Three days passed by. They had been in Pennsylvania for a while now. They had seen the welcome sign on the road they took. They had switched highways a couple of times, but thanks to William, they hadn’t had any dangerous encounters so far.

Valen had received the same piercing headache each day, and for each, it would quickly disappear again. It had too much of a pattern to be disregarded, so Valen asked John about it, but he had no clue. Pittsburgh wasn’t that far from them, and now they were in a sort of suburban area. Although it wasn’t downtown yet, ruin and despair labeled every building. Many houses were decimated, flattened, or squashed under the monstrosities, but some remained untouched. Large divots and cracks were dispersed all over the roads, spreading through the pavement like a web.

William had droned ahead, so they were walking straight down a street. The reason they entered the suburbs was to look for more food and water, especially in a grocery store. The light sounds of their collective footsteps echoed through the streets of demolished houses. The sky was very different today and shined a beautiful blue. Round white clouds hung in it. The sun was easy, and the air was cool.

While Valen was walking, a headache came back like a hot knife was digging into his head. Valen carefully dropped his side of Lancey’s stretcher on the ground, and then reeled over, clutching the side of his head.

“Valen, what’s wrong?” Frank said, letting go of Lancey’s stretcher too, and coming over. He placed his hand on Valen’s back. Valen was turning wildly in all directions. It felt like someone was splitting his head open and messing around. He groaned.

“Something - ”

Valen yelped in pain as it unrelentingly continued. The group had stopped now, and the captain and John approached Valen.

“Valen, what’s wrong?” Kang asked.

“My… head,” he answered, trying to hold himself back from screaming out in pain.

“Is it the headaches you told me about?” John said, bending down to get a look at Valen’s face.

“Yes,” Valen said, gritting his teeth.

The captain was about to say something when the ground shook. Everyone turned their heads. A house covered in broken planks of wood and brick suddenly erupted, sending a flurry of housing pieces in every direction, and a ferocious beast revealed itself. It was massive, the size of two tanks on top of each other, and it looked like a giant rhino, except for the fact that it had four eyes and a protruding jaw like a bird’s beak. It had a large black horn with a terrifying, vicious, point at the end. It rushed towards the group. The captain cursed, but the military group was quick in responding.

“William! Get us some cars!” The captain yelled and then aimed her rifle at the beast. In unison, the military group fired their guns and grenades. One even shot a rocket at the grey monster. The monster was encased in a giant ball of orange fire and sparks, but then it moved right through it, seemingly unimpeded except for some small scratches, burns, and bumps. They couldn’t run away from it unless they left their wounded. Captain Kang wouldn’t leave anyone behind, and neither would Valen; so, their options were to either fight it or escape with everyone.

“I need time!” William shouted back. He searched his surroundings for vehicles. Just like how there were some untouched houses, there had to be vehicles. He called out to other people who also knew how to hotwire a vehicle, a mere three, and then they separated into the streets, each to find their own. The rest were keeping the monster busy, which was an extremely difficult task. There was no use prioritizing damaging the beast, so what they focused on was buying time and avoiding its attacks. The disciplined militants covered for each other and skillfully dodged the monster’s charges and snaps. They were lucky that it seemed to only have a single brute method for attacking, but it didn’t mean that all were able to escape.

The monster was able to move at frightening speeds, and a soldier, whose name Valen didn’t know but had seen before, disappeared into its mouth in a blurred flash of blood. He was swallowed whole. Only a few seconds later and in one fluid motion, the monster chomped a female soldier in two and then impaled another to its right on its dark horn before throwing him high into the air. The soldier screamed as he entered the beast’s horrifying maw.

Valen knew he was no help to the soldiers. He could only hope they would hang on, for he had no gun or other weapon. Not to mention, Lancey couldn’t move; his injury prevented it. He was on the stretcher, watching the ordeal in panic. Pulling Lancey away to safety was something Valen could do. Valen sprinted towards the still Lancey, passing the back ranks of the firing and weaving soldiers.

Not wasting any time, he lifted one side of the stretcher, letting the other drag on the ground, and backpedaled away from the chaotic fight. He set Lancey behind the ruins of a decently far away house and then turned to go back to the monster. While he didn’t think that he would be much help, any assistance was better than none, and all their lives hung on the soldiers’ fate; not to mention they had saved his life. So many had died for him, and he hadn’t even begun to make up for it.

“Hey,” Lancey said, laying flat on the stretcher. He wasn’t looking at Lancey. “Don’t die.”

“I won’t,” He promised, giving Lancey one last look before running back to the battlefield.

For the situation, the soldiers were surprisingly calm. Gomez held a stern expression on his face as he unloaded magazine after magazine onto the rhino in an unending fury. Whether it was on purpose or not Valen did not know, but one of his bullets struck the beast’s eye, but not all the way through. The bronze bullet was stuck in the eye like a splinter, glinting in the sun’s light. Immediately after, the beast roared so loud that Valen had to cover his ears, and some of the soldiers particularly close to it fell back. The beast began to rampage. The soldiers in its proximity had barely started to recover when it snapped at them. In a single moment, five of them were disposed of.

Valen noticed an unused black rifle on the road. The beast wasn’t close to it. He dashed towards it and picked it up. He had never used one before, and everything seemed foreign, but when it came to it, he remembered the words point and shoot. He aimed at the beast.

“Put that down,” Captain Kang said a few yards to his right, holding a green rocket launcher. “You’re more of a danger to us than to the beast.”

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Valen furrowed his eyebrows. “I can – “

“You can’t,” Gomez said between his constant shooting. “Listen to her. It isn’t a toy.”

“Go help John with the wounded,” Kang said evenly.

Valen scowled, but he listened. John had been pulling the wounded, the few that the beast left, out of the fight along with Frank. Valen didn’t know where the rest of the civilians were, probably hiding behind the destruction. He quickly joined John and Frank. They had been taking all the wounded further down the street from the beast. John was next to a soldier whose leg was… gone from the shin down. He was screaming wildly as John wrapped a cloth around the soldier’s leg. John noticed him approaching.

“Take this!” He said urgently, taking Valen’s hands and placing them on the wrapped cloth. ”Tie it tight!” He said as he went towards another injured soldier. Valen fumbled with it but then secured it tightly, causing the soldier to yell in pain.

“Sorry,” Valen said, paling and wincing at the soldier’s plight. Valen looked up at John, who was going from soldier to soldier trying to do all he could, but there wasn’t much that he could do. He was low on supplies, painkillers, everything. Frank dragged another injured soldier over to them and then turned back to save more out of the fight.

Valen rushed towards the hurt man, for John was busy. He approached him. The man wasn’t moving. Valen caught his breath and then yelled out for John. Valen stared at his face. His eyes were open and brown, but their spark was gone. A deep wound went in his chest and dark red blood was gushing out. His beige uniform was stained with the color of her blood. John arrived and put two fingers on his neck. After a moment, he met Valen’s eyes. John’s face was pained.

“Dead,” John said while leaving to resume treatment of another. Valen took a long look and then pulled away to help more. The fight kept going on like that. Valen could only deal with the aftermath of the beast and not fight it. He could only watch more people get hurt for him. Like his family did. Like the soldiers did before when they saved him. And then Captain Kang’s cold body was dragged out by Frank. He didn’t know she was dead. His job was only to pull people out. But Valen knew. Her black hair was still, and her face had lost all its color. She was gone. And her death was far from peaceful.

Kang’s left arm was completely torn off, taken by the ravaging beast. Valen slowly ran his fingers over her eyes, closing them, and then stood over her. His hands curled into a fist and his vision blurred red. He wanted to kill it. To completely pummel it. To torture it and make it feel what so many others had. It was out of his power, he knew, but he turned towards the beast with a murderous gaze. He breathed rapidly. The beast smashed through a light post in pursuit of yet another human.

He wanted no more of this. He sprinted towards another weapon, picking up a rifle from the ground in stride, and dashed to the beast. There were about sixteen soldiers left and they were furiously shooting and dodging in honor of their captain. Valen soon arrived. He brought the scope to his eyes and aimed for the beast. He pulled the trigger and didn’t let go, crying softly as the bullets flew. Initially, his body reeled back from the recoil, but he quickly stabilized himself before he ran out of ammunition in the magazine.

“Valen! Back off!” Gomez yelled over Valen’s gunfire. Valen steadily looked back at him from the corners of his eyes, stained with the remnants of small tears. Gomez’s eyes widened, and then gradually went back to normal as he understood what Valen was feeling, what he was trying to do. He tossed Valen a magazine. “Three rules. Stay alive, don’t shoot at all if there is any chance you might hit one of us, and don’t waste ammo like that.”

Valen nodded. The rifle seemed simple enough. There was a button on the side for reloading, the lever for cocking, and pull the trigger to kill. The beast had turned his way after he shot at it, but another soldier had shot right after, getting its attention again. That soldier was currently running from the towering beast. It was at least triple the man’s height.

Valen repositioned. He needed a good angle, so he could get it where Gomez did that one time, in the eyes. It had four of them, so hopefully, it wouldn’t be too difficult. Valen aimed towards one of the beast’s eyes. He pulled the trigger once, unleashing a bullet that whisked in the air and wildly missed its mark. He couldn’t hit a moving, primal beast, he realized, not without the training that the soldiers had. To make his shots, he needed to be much closer. He prepared to sprint towards the monster.

“Don’t! Calm down!” Gomez shouted at him. “We are buying time for William! Not trying to kill it!” Gomez was right. Valen took a deep breath. He needed to delay it, not try to injure it if that was even possible anyway. Valen fired two shots at the beast. This time, he aimed to simply hit its humongous body, rather than its relatively small eyes. His shots bounced off the beast’s skin but successfully attracted the attention from the nearby soldiers who were trying to escape it.

But now, it turned towards him, annoyed like they were pests to be removed. The beast galloped with its horn reflecting the blinding sun and pattered with the gunfire of the other soldiers. Valen paled. What was he supposed to do now? He stared at the quickly approaching beast in shock. He snapped himself out of it and dashed towards his left, hoping that the beast couldn’t make a sudden, sharp turn while moving at its top speed. It could. It was almost right on him, its horn on course for his head. Valen, in his haste and instinct, dived forward under its legs. With any other normal, Earth-sized beast, this wouldn’t have worked, but with how big the monster was, it was much easier for him to sneak through.

Valen came out the other end mostly unscathed except for a few scrapes on his knees and elbows. The beast skidded to a stop, shaking its head and snorting, and then prepared to charge at him again before a grenade imploded against its skin. Another soldier saved him, and the cycle of baiting and making time continued. Against the scythe monster, this wouldn’t have worked; that one was much more fearsome, and this rhino-like beast did not have the terrifying bladed tentacles the other had, but it was impenetrable, and it could not be underestimated. A tense four minutes passed. Valen was currently shooting at the beast, supporting his partners, when he heard a loud sound behind him, like a car horn.

Valen glanced towards the source of the sound. Five cars were there, most of which were minivans and vans, which Valen figured was the type most used in the suburban area. They seemed to have just finished loading the wounded into a single car. They hadn’t brought the dead in; they didn’t have such a luxury. Gomez recognized the vehicles too. He gave the order to ease off fighting. The vehicles approached from behind them. One by one, the soldiers went into the cars while the rest would fend the beast off. Valen was one of the first. Gomez had ordered him in, and he was the last to be picked up.

The beast angrily charged after him, its horn wanting to consume more blood. A car swung around, opened a side door for Gomez, and then after a moment, sped away, winding through the suburban streets. Another car, which Valen was in, picked up Lancey, who was silent. Lancey could only listen to the gunshots, screaming, and yelling with his fate being determined with every noise. Valen wouldn’t wish that fate on anyone. The cars were faster than the beast, not much faster but faster still, and they escaped back onto the street where they had entered the neighborhood. They had survived, but now there were only fifteen people left, half of their number the day before. The mood was solemn, and many things were left unsaid as the soldiers dealt with their grief and the loss of the captain.

The citizens that hid weren’t found again. They likely left the entire area at some point, figuring that they would all die. The soldiers went into a nearby woods and set up the camp again. They weren’t going to move again for the rest of the day, for it was evening and they did not have the feeling for it; not to mention, the sky was already beginning to darken, and the sun was setting.

At some point, Gomez came up to Valen, who was next to Frank and Lancey on the bumpy floor of the forest.

“Don’t be that reckless again. That’s how you get killed.” Gomez said. He looked at Valen for a moment or two, observing, and then shook Valen’s shoulder. “But good job, kid. You did well. Would have made her proud.” He left after that. Valen didn’t fall asleep for a long while, remembering everything taken from him; he yearned for the power to make sure nothing else would be. He yearned for the power to protect.