The bumblebee buzz of a phone rung in the brunette’s pocket, and as much as the mystery of the dark veil of blood hugging the sky merited closer examination, he also wanted to delay opening up that particular Pandora’s box as much as humanly possible. Fishing out his smartphone, the notification at its center was… Well, there’s some things that can only be understood from seeing them yourself, and what Wyve was looking at was a very strong candidate for that category. A mystery app, a yellow textbox, and the most nonsensical text he had ever received:
“Honored Guided,
You have been selected for the duty and privilege of representing humanity alongside 500,000 others of your kind. Unfortunately, the one originally meant to be you and your comrades’ guide to achieve greatness is unable to do so for the foreseeable future. Regardless, your job is simple. Survive and Harvest the Seed, those are your top priorities. Do this job well, and your lives -the lives of everyone you know- will be left untouched.”
A message so over-the-top in its attempt to be ominous that it couldn’t be anything more than a prank now felt more like the trumpets heralding the end of the world. Or at least, the end of the world Wyve knew.
The weight of everything that had happened so far had already been silently sitting on his shoulders, but its heaviness became harder to ignore as time went on. Should he even waste the energy to dissect what any of this meant or would that be time better spent worrying about whether or not he’d survive whatever form of damnation this was supposed to be? Wyve was never a fan of hand-outs, but for once he wished someone would just tell him what the hell was going on, or if any of this even had a purpose to begin with.
Shaking himself out of his reverie, Wyve did what he’s always done best: spring to action instead of sitting around mulling things over. He had a couple of urgent calls to make sure others were safe, Boss being the one that immediately jumped to mind. Rushing past his lock screen with fingers shaky from fear, what the teen saw wasn’t his usual homescreen. The world seemed so determined to rip every sense of familiarity he had left, of course something as petty as messing with his phone wouldn’t be off-limits.
A black background, an 8-bit coin symbol, and a big fat zero next to it.
That’s all that was displayed.
Even his phone was calling him broke… his sense of humor was wearing far too thin to find that funny. No amount of desperate swiping in any direction let him exit out of the invasive app. He couldn’t help but feel weariness bloom in every crevice of his body as the situation just seemed to get more and more hopeless.
Wyve glanced out the window, into the despairing crowds clamoring for answers they wouldn’t ever receive. For once in his life, Wyve couldn’t look at them with superiority, couldn’t laugh silently at their herd mentality and how easily they started flopping like fish out of water at the first hint of adversity. He was just as lost as them. That thought had Wyve gritting his teeth, almost to the point of cracking them.
He’d been here before. Throughout his life, he’d been knocked down and on the edge of giving up more times than he cared to count. But he always got back up. Why should it be any different now? He wasn’t about to lose his resolve at the starting line.
No, whatever kind of hell this was, it wouldn’t leave him rotting in a dingy café.
///
Yep, this isn’t NYC.
It took an embarrassing amount of time for Wyve to realize this wasn’t the city he spent his whole life in (it’s not his fault this place looked so damn similar). Looking at the countless stores and bodegas lining the streets, a detail stuck out so blaring obvious he was completely bewildered he hadn’t spotted it sooner. All the store’s names were blurred, not a single piece of recognizable branding was left uncensored. Whoever set this whole thing up must have been real paranoid about copyright infringement, although Wyve reckoned they’d be better off worrying about the impending mass kidnapping charges. He didn’t know it was possible, but whoever built this place created the most purposefully generic rendition of an American metropolis. ‘Perfect place for a movie set.’
‘…But this isn’t a movie, is it?’
It was something he constantly had to remind himself of, that he wasn’t just watching the most realistic horror-action-thriller ever made. The sky’s angry hue felt like something straight out of those end-of-the-world flicks, and every so often, there were flares of bright scarlet rippling through it like roots of a demonic tree. The atmosphere was suspenseful in the way the media he loved to consume was, but the anxious fear of actually living through it was in a class of its own.
Strolling past the panicked and hysteric people chattering and theorizing about possible explanations for what the hell was happening, a different sound prodded at his ears, disturbing enough to make him stop in his tracks.
It sounded… fleshy.
It was faint, incredibly so, but that didn’t stop the unease settling into the deepest crevice of his gut. The brunette’s decision was made in a split second, and to any experienced horror movie fans watching, it’d be worthy of a dry remark about how no one would be stupid enough to actually do that. Slipping through the dank forest of alleyways, right then left then right again, he navigated them with the sound of the sinister noises as his compass. As he got closer to its source, the feeling nestled inside him grew vicious and self-prservetive. It was pleading to him. Please, leave while you can.
The sounds of human screaming made a more compelling case. Abandoning someone in need of help was a sour way to start the apocalypse, and now that he was here, why not save a life or two. Wyve’s pace went from cautious but quick to recklessly fast.
'Copper. It smells like copper. It’s probably just copper.'
He turned the corner way faster than he needed to and bumped into a nearby radiator because of it. As he stared ahead, the pain at his sides barely had room to register. The scarlet from the sky had dripped down to the ground, and it was pooling and spreading and reaching towards him. The half a mile he had just ran and the carnage in front of him fought relentlessly to rip his breath away.
The shadow of something was squatting near the figure of a man, and its hands were inside the carcass. No, not hands. Hands weren’t so sharp, didn’t glint so malevolently in the obsidian darkness. They were talons, nature’s weapons for its decreed executions and tools to gleefully carve out her will into the skin of her enemies. Two legs, two arms, bipedal, humanoid. It had the same ingredients as any normal human, but it was as far from one as a living thing could be. After all, humans didn’t do this to each other, not with sheer joy in their eyes and with a grin that could only belong to something that had no purpose other than to inflict suffering.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
The horrible creature noticed its audience, and it didn’t seem possible, but its smile grew wider. It took step after step, got closer and closer.
‘I can’t move.’
Mixed in with the smell of blood was a pungent musk, so powerful it smelled more like decaying flesh… or that might just have been the corpse lying behind it. Whichever it was, it got stronger and stronger.
‘Please, move. I need to-’
The dripping sound Wyve heard in the background may have been the leaking pipes spilling their dew, or maybe the saliva dripping from the beast’s opened maw. Whichever it was, it got louder and louder.
‘Why… This? Is this what my end is supposed to be?’
Wyve didn’t know when he had begun to look away but -filled up with indignation- he found the courage to stare at his death’s eyes. Two broken windows leading nowhere. So empty. Horribly empty.
‘… Hell no. No shot I’m dying to this.’
With strength he thought had been sapped from him, his fist flew and dug into the pathetic thing’s face. It flinched, but not as much as the damn thing should have. And so, he fed it another. And another. The form was amateurishly sloppy, and by the third punch his knuckles burned. But in each swing Wyve charged as much of his need to survive as he could fit. This was his all, his resistance to everything that had wronged him, not only payback for today, but for how the last five miserable years of his life had turned out. No eldritch creatures nor vengeful strangers were gonna rip away the life that was rightfully his, not after so many people gave up so much to give him the chance to live it.
Punch after punch Wyve felt himself tire and slow, yet the creature was unscathed, as it had been before he arrived. Its smile kept growing bigger, but its two clouded orbs remained as still as a dead man’s eyes.
Bam. The punch rang with powerful volume, but that’s all it seemed to accomplish.
Bam, there was another.
Another.
More.
They had to be faster and stronger because if they weren’t then he’d be eaten, probably alive, definitely painfully, all while this thing tortuously dragged out his last breath like a coveted hunting trophy-
His arm had stopped moving, all of its momentum disappeared far too quickly to be physically possible. But he hadn’t stopped. The demon’s own hand enveloped it, and its grasp was so painfully cold he wondered if his arm was still even there.
Crack.
He screamed, but to who? What for? For help? To curse another innocent person to die in the same horrible way? ‘Maybe...’
‘Maybe, I don’t want to die alone in the alley of an alley, all in a city I’m not even sure is real. Would Boss and the lot even find out? It’d be better if they assumed I just ran away. From the responsibility, from the consequences…
Maybe she was thinking the same thing when- ‘
Wyve wasn’t facing the necrotic beast anymore. He was running, with the dead weight of a limp arm flapping by his side. The indistinctive walls at both his sides blurred together, then shifted and bended as he turned corner after corner, but in his fear rational and calculated navigation became impossible. He was simply running.
After what felt like the hundredth turn, the open jaws of the accursed alleyway and the red skies beyond them were laid out in front of Wyve. The finish line had been set, and the possibility of actually surviving went from a pipe dream to tantalizingly close. Those last few steps before safety felt like the longest ones; the most dangerous ones to take…
Then, Wyve was out. Out of the concrete cemeteries’ unrelenting grasp and safe from that bloodhungry monster. The landscape above almost looked roseate and comforting when compared to the puddles of ruby red formed from the screams of desperation, but nevertheless the crimson tint served to remind Wyve that he wasn’t safe. He needed to bury the concept of ever being safe again and then not even think about digging it back up until he was out of this place. It was a commodity that had been ripped from him as soon as his eyes landed on that monster’s silhouette and the cadaver it had been toying with.
Just the thought of it had him throwing up his egg and pork breakfast all over the sidewalk.
///
As the adrenaline flowing throughout his body waned, the throbbing in his left arm took its place with newfound intensity. It was the most physical pain Wyve had ever been put through, and it took tremendous amounts of his willpower to not simply lay down and cry in pain and frustration. He’d just seen a monster that had no place in reality alongside the grizzliest sight of his life and was expected to do what exactly? Move on and pretend it hadn’t even happened? Maybe that’d be the best for his deteriorating psyche, but Wyve doubted that that image could ever be burned from his memory.
With his mind still back in that alleyway, Wyve felt a dull sensation at the left side of his leg, and amidst all the pain he was feeling it took him a second to recognize it was his phone buzzing. There was a moment of extreme anxiety, a fear that whatever was waiting for him would just make this record-breaking shitty day even worse. Wyve rationed out that whatever bullshit was being thrown his way wouldn’t just dissipate by ignoring it, and so there was now acceptance in the place of his previous trepidation as he dug out his phone and turned it on.
The same interface as before beamed at his face, but rather than the uninspiring zero that was initially next to the coin icon, the number had gone up by a hundred. Some sort of log took up the bottom half of the screen with one lone line of text at its top.
14:34- Survived encounter with a Locust: +100
‘Plus one hundred… points? Coins? And what the hell is a Locust?’
Whatever it meant, the change in the app made one thing clear. This wasn’t just a malicious piece of malware meant to block him from using his phone, but something closely connected to whatever the hell was going on, maybe even the key to understanding it. The way it presented itself was game-like, but if Wyve’s memory served him correctly, the strange message from before stressed how life or death this ‘game’ supposedly was. Wyve shuddered; that threat felt a lot more real after what he had seen in that alleyway…
A foreign feeling at his shoulder sent his mind into panic mode, and he was only slightly soothed after realizing what it was. He had been so caught up in unraveling the Gordian knot in front of him that he hadn’t even noticed the company he’d been graced with.
Wyve’s eyes traced the beefy forelimb sitting atop his left shoulder all the way back to the larger-than-life mountain of a man in front of him. What he was staring at was certainly human, but the man’s intimidating stature and build still fired off the alarm clocks in his hyper-skittish brain. The impressively well-cared for beard the other sported was the same striking shade of tar black as the sunglasses that concealed his eyes… and his intentions.
“Holdin’ up alright there?”, the robust man gruffly gestured to the other’s broken arm, but Wyve had a feeling that he wasn’t just talking about the physical injury; he’s probably been showing his exhaustion like an open book. He could tell the stranger was seeing through him with a concerned stare, even with the opaque glass obscuring his eyes.
“…Survivin’”, Wyve’s reply couldn’t have come out as anything other than curt after what he’d been through, but that didn’t stop him from feeling bad for repudiating the other’s help so strongly.
The tan-skinned man shook his head dismissively, obviously not buying the feeble attempt at deflection. “Now ain’t the time to be actin’ tough. Not at all.”, the deep gravelly voice sounded out, and its owner had already turned around and begun leaving seconds later. “Follow me.”, he continued speaking as smoothly as he continued walking, “Or not, if you wanna deal with that by yourself”.
Some stranger clad in stereotypical biker’s attire suggesting they could fix up your multiple broken bones would’ve been an instant nope for anyone sane.
But this involved the business of powers Wyve didn’t even want to comprehend, trying to keep hold of his sanity sounded like a bonafide death sentence.