“Don’t leave me here,” he whispers in agony. Blood pouring from his mouth, his words just able to reach my ears.
The first sign of morning peaks over the eastern hillsides as I wrap the boy in my arms. As he wanted, I carefully load his body in the shuttle and start the engines to leave this fucking hell hole and never come back.
The engines fail.
I try again as the cold heat begins to creep over me, squeezing me tighter with every passing second. This isn’t good.
My upgraded eye detects more hostiles approaching, attracted to the sound of my failing flyer. The engines must’ve taken too much damage. They're refusing to crank.
The side glass shatters. They’re closing in on me.
Come on, baby. One last ride. Don’t fail me now. My eyes close as I mash my forearm to the dash.
Nothing.
Swiftly, I move around to the side door swinging it open, rifle in hand. I’m not going down without a fight.
Inhaling deeply, time slows to a crawl. The wind reduces to a whisper in comparison with the beating heart in my chest. I hold the trigger, spraying death in every place my bullets touch.
Lines of droids collapse in rows at a time. Even more appear behind them. Iron beasts, sprinting without capacity to tire.
My gun runs dry.
I pull the grenade Athan gave me out of my pocket and release the pin.
I’m teleported to the server room.
Red and green lights from the machines flicker rapidly.
I’m choking.
I see Palin’s reflection in the shiny black shoe crushing the bones in my neck.
I’m not Palin.
The man with the metal arm pushes harder.
I can’t breathe.
No. This can’t be happening.
“I’m not Palin!”
My eyes open and I’m back. Like I never left. The unstoppable metal militia’s still charging. I look down still holding the grenade and I wind back. It flies through the air, landing in the center of the incoming horde.
The explosion throws smoke and metal high in the air, but there’s more of them. The Lethe droids keep perusing, too many to count now. A wall of red eyes glows as far as I can see.
Hopping back into the pilot seat, I give it one last go as bullets begin slicing into the side panels. A sigh of relief propagates throughout my body when I hear the engines roar, but shatters with the front windshield from incoming gunfire.
Over the others, a lone droid leaps into the air, crashing on the nose of my shuttle just as it lifts off the ground. Motionless, it glares at me. Its armored frame is like a black hardened liquid. Its legs, holding powerful hydraulic machinery, are wrapped in battered titanium with two metal plates for feet. It scans me in a glance and bursts through the remains of the broken glass windshield. It grabs the steering from my grip, far stronger than I imagined. Great iron claws immediately overpower me as the shuttle spirals just feet from the ground.
My fist lands solidly on what would be considered its chin if it were human, but it doesn’t flinch. I don’t even dent it. My hand goes numb, yet I swing again, harder this time. Then again. Using my elbow to beat its face into the dash as I feel the full force of its power fling me to the rear of the flyer as if I weighed nothing.
On all fours it crawls towards me like a demented animal as I hear the others latching on to the shuttle from underneath, pulling it from the sky.
Out-of-control the flyer clips the side of a timeworn building, capsizing, as the unwary droid is ejected out of the open side door, falling into the debris of the crumbling building.
Struggling to maintain equilibrium, I climb back into the cockpit and stabilize it. As they continue to hammer the remains of my shuttle with gunfire, I’m grazed in the arm from a ricochet. It’s bleeding, but my adrenaline dissolves the pain. I give her everything she has left, just narrowly escaping the death grip of 34.
“Or at least we thought,” utters an ominous voice, a voice I’ve heard before. “One of their missiles hit us shortly after. We did give it a hell of a run, though. Almost thought we got away. It was so close, flying straight up again, but Lethe always hits their mark. They picked us out of the sky and now we’re here.”
“Wait.. what!? Who are you??”
“You know who I am, Eros. I am you.”
Feeling the jarring warmth of a hand placed on my shoulder, I snap around the darkness, to see Jacee’s sapphire eyes just inches from my face.
“Will you be ready?” she asks. Her voice in frightening unison with the others.
Struck to the floor with terror, a stranger shouts from the shadows behind me, “The fight must continue. It’s not enough to simply preserve life. We must better it!”
Giant red eyes open overtop of me as wide as the sky itself.
“It’s our evolutionary duty!”
Their words echo, bouncing off the walls of my mind. The malevolent eyes above grow larger and glow brighter until every place that I look is them. They consume every crevice of my soul, picking away at what’s left of my feeble mind. I stare into them and they show me everything.
A black sickness wraps itself around my body like the second skin I neither want nor am I able to escape. Its smell rapes my lungs and singes at my eyes. The air is rotten. Dirty. Mountains of the dead pile around me. Their bodies, warped. Their heads, enlarged.
The sickness creeps around me slithering like a serpent, inching up my legs, squeezing me. My eyes envision colossal shuttles escaping a smoldering planet in hives. Clocks are ticking on every surface the light touches, and the places it doesn’t too. Tick. Tock.
The meteor strikes.
The pillars of earth collapse. Quakes swallow entire nations. Massive volcanoes spit fire, covering anything unlucky enough to remain. Oceans evaporate. Continents tumble. Then… the smoke clears,
