Beginning of the End
Hi, my name is Ethan, and first I’m going to tell my story... before I destroy...
April 14, 20xx. It began at the stroke of midnight, when the chime of the hallway clock cut through the silence and dragged me out of sleep.
I bolted upright, startled by a commotion filling the house. As I stumbled out of bed, a mechanical noise rose around me — every appliance suddenly seemed to have a voice of its own.
The microwave sang in broken, off-key bursts. The refrigerator groaned like something hungry. The phone flickered and spat out fragments of its ringtone. The lights flared and died until the house went black.
For a moment I thought I’d gone deaf. Only my own heartbeat kept me from collapsing where I stood. I shoved the fear down and moved toward the one light I could see.
I went to the window, legs shaking, expecting the familiar glow of streetlamps. Instead, on the horizon, a massive orange cloud was climbing into the sky — rising and spreading like something blooming out of the ground.
My skin went cold. I shook my head, refusing to believe it, as buildings across the city started coming down.
I ran. Down the long corridor, stumbling, catching myself, straight to the door at the end of the hall. I grabbed the handle. Locked.
I started pounding on it, screaming for my parents. No answer — just, after a few unbearable minutes, screaming from the next room, glass shattering, something heavy hitting the floor.
Pain stabbed through my skull. My back was soaked in sweat. I stopped knocking and threw my shoulder into the next door instead. It gave way.
I hit the floor hard. Through my thin pajamas I felt glass bite into my skin. I pushed through the pain and looked around — the window was broken, night air pouring through the gap. The bed was empty, sheets thrown back. Further off, a blanket hung snagged on a shard of the window frame, fluttering.
That was the first time I saw one of them.
The blanket’s white edges kept catching my eye, flickering in the moonlight that suddenly seemed too bright, too sharp.
My sister’s room had a balcony, swings hanging from the ceiling. For a second I told myself I was imagining things — adrenaline playing tricks. But the shape over the iron railing didn’t move like an imagined thing.
A gust of wind tore the blanket loose. It hit the floor with a sound like ripping cloth, and something in my head went quiet and empty. A ringing started in my ears. Nothing was stopping me now from looking straight at it.
Sweat ran into my eyes. I stared anyway.
The longer I looked, the colder I felt. Its body was wrong — bones jutting at angles no body should bend, skin torn open in patches, the whole shape of it like something unfinished, sketched and abandoned halfway through.
I backed away until my spine hit the wall, unable to look away. It hadn’t even registered I was there.
That’s when I understood — it had been looking down the whole time.
I followed its gaze. At first I didn’t understand what I was looking at — a tangle of pale limbs, fabric, something dark pooling underneath. It took a full second for the shapes to resolve into a person. Another second after that for the person to become my sister.
Half her body was pinned under a dark green claw.
Her arm, bent wrong at the elbow, was still locked around a flashlight. Its beam shook against the floor, lighting up splinters of the broken swing and scattered glass. I remember thinking, stupidly, that she must still be holding onto it on purpose — that some part of her hadn’t let go.
She turned her head toward me. Slow, like it cost her everything she had left. Blood at her mouth. Her lips moved, shaping something I couldn’t hear — my name, maybe, or maybe nothing at all, just the shape her mouth made when there was no air left to push the word out. Her fingers twitched against the floor, reaching, not quite far enough to mean anything except that she’d tried.
That was worse than anything else in that room. Not the wound. Not the creature. Just her hand, an inch short.
Something in my chest broke open. My throat closed. I stepped forward without deciding to. Then I was running, screaming, not thinking at all.
The creature snarled and unfolded wings as wide as a grown man is tall. One beat of black wings, and they were both gone.
I kept running on momentum alone, hit the door frame, fell against the broken glass, hissed through the pain — and through the bars of the balcony railing, I saw the rest of it.
The street was full of them. Cars overturned. Houses burning. Creatures everywhere, on the ground and — I was sure — somewhere overhead, just out of sight.
People were being carried off. The ones who fought back didn’t last long.
I gripped the railing, scanning the sky for any sign of her, trying to convince myself this was a nightmare I’d wake up from. My body wouldn’t let me believe that. The pain was too real. She was nowhere. Just empty sky.
Tears dropped onto the glass, mixing with my own blood. My cuts burned. My head spun.
I looked down at my torn-up hands and noticed, distantly, how much light there still was around me. I turned and found my sister’s flashlight lying nearby.
I picked it up, hands shaking, and switched it off.
I held it against my chest and cried, with no idea what came next. No idea who could help me, or how.
I opened my mouth and nothing came out.
Then, against everything in me, I made the choice that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my life.
One last look at the sky, and I turned toward the open door.
Walking back, guilt pressed down on me — if my parents were gone, taken like everyone else, what was the point of any of this? Could I even fight back against something like that?
But I stopped myself. I closed the door quietly, looked toward my parents’ room, then knelt down and pressed my cheek to the cold floor to look under the crack.
I strained my eyes against the dark. Nothing.
Then I heard it — wet, slapping footsteps on the tile downstairs. My body moved before my mind caught up, and I ran for my room.
I clutched my side, limping, and once inside I shoved the nightstand against the door.
The slaps kept coming, closer, in rhythm with my own racing heart.
I grabbed the bat from the corner, held my breath, and waited.
Every second stretched out. I felt like I could go gray with fear before this was over.
The footsteps reached the stairs — small, wet sounds, almost like a child clapping. In an empty house, they sounded like something else entirely.
