarily, that is a huge mistake and a major no-no since it is widely accepted wisdom that a reader cannot relate to a nameless character. In this one story though, it worked and worked perfectly. BUT... (there's always a but). Your story starts with "the girl," who is the central character. You then call the secondary character "mom," and while I understand why you did it, it doesn't work as well as it could.
The story is how the plague affects the girl, and her mother. The girl is the focus, the mother is secondary. It's a much more gut-wrenching tale if you back the mom out of the spotlight and focus on the girl. I read it through twice. First time as writ, second time I substituted "her mother" every time I saw "mom," and it was much more powerful since it focused the entire story then upon the girl, and made the end about a hundred times more emotionally affecting. If you are gonna write a story with no names, only one of them can lead.
The only other writing titch was the continuity errors. The wind doesn't blow west-east around the globe. If the whole planet is covered in less than a week, why is the girl still alive? It would have been better to have the murder scene within two days, not 12. Although I do get that you probably picked twelve so it fell outside of the really neat little death-day countdown bit you had there at the end. I probably would have gone with just casino names rather than naming landmarks in that one scene as well, to avoid confusion. It can be read to be actual New York getting wiped out rather than the vegas casino, which throws the reader out of your timeline.
That being said -
Dude, I absolutely LOVED your story. The idea was brilliant, and the ending was powerful. This is one or two re-writes away from being a classic piece of flash fiction. Win or lose, good points or bad, you wrote something that really affected me when I read it. As a writer, I wish it was better. I wish it was as good as it could be and had fewer flaws. As a reader, holy hell. I had to go hug my daughter after that.
Kudos.
And that, new kids, is how AR rolls. ;D