“Alf!” Something tugged on his arm. It was pulling him, dragging him across a plane of frozen grit. “Alf, are you alright?”

The burned girl. She had kissed him. What the heck?

“Wake up. Please…”

His brain felt like twice-baked mashed potatoes. Why wouldn’t she leave him alone?

“Alf, get up. I know you can hear me. Something attacked us. I think it’s some kind of parasite.”

“Huh?” He yanked his arm away and pressed his palms to his eyes.

“Wake. Up.”

His head snapped back in a thunderclap of pain.

“Hey!” He pushed himself off the floor, pressed a hand to his stinging cheek. Had she just slapped him? He squinted into a haze of blurry light. They looked like narrow medieval crosses. Arrowslits?

A hand clamped around his upper arm. “Can you hear me?”

He blinked the burned girl—Blix—into focus. “Um… What happened?”

“We need to get out of here.” She fixed him with a scowl—as if he’d been the one to slap her. “The building could collapse any second.”

Alf closed his eyes and tried to think, but nothing made sense. He felt like something had crawled inside his head and ripped the reality from his brain. Oh, well. If he waited for the world to made sense before taking action, he’d still be in the womb.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Is it okay if I…?” He reached toward her and hesitated.

“Really?” She hooked an arm around his neck, pulling him close.

Which was awkward as hell. Even if the entire building was falling down, it was still an intimate… whatever. And the kiss from before only made it more whatever. “Should I hold you… like before? Or from behind or…?”

“Um… Building shaking? Collapsing on top of us?” Her tone was scolding, but he didn’t see any of that in her eyes. Or her, you know, whatever.

He shook his head and grappled her awkwardly off the floor to stagger onto his feet. “Sorry, but could you…” He shifted her awkwardly to his right hip. “Um…” He craned his neck to see around her. “Wasn’t it dark before?”

“They just… appeared.” Blix nodded towards the cross-shaped windows. “Like they were cut by an invisible saw.”

Another jolt passed through the building, rattling the landing beneath his feet.

Alf headed down the stairs, faster and faster, tossing out caution like last week’s leftovers.

“The Lawrence Livermore Lab…” Blix shouted over the roar. “Any idea what they were working on?”

Alf shook his head and focused on not killing them on the stairs. “Whatever it is, it’s not this.” His arms were already burning, and they hadn’t even reached the third floor. He needed a break, but he might not be able to lift her off the floor again.

“Thanks for not leaving me.”

He stopped when they reached the next landing and leaned her against the wall to give his arms a rest.

And then she started shrieking.

He followed her gaze to the base of the wall. A tendril of undulating dust wriggled through the air like a snake.

He turned and tried to run, but a ghostly coil circled his ankle and wound its way up his leg.

He hit the steps hard, turning at the last second to protect Blix from the impact.

She pushed him away as a tidal wave of dust crashed down on top of them.

Hundreds of insubstantial tendrils looped around him, twisting and roiling, pulling his clothes apart thread by thread by thread. Squinting against the swarming dust, he found Blix sprawled on the landing. Gossamer strands of dust glinted in the dim light, forming and dissolving, stretching and shrinking as they reduced her shirt to a tangled mass of thread.

This couldn’t be happening. It was impossible.

He turned away, pressing his forehead into the cold tread of a cement step. Whatever this was, they couldn’t outrun it. All they could do was wait it out.