The explosions started,

and no matter how long the citizens of Atlantis hid in their subterranean bomb shelters

the explosions didn’t stop.

Some of the noises were distant; different sections of the city being destroyed far away. The little boy in shelter 108 was happy for those explosions. He was sure it meant the bad guys had moved on. But each time he thought this, a new shell would land far too close. A snowfall of concrete and metal bits would then coat the people hiding underground.

The little boy didn’t understand. Why didn’t they move on? They already dropped bombs on this place, shouldn’t that be the end of it?

The little boy was unaware of what kind of battle this was. He was used to the explosions in the sky as MACs intercepted political flurries of missiles and UAVs. That kind of war had become normal for the boy. Yes, that kind of war had become normal for most of the citizens of Atlantis. The horrifying and monstrous weaponry of war had been reported on and described as simple political maneuvering between Atlantea and her neighbors.

The explosions always stopped. The little boy knew this lesson well.

So why wouldn’t they stop now? The little boy wished desperately to ask his parents, but they would have been evacuated into shelter 22 underneath their office.

The little boy tried again to ask his teacher. He pulled on her shirt and yelled as loudly as he could, but she still couldn’t seem to hear him.

She and the other adults were acting crazy. They took the couches and beds and tables and pushed them all against the door. The man with the fancy suit and medals that was assigned to their shelter had unlocked the box that all the kids knew was forbidden. The adults took the long sticks out and clutched onto them like crazed fanatics with their talismans.

The little boy couldn’t possibly know what a gun looked like. They weren’t very common for civilians to see in this new age. The little boy couldn’t possibly know how different this battle was from the ones he’d experienced and the ones he had learned about in school.

The little boy couldn’t possibly understand the fear that seemed to pour out of the adults and submerge the room.

All the little boy knew was that that fear had surely filled the whole room by now, because now the children had been thoroughly drowned in it. The normality and drill-like feeling of these shelters felt like distant memories. The explosions were too loud and too close. The adults were too stressed and too wild. The concrete and metal ceiling above them, which was once so pristine, was now painted liberally with cracks and dents.

Yes, the little boy thought, it wasn’t normal at all.

Most of the other children huddled together at the back of the room. The lady and man with them, who were normally in charge of ration distribution, were the sole bastion of lighter feelings. Their smiles were strained, but at least they were there.

The little boy, however, stayed in the center of the room. He didn’t try to help the fear-laden adults and he didn’t retreat to the false hope at the back.

His parents both worked on the MACs. Once in a while they would take him to see the metal giants. The little boy had seen the big weapons and sturdy shields. The little boy had seen the big legs stomp and the massive arms move. And, most importantly to the little boy, he had seen one of the pilots that controlled the beasts.

She was taller and looked stronger than his dad. Her hair was fiery and threatening and looked wild as it hung loose around her. Her face lacked any sign of humanity. At that moment the boy was sure that only monsters could control monsters.

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He hid behind his parents the first time he saw Callista.

But, even with dead eyes that betrayed no emotions, she squatted down and greeted him warmly.

The little boy still knew she was surely a monster, but at that point he realized monsters don’t have to be bad.

That was the day the little boy knew the city would always be safe. Monsters like her didn’t lose. They just couldn’t.

And so, while the fearful and the hopeful were busy, the little boy found his way to the air vent. It was partially hidden by a wall and sat above the industrial fridges. Normally the boy and his friends would use the chairs and tables to climb up and out. They all wanted to see the monster in action. However, this time his friends were busy crying and cowering, and the furniture was all piled against the main door.

The little boy knew he could never be equal to a monster, but ever since seeing Callista he started to train any way he could. He found trees to climb and rocks to lift. He wasn’t old enough to go to any real places to train, like gyms or fighting schools, so he had to make do with the world around him.

He opened the doors of the fridge and jumped as high as he could, just barely wrapping his little fingers around the top edge of the first open door. Now was the hard part. He pulled with all his might. He still hadn’t been able to do pull ups on the tree branches at the park, but he was always close. This time, with a clear goal to help boost him, he slowly but surely levered himself up. As soon as he could he wrapped his arms around the edge and swung a leg up. The rest was easy. The next two handholds up to the top of the fridge were closer together so the boy had no issues.

Once on top, he used his fingernail to turn the loosened screws and crawled into the vent. It usually wasn’t very hard to climb outside from the vent, but the boy ran into some unexpected issues. Certain parts of the vent were narrower than usual. The metal was crumpled up and had jagged parts where the earth poured in.

In other shelters, the explosions had already caused far worse damage, but the little boy naively thought this was a sure sign that his parents’ shelter was safe as well. He believed they would be just fine if this was the worst of the damage.

It was a tight squeeze at some points, but the boy managed to slither through without cutting himself up too badly.

As he neared the surface the explosions became truly deafening. The boy could no longer hear. But he still refused to give in to the encroaching horrors. Nothing could be as scary as Callista and her metal beast. The little boy was sure of this.

In fact, the boy was happy for the lack of sound. Now he only had to deal with the rumbling and quaking of the metallic vent beneath him. But, as he neared the opening that would spit him out onto the surface, new dangers descended upon him.

The air had thinned considerably. The fires were spreading with nearly no one left to stop them. The few emergency personnel that normally dealt with these things were mostly just smoldering corpses filled with boiling hot liquid that bubbled up at the seams. Luckily the stench of the dead and dying was still hidden away by the overpowering smell of smoke. The ground the boy crawled out onto was hot enough to scald his hands.

The boy’s eyes dried out to dangerous levels. The liquids in his body were evaporating endlessly. Each explosion seemed to throw more shards of molten metal, turning the walls of still-standing builds into pincushions and art pieces all at once.

The little boy, upon seeing the jelly like red and orange metal leak out of each puncture wound only to dry into demonic looking globs of black and gray, wondered if the city was crying. He didn’t spare much time to think about such things. His eyes, now bubbling puddles of pain, were trained on the sky above. The smoke seemed intent on hiding away the sky and the battle that was surely raging above him, but the boy knew monsters couldn’t be tucked away so easily.

His feet were starting to burn and, hoping to escape the smoke that was filling his lungs, he rocked back and fell flat onto his back.

But the smoke didn’t lessen, and the burning only continued.

The boy, possibly before exiting the vent, had become delirious.

He was correct when he turned away from the two groups in his shelter; there was no more hope for him, and there was no more fear.

Soon, the burning feeling had gone away. As did the shaking of the Earth. His lungs no longer labored and strained. Before the boy fell away, like some twisted fairy tale, the monster appeared.

The bright blue boosters blew away the smoke that surrounded the machine. The boy could easily see the red stripes painted onto the MAC. The machine swatted away the blazing streaks of missiles and even some shells. It twisted itself sideways to dodge another barrage and fired its own weapon in return. The bright light of the laser burned a lime-green hole through the smoke.

As quickly as she came, she dashed away. Her weapons and shields looking as bloodthirsty as the machine itself.

In a strange moment of solace, the little boy smiled widely.

The boy knew – a monster like that just couldn’t lose.