Leon gathered his will and stood up. The world spun, but he grit his teeth and pushed through the nausea. He couldn’t wait for his body to adjust. They had to get out of the light as soon as possible or else radiation sickness would be the least of their worries.

Throwing Mila’s arm around his shoulder, Leon dragged her limp body through the shattered sliding door. He prepared to put her down gently when a new wave of heat crashed into his back, making him stumble. Another bomb? He leaned against the door frame as the world spun, and then he felt Mila slide off his shoulder.

Looking up, Leon found his closest friend standing over him. Marcus took the weight off and dragged Mila around the corner and into the shade. Once she was safely leaning against the wall, Marcus rushed over to him and spoke, but it only came out as a dull hum in his ringing ears. He put his hands under Leon’s arms and began to guide him inside, but he only took a single step before Marcus stumbled and fell to the ground, his arms and legs going stiff.

Leon blinked. At some point he couldn’t remember, he must have decided to press his face against the cold tiles of the balcony. Why else would he be on the ground? He felt someone trying to drag him inside, but the person was either too weak or Leon was too heavy. He only slid across the ground until he bumped into the raised track of the sliding door. They would have to carry him over if they wanted to bring him inside.

The world faded as his thoughts stopped coming. The heat was too much for Leon to bear. The fire crackled through his veins, but in the back of his mind, he noticed that it was slowly gathering in his abdomen. Barely a subconscious impression, he didn’t act on that thought or look into it deeper. He merely watched as the heat sunk into his skin, flowed through his flesh and bones, and came to a stop within his stomach.

After what felt like hours of suffering, the pressure reached a limit. His stomach was going to burst open from the pool of boiling magma inside it. Leon focused on nothing but breathing. His chest rose and fell, and to his surprise, the pressure suddenly began to lessen. Minutes later, he opened his eyes to find more text flashing in front of his eyes.

Aura saturation [36/100]

Then he ran to the edge of the balcony and threw up, inky black bile coming out of his mouth.

Once the nausea subsided, Leon stood up and looked around in shock. Was any of that real? The floating text was gone, making him doubt everything that’d just happened. A few mushroom clouds rose up in the distance, the heat from their blazing clouds of ash making his skin tingle from the overwhelming energy radiating from them. Now, however, there was a strange clarity to his thoughts.

The fire in his abdomen was gone, and with a deep breath, Leon felt absolutely nothing related to that ethereal heat. He still found nothing even when he examined his hands and arms that should have been cracked, blistered, and bleeding. There was no evidence at all of anything happening, making him wonder if he had just experienced some radiation-induced hallucination.

“Ugh,” Someone groaned from inside the apartment, “my head.”

Hearing the muffled groans of those around him, Leon remembered where he was. He quickly turned and found that everyone was either unconscious or writhing on the ground. Without a second thought, he moved to help his friends. He couldn’t stare at his hands and ponder on the strange visions, especially not when people needed help.

After a sip of cold water, Marcus and his girlfriend, Olivia, rushed to the balcony to throw up. It seemed that the radiation was causing people to feel nauseous. That was the only logical explanation that Leon could come up with, but it didn’t sound right for some reason. Maybe that entire event was a hallucination or maybe it wasn't.

Either way, he knew what he needed to do: Help everyone up and get to the damn basement.

Mila woke up a little bit after that. Unlike almost everyone else he helped, it seemed she had passed out from the shock wave rather than the heat. Or maybe both. He couldn’t tell, but it seemed that she was not in the best state, still feeling sick even after she threw up.

After Leon finished getting his friends up, he moved to a girl wearing a black dress. She'd been standing by a window when the shock wave hit. Now she lay on shards of broken glass, her body covered in bloody scratches.

“Are you okay?” Leon said, crouching down beside her. After repeating himself a few times to no avail, he reached down and squeezed her shoulder. He'd just done CPR training at school a few weeks ago and apparently that was the safest way to wake someone up after an accident.

She didn’t move.

Feeling his stomach sink, Leon felt for her pulse. Nothing. No, wait, she was warm. Her skin was almost scalding to the touch, but he pushed that thought to the back of his mind when he realised it was pointless without a heartbeat.

A man came over and stumbled against the wall, asking if the girl was okay.

Leon didn’t respond. He was able to sense something in the air. It was indistinct, almost like an electric buzz that made the hairs on his arms stand up. Fearful. Something in the back of his mind screamed at him to get away; to run and avoid this area, almost like how children know to fear a spider or a snake.

The man shook Leon’s shoulder.

“Hey man, are you a medical student or something? What’s going on with Cass. Is she okay?”

“She…” Leon hesitated, feeling ill as the stranger looked at him with fear in his eyes. “I’m so sorry, but she didn’t make it.”

“That’s not funny,” The man said, scowling. He looked over his shoulder at a group of people behind him and called out for help.

Leon stepped away as people carried the girl into one of the bedrooms. That terrible feeling of doom was building up for some reason, making his heart race. He walked straight over to the next unconscious person to hopefully prove himself wrong. A girl was standing over her boyfriend, shaking him as she screamed to get up so they could leave.

He didn’t move.

Leon gently pushed her to the side and checked his breathing and pulse, only to find that he was also dead. He wanted to check more, but everyone who was ‘passed out’ was being shaken or shouted at. Taking a deep breath, Leon mastered himself as he became certain that everyone who had passed out was dead.

He thought the heat was nothing more than a hallucination, but then how could all those people die? Radiation was impossible. The shock wave, if it was strong enough to kill, would have wiped out everyone in the building. And what the hell was that floating text he’d seen? Leon went over everything in his head but came up with nothing. He was obviously in shock, but there was nothing he could do about that.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

He could barely even think right now.

“Leon!” A woman shouted, the voice coming from somewhere behind him. Hearing his name, Leon turned and found Olivia holding Mila’s hair as she threw up over the edge. “Can you please help Marcus? He’s trying to carry some guy to the bathroom.”

Marcus was in the corner of the balcony, leaning over a man as he lightly slapped his face. The stranger was covered in vomit and entirely unresponsive. Leon walked over to tell Marcus to leave the dead man alone when an ethereal voice echoed throughout the apartment.

*Warning! A case of Rapid Dimensional Decay is coalescing at your location. Please evacuate before reality begins to fracture.*

Judging by the way that people were looking around, everyone else had heard the voice as well.

Before Leon could figure out what was going on, the air above the coffee table began to distort. People gasped and stepped back. Leon copied them until he was against the wall. The distortion began to swirl as it shrunk in size, condensing into a perfectly spherical orb of pure darkness. Once the ball was formed, it was almost like the air around it was… twisting?

After what felt like an eternity of stunned silence, a stranger in a Hawaiian shirt walked up and tried to poke it with his finger. Some people shouted at him to stop but the man wasn’t deterred. Leon imagined the man's finger stopping on the surface like it was a solid ball, or maybe even being ripped off. Instead, the last thing he expected to happen, happened.

A flash of light and a pop that reminded him of a balloon bursting echoed throughout the lounge. Once his eyes adjusted, Leon was filled with confusion. What the hell was that black mark that looked like a crack in a mirror? Why was everything red? Why was the apartment so empty?

Where had the people gone?

Leon searched the lounge with his eyes and immediately realised he’d made a terrible mistake. All the people that had gone missing from the room were still there, they had just become a fluid. It was almost like a bomb filled with paint had gone off. Splashes of blood could be found in blotchy streaks, staining the cream-coloured walls in circles of red where people had once been.

Leon couldn’t process what was going on, but when he laid eyes on the strings of flesh ground into the roof, his body locked up as his mind reeled from the truth. An eyeball hung from the ceiling by its optic nerve, swaying gently in the hot breeze passing through the shattered glass doors. The eye was surrounded by strings of skin and meat ground into the roof, and drops of blood fell from the hanging strands as gravity reasserted itself. Leon couldn’t tell where the roof began and the minced-up people ended.

His stomach churned and his mind screamed at him to run. Instead, he stepped back and vomited over the lip of the balcony, soon followed by Olivia when she saw the inside of the apartment. In the mental fog of his nausea, Leon spotted several black streaks down in the park, almost like cracks in a mirror or lines of black paint on a canvas.

Hordes of people ran through the streets, shoving each other down as they fled from the cracks. Sounds of screaming echoed throughout the apartment and they all originated from the park below, but he couldn’t see why people were running. Was it from the mushroom clouds? It was too far to see anything distinctly, but there seemed to be some people standing around the–

No, they weren’t people.

Leon stood up and turned to look at the phenomenon in the middle of the lounge. The fist-sized distortion was now gone, leaving nothing more than a crack in space. Leon began to yell, hoping to warn people to run, but he was a second too slow. A leg poked out of the rift. It was the colour of paper and thinner than any human could be, almost like the leg of a malnourished man on the brink of death.

Then the creature itself walked out of the rift with a groan, exposing its nauseating form to the survivors. The thing looked like a human corpse just before it should've rotted into bones. Its skin was like chalk and it had no muscle volume at all, yet it was somehow alive.

Alive and groaning.

Its sunken, white eyes drifted around the apartment. The thing didn’t really look at anyone. Its eyes passed right over them, but it seemed to be aware that people might be there, glancing around as if it were looking for someone. It groaned and took a step forward, its head lulling about as though its neck had no strength. And then it took a deep breath.

An ear-piercing shriek ripped out of its throat as it pounced on a shorter girl holding a bloody tissue to her forehead. It bit down on her neck with its maw of pointed fangs and thrashed its head about like a dog with a chew toy. The girl slid across the ground, screaming and crying as blood erupted out of her, but the creature didn’t let go no matter how hard she fought.

Some people screamed and ran out the front door of the apartment, others remained frozen, and yet two men overcame their fear and jumped forward to help the girl. Neither of them were Leon. A stranger disappeared into the kitchen while a different man grabbed the monster by its ankles. He yanked it hard, but instead of letting itself be pulled off its prey, the monster coiled its right leg and kicked the man in his chest.

The kick launched the guy across the lounge and into the wall where he swiftly passed out, leaving only an oval dent in the drywall.

With a heroic cry, the other man came out of the kitchen holding a meat cleaver. He ran at the monster and hacked down on its back with an overhead blow, sinking the metal into its rib cage. The monster didn’t even react. It continued tearing at the girl’s neck, drinking her blood like water. Still, most of the girl’s blood fell out of the monster’s mouth and pooled on the ground. She thrashed against the monster on top of her, crying and shrieking bloody murder the whole time.

The man with the cleaver continued to hack away at the monster, cutting up every part of it he could. Leon expected there to be more blood. Instead, its flesh just separated into reddish-white gashes that went down to the bone.

By the end of the man’s assault, the creature’s back, left arm, and neck were more red than white from all the cuts. Leon had even heard a few cracks as well. Its left arm was snapped, part of its chest had caved in, and its head was almost separated from its body.

Finally, it was dead. The man stepped back and wiped the sheen of sweat from his forehead, his chest rising and falling with every breath. Blood pooled underneath the girl as she stared up at the ceiling. Her eyes were dull, but some people still cheered while others cried now that the terrible nightmare was over.

Then the creature groaned, and all hell broke loose.