Leon jumped up and was about to follow when Olivia waved at him to sit down.

“I’ve got this, okay?” Olivia assured, chasing Mila into the bathroom. Leon felt like he should be doing something. He wanted to help, but they had been friends since they were kids. She would know what to do better than him. Still, that only made him feel worse.

Sitting down, Leon and Marcus just looked at each other without saying a word. Marcus had always been calm and confident. He was a born athlete; talented at everything he did and confident enough to try anything that garnered his interest.

He’d even done martial arts with Leon for over a decade before he focused on his football. And in that time, Leon built up an image of his best friend. No matter how bad his day was, no matter what was going on in his life, he’d always approach it with the confidence that things would get better.

Now he was trembling so hard that even his breathing had turned to stuttered, shaking gasps.

Leon wanted to comfort him. To tell him that everything was going to be fine, so he should just relax. The words refused to come out. Leon couldn’t even get his mouth to move, and if he forced himself, it felt like he would break apart into little pieces.

The horrors of the last hour were swirling around his mind like drops of poison. Was he going insane? Had he died and gone to hell with this being his own personal purgatory? If not, then what the hell was happening? He looked to Marcus but hesitated to speak, unable to find the right thing to say.

Leon swallowed as he chewed on his words. It would ruin everything if he became an inconsolable mess, so he needed to control himself or else they would see through his facade. The last thing he wanted was to be abandoned in the middle of a city full of monsters.

“What do you think that floating message was?”

Marcus flinched.

It was almost as if he had forgotten Leon was there, but after a few seconds, his friend remembered how to speak. “I think it was helping us, right? It said something about evacuating and those portals.”

“What do you think it means?”

Marcus didn’t respond. They lapsed into silence, Leon trying to hide his trembling fingers as he recalled what happened earlier in the night. People exploding on the sidewalk as they fell from the sky. Demons tearing people apart with their bare hands. Nuclear war.

The screaming!

“I think someone is helping us.”

“Pardon,” Leon said, looking up at his friend. “Who do you think is helping us?”

“I don’t know, but the messages warned us,” Marcus said, colour returning to his pale skin. “It was telling us to flee. That message about aura saturation has something to do with it as well.”

“I got that message too,” Leon said, gripping his knees to stop the shaking. “What happened tonight? Do you think we’re at war with someone? Or maybe it was an accident like Y2K?”

“You think Russia or China have demonic nukes?” Marcus said, some energy filling his voice. “There’s no way we’re at war. At least not for long.”

Leon nodded. “I guess it doesn’t matter who started the war because it’s definitely ending soon. Those demons are probably all over the world by now.”

“We can only hope that isn’t true.”

About half an hour of quiet discussion later, Olivia came back with her arm over Mila’s shoulder. Both of their eyes were red, but only Mila was pale. She gave a weak nod when he asked if she was okay.

The girls sat on the floor in the corner and hugged each other while Leon and Marcus walked around. Leon even looked out of the window occasionally. He didn’t know what he was looking for, really. A sign that help was on its way? Still, the constant vigilance gave him a chance to get a good picture of what it was like outside. Tens of kilometres had been flattened by the bomb while another third of the city was shattered by the shock wave. As for the rest, the sky was black with radioactive ash and fires were rising up all over the place.

It was the end of the world as he knew it.

“What are we going to do?” Mila whimpered, fresh tears streaming down her cheeks. “I don’t want to get eaten by monsters. I don’t want to die. Please, we need to call for help or something.”

“It’s okay,” Olivia cooed. “Remember what the voice said? The demons only appeared because of the nukes. That means we just need to get away from any mushroom clouds and we’ll be safe, right guys?”

Marcus nodded, a smile plastered onto his face. “The military is probably clearing the city as we speak. All we need to do is make our way out and we’ll bump into a whole battalion and be rescued.”

“And besides,” Leon said, trying his hardest not to tremble, “We’re already out of the blast zone. Another day of travel and we’ll probably never see another demon for the rest of our lives.”

Somehow, he didn’t believe his own words, but they were said to lower Mila’s stress and not to be taken as fact. Then again, they might not see another demon if their lives ended tonight.

There was a lull in the conversation as everyone just sat there and processed what was going on. Leon tapped his foot on the carpet, his nervous energy welling up inside him. What were they going to do now? Escaping the city was a fine idea, but how were they going to do that with giant birds watching from the skies and walking corpses patrolling the ground?

The events of the last two hours were bouncing around in Leon’s mind. He had to move, so he walked up to the window and stared down at the puddles that were once people. Blood flowed in lines down to the gutter, streaming from the piles of red mush draped in pieces of wet clothing.

Mila wiped her eyes. “Seriously, what the hell is going on?”

Minutes later, someone screamed. The sound was muffled but it was coming closer and closer at breakneck speed. Leon peeked behind the curtains without thinking and was forced to watch as a young woman fell helplessly from the sky. She landed with a wet thud on the concrete sidewalk beneath the window.

The bird flew down moments later and began feasting on the corpse.

“I think we’re not the apex predator anymore.”

***

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Leon’s attention was honed in on the street below. Or, more specifically, on a lone raptor cloaked in bloody plumage. It walked around on top of a pile of mush draped in an emerald dress, picking away at any pieces of human flesh it could get to with little trouble.

Leon held back a shiver every time it swallowed another piece of meat. The dress got in the way most of the time, but the demon wasn’t deterred. With a bit of effort, it pecked through her dress and ripped out a chunk of what should have been her liver, feasting on it with such enthusiasm that Leon wondered if it had been starved for weeks.

He imagined a resplendent girl full of hope for the future, dancing and partying the night away. The issues troubling her day-to-day life were pushed to the back of her mind as she allowed herself to let go. She would’ve been having so much fun mere hours ago, and now she was dead; nothing but a chunk of meat left to rot on the filthy, rubbish-laden sidewalk of a destroyed city. The problems that once chained her down must have felt so insignificant while she fell to the earth like Icarus.

Leon was pulled out of his musings by three tentacles that extended from the hawk’s open beak. They writhed over the ground, sucking up all the blood around the corpse within seconds. The blood disappeared inside the bird, turning the young woman into a pile of grey meat, white tendons, and chalky patches of skin. Leon swallowed as the bright human blood leaked into the bird’s feathers, dying them a richer shade of red.

No longer weighed down by blood or flesh, the dress made of emerald fabric jumped as a breeze swept through the street. Soon, the wind took it for good, dragging it into the heavens. Leon only hoped that the girl’s soul was carried with it, taken to a better place than this hell on earth.

“What the fuck is that thing?” Marcus whispered, jolting Leon out of his trance. It looked like his friend had been standing behind him for a while, watching the scene down below in morbid silence.

“I don’t know.”

The ‘bird’, if he could even call it that, was nearly the size of a human. Its crown was a metallic orange, and as its feathers streaked down its head and neck, they darkened into the crimson of fresh blood. And that wasn’t even the strangest part. Its feathers were something infinitely close to liquid, swirling and shifting like some kind of fluid trapped in glass.

“I really don’t know, man,” Leon said, trying to keep his voice from trembling. “But I do know that we should avoid it.”

“What the hell are we supposed to do against that? The guy with the cleaver didn’t even manage to kill the demon zombie, and that was a person made of flesh. How are we supposed to kill a liquid that can fly?”

Marcus turned away and looked at the girls. Olivia comforted Mila in a gentle voice, but she was still sobbing away as the situation became too much for her to cope with. Her beautiful white dress was splattered with blood, making Leon’s chest ache in sympathy.

“We’ll need supplies,” Marcus said, tapping his foot, “and we’ll also need to stay out of the open or else we will be easy prey for our feathered friends. Maybe… we can use the underground subway?”

Leon nodded, then spoke in a low voice so he wouldn’t upset Mila. “The trains shouldn’t be running. A nuke just went off, after all.”

“Do you have any better ideas?”

Leon shrugged. “We’ll just have to walk through the tunnels or something. It'll be a long walk, but the birds won’t be able to swoop us and demons can only come in two directions.”

“Which would be bad if a bunch came from both sides and blocked us in,” Marcus said, leading him out of the conference room. “You cook at home, don’t you? Can you figure out all the food we’ll need for a long trip? I’ll go down and find a camping store. It would suck if we froze to death after taking a million precautions against demons and starving to death.”

“That’s a good plan. Try and get some backpacks and a portable stove as well. Weapons would be nice, too. God knows we’ll need them.”

Leaving the girls in the office to go and gather supplies, Leon and Marcus soon went down to the empty shopping centre. From there, the duo appropriated some black tracksuits from a nearby store that were both warm and easier to move in than their current semi-formal wear. Their previous clothes were also covered in blood, sweat, and vomit, so it was their first stop for several reasons.

After they lightly rinsed themselves off with the taps in the bathroom and changed, Leon grabbed a shopping cart and separated from Marcus. He had a few pairs of extra tracksuits for the girls, so he was going to drop them off and then go to the camping supply store they had seen on the way in.

Walking into the grocery store with the shopping cart, Leon glanced about at the aisles packed with food.

“Water, canned food, muesli bars, nuts, and… Ah, we’ll need a can opener if we’re taking canned food. Last mistake I’ll ever make,” Leon mumbled, chuckling to himself as he imagined hiking all day only to pull out a can of beans and no can opener. “Would it be smart to bring pasta? It would expand quite a bit, saving storage space while filling us up, but it would use up a lot of water. Then again, the plumbing in the city should still work even if the power is off.”

“Okay, water first.”

Deciding on a basic plan of action, Leon moved through the aisles in a rush. He grabbed jugs of water first, then a bunch of canned fruit, vegetables, and meat.

Seeing the disgusting canned meat, Leon remembered that there should be some jerky nearby. Walking through to the back of the store, he spotted a pharmaceuticals aisle and started grabbing anything that might be useful. Pain meds, a radio, a torch with extra batteries, and even a first aid kit were knocked off the shelves and into the cart. He was running through his mental checklist when a barely audible sound echoed down the aisle.

“Help…”

Leon froze, turning left and right to see if anyone was trapped under something. The mains were off due to the power outage, but there must’ve been a backup generator as the refrigerator lights were still working, their tiny output granting just enough light to see around the aisles. Still, it was dark. The shadows lingered in the corners, hiding things away from sight. And with only the dull light from the refrigerators against the back wall, nearly half of the store was shrouded in darkness.

“Help me…” A male voice called out, wheezing with every breath. “Please….”

A muffled crunch echoed off the glass fridges all around him. Pushing the cart, he silently made his way to the back of the store where the breathing was getting louder. He left the cart by a rack of kitchen knives at the back of the store then leaned over to look down the other aisles.

Nothing.

Or was it…