"We need to get out of here. Fast," Hawk said.

"There's a back door somewhere. Restaurants always have a back door. There wouldn't be anywhere else for employees to smoke if there isn't a back door." Em's words came tumbling out, rapid fire and breathless.

"How do we know they want to hurt us?" Alex said.

"How do we know they don't?" Hawk said. "And how do we know we can't hurt them?"

"Hold on, hold on," Henry Dyson said. "Why are we running away from monkeys? They're just monkeys. Big ones, but they're used to people."

"You didn't look through the window." Hawk breathed. Oh, god, she was shaking so hard. "And we're not going to waste any more time. Back door. Now."

They went through the darkened rear corridors of the restaurant, lit only by emergency fixtures. Everything was bathed in a harsh, white glare. Cold tones only. Exit signs glowed before them, and side doors promised a walk-in cooler, dry storage, janitorial. They passed each without checking. Hawk kept thinking about the mother-creature, her eyes. Wide with fear, yes...but could she call them wild? Could she? Or was it a more sentient fear she had registered? She kept thinking about how it...how she cut her feet on glass. She hadn't run. That female creature had gone forward, despite the fragments of window before her. Wouldn't an animal have run away at the first taste of pain?

The quartet of humans reached the rear door, exit sign glowering to indicate escape in case of fire or other disaster. And now it was time to measure what their next move ought to be. In here, they were discovered, but being inside the kitchen was a known quantity. Out there was the infinite. Out there was the void. It was the last place they wanted to be, and it was the place they needed most to go.

Henry broke the silence. "We could always call Kaiser for an extraction?" His voice made it a question, albeit a hopeful one.

"No," Hawk said. Alex nodded with approval. Em looked scared.

"Why not?" Dyson said.

"Because assuming he even would extract us—which is a big assumption, Henry—I don't think that's a good idea." She said.

Bangs sounded from inside the restaurant. The creatures were trying to get through the kitchen door.

"You'd rather be on Planet of the Apes here?" Dyson said.

"Right now, yes. Because everything else aside, even if we think the energy made these monkeys survive, somehow—"

"Holy shit," Em said. "You think that?"

Hawk waved her off. "How did they get the clothes? If they survived the energy, where'd they find the clothes?"

Alex said, "Well, fuck. Why not go with 'they made them', since I'm pretty sure they did."

"Great. So how did they have time for that? It's been...what, twelve hours since this Event started? Maybe, maybe they made the loin cloths. It doesn't take much for those. But I saw those...those robes the one was wearing. You don't make that in twelve hours. Not with the kind of embroidery and beadwork I saw."

"So what are you saying?" Dyson said.

"I don't know. I don't have enough information to know anything at all yet. I can still argue maybe somebody brought those robes and they were just sitting somewhere for a monkey to pick up, but...did you see the caps they wore on their teeth? All of the ones I saw had them. It was made for those teeth. That's not something you can just...pick up off the ground. And I don't think they could make those in twelve hours. You'd need a crucible, molds, blacksmithing gear...So there's something else going on here that we don't understand." She paused. Swallowed. "And I don't think we should get Kaiser involved in this yet. He will be. I get that. But...I think about telling him, and I'm more frightened than when we first saw those things."

"Which was five minutes ago," Alex said.

"Right. I can't tell you why seeing a jeweled tooth cap made the thing less scary, but...I think we should keep going. Get as close to the Prism as we can, and see what else we can find. Have more to tell the world than whatever story Kaiser wants us to pick up. Okay?"

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"Okay," Alex said, and the other two nodded. But he was the one who stepped up against the door. "I'll take point, okay?" And as there were no objections, he leaned forward on the handle.

***

The outside air was cool and scent-less. Hawk hadn't realized how much botanicals perfumed the air—even grass had a scent—until all of it was gone. There wasn't even the hoary musk of mulch. The organics that gave loam its richness had turned to Glass quite some time ago. The door had dropped them into a small side-alley, where the garbage (a plastic can of gleaming ashes, broken up by inorganic plastics) sat waiting for a maintenance worker that would never come, that was probably sitting dead in a little cart somewhere. Everything was dead. That fact opened up beneath Hawk's feet periodically, a void hungry for more. Everything. The isopods. The springtails. The nitrifying bacteria formerly taken for granted. This ground was dead beyond all possibility of life, save for the lives of four humans, preserved by ants. It was enough to make Hawk want to puke again.

Swiftly, Alex glanced out of the little alley, then turned back to the others. "Okay. I don't see much outside of the restaurant, so here's what we're going to do. We're going to walk—"

"You mean run." Em said, clinging to Henry's hand. They didn't even seem to notice whose hand they were holding. Hawk snuck a quick look at Henry, who seemed very much aware that his hand was being crushed, and seemed almost happy about it.

"No. To quote The Last Unicorn, 'never run from anything immortal; it attracts their attention.' Obviously these things aren't immortals. But running is the fastest way to attract attention to yourself. That goes double when you're dealing with animals, especially if they're high prey drive, like dogs. Do not run. We're going to walk. You see that golf cart right there?" He pointed a ways back up the main thoroughfare. It was a cart they had passed a bit earlier, green canopy, a great deal of ash in the seats. Multiple pairs of shoes on its base.

"We are not riding in that thing," Hawk said.

"We are absolutely riding on that thing," Alex told her. "We're riding that to the Prism, we're taking a handful of pictures, and then we are booking it for the entrance. Sound like a plan?"

The trio of scientists agreed. Plan. Good plan. Time to go. Alex looked back and forth to make sure the coast was clear, and then they were off. The walk was short, brisk. It would even have been pleasant, late hour or no, if there weren't so many reminders of what they were walking through, and why. The dust of the dead moved with their every step. And there was also the feeling of eyes. Hawk felt the psychosomatic prickle of being watched. It danced up every limb, lingered on the other senses like the bad touch of a sweaty hand. Don't run, she told herself. Don't do it. Across the pale concrete walkway, which had once been hedged with flowers, footsteps echoed off walls like the knell of funeral bells. I'm here, those echoes seemed to say. Come find me, chase me, catch me. And what came after catch me? Maybe Hawk would be lucky. She wouldn't have to find out. Or maybe it was something lethal, and these were her last minutes or hours alive.

They reached the golf cart without incident. And now Alex and Hawk stood side-by-side as they studied the dead, slowly dissolving in their seat. And they hadn't dissolved nearly fast enough for Hawk's taste. "We're going to have to...touch. Aren't we?" She said.

"Squeamish?" He raised a brow. She guessed it wasn't much like her.

"It wouldn't be so bad if they were actually...bodies." Things she could rationalize. And there was nothing to do but reach forward and grab what she could. Arms were shattered off, like fossilized wood from its place of repose, and her fingers crushed through what felt like an inch of frail crystals before she reached something more compact. She had to swallow to control her gag reflex, for all that she had emptied her gut out earlier. The beige crystals around the neck still carried a cord of red, and the shape of vertebrae was still evident, as if the denser leavings of bone were more durable. The crystalline properties of ex-flesh. She was learning all kinds of new things here. Holding on to her sanity by her fingernails, she heaved once, and threw the dissolving body out of the golf-cart. It hit the ground with a high pitched sound, a C with just enough dissonance to set teeth on edge. Then another body followed the first, as Alex heaved the shape in the driver's seat aside. The shapes shattered on the ground.

"I feel like I should apologize," she said, staring at the concrete.

"They're dead. We're not." Em got into her seat. "Can we leave now?"

"Hold on." Alex closed his eyes. "Hawk, can you remember the map?"

"No, but I can bring it up on my phone," she said, and obediently produced the cartoon, colorized map of the Bronx zoo.

"Alright." Alex studied it for a moment. "What is the most valuable information we can get, right now?"

"Insectarium, to check on their honeypots. Another enclosure. Maybe the big cats or the birds, see if any of them made it. Then the Prism and the monkey house." She said.

He walked his fingers across the phone screen. "I want to avoid the main routes. They're made to be seen and used. If I were a monkey-person, I'd stick to the thoroughfares because they're easy."

"That is a gigantic assumption, Alex," Hawk said.

"I'm assuming it. So we're taking a back route. Here." He traced down the side of the zoo. "I saw it on the sat map back with Kaiser. There's a maintenance path that runs along the fence. Insectarium's here," he pointed out in front of them, where a building quietly glowered over the hellscape around it. The gleam of its windows was nearly palatial "We hit that, we loop around on the service road until we get to the Prism. We take Kaiser's special little pictures, and then we blow this popsicle stand. What do you think?"

"I think we're spending too much time talking and not enough time driving. Lay on, MacDuff." Em patted the driver's headrest. Alex gave her a look, and then put the cart into gear.