God forgive us for what we've done. 

• Field marshal Walter Peters after ordering the first city buster dropped on a British Empire city. 

***

Lights flashed even with my eyes shut. I felt as if I was submerged in broken glass, and a moment later, I was flung out into the dark. 

A film of water slapped me in the face as I skidded around trying to keep to my feet, slipped and unceremoniously fell flat on my ass. I dropped the heavy blade instead of trying to keep hold of the honking thing and squeaked in fright when it loudly clattered onto the hard ground. 

Frantically I blinked my eyes, getting rid of the white spots to see where I was as fast as I could. It quickly became apparent that it was evening, drizzling with cold rain, and I'd sat on the wet tarmac soaking my trousers. 

And then everything hit me. Whatever had been controlling me and keeping me docile was gone, releasing everything they had repressed. 

The kidnapping. The man that they cut apart. The machines that cut into me.

I touched my back and felt the unyielding metal they'd forced into me. 

"No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no..."

I coughed, then dry heaved. I couldn't even begin to process it all. 

"Whaaaa..."  

I sat on the tarmac for, well, I'm not sure how long. My thoughts relentlessly chased each other around my skull. I desperately tried not to think about what was happening while shying away from anything that reminded me of the last few hours. 

Days? 

I guess I was stupidly still wishing it was all a horrible dream.

It wasn't working, though; the reality of what had happened kept rattling around in my head again and again.  

The abduction. 

Me waking up strapped down in that assembly line. 

Them mutilating me. 

All of us just standing there like cattle waiting to be slaughtered. 

The bastards peeling back everything I was and then fucking with my mind. 

Reae, Ron, and Alice had been there. They had gone through what I had gone through. But what about Sophie, Alex, Jessie and all my other colleagues? Where were they? 

Jo had returned to her practice, but was she far enough away not to get swept up in this?

The thoughts chased each other around and around themselves in my head, and I couldn't do anything but cry, moan, scream, and shiver. 

***

It wasn't until I started violently shivering from the incessant rain, which had soaked me thoroughly, that I came back to myself a bit. 

I was unbelievably tired, but my need to not be freezing cold forced me to acknowledge what I already knew and that I wasn't dreaming. 

That this was all real and that if help were going to come for me, it'd already have arrived by now. 

I was on my own, and no one was going to help me. Except me.  

I wouldn't wake up again if I lay down to sleep now. 

Looking around in the gloom, I struggled to concentrate on something other than what had been done to me by trying to get an idea of where I was. 

It took me longer than I cared to admit, but I finally understood that the tarmac I was on lay in the middle of a dark residential street. It looked like what Jo would have called a suburban hell. Or at least the parts that were still standing did. 

Forcefully squashing the distracting worry thinking about my best friend caused, I peered into the gloom around me. 

The detached houses on this street had probably once been large-ish two-story affairs with manicured lawns and sprawling flower beds out front flanking a broad meandering road. 

It must have been pleasant enough before it was reduced to a bombed-out war zone that was subsequently hit by a tornado.

These houses weren't the flimsy wooden things you saw in news reports following a tornado's path, but solid brick and concrete. 

That still hadn't helped them much, though. 

Almost every structure in the area had been knocked flat, and the ones that weren't piles of rubble were missing massive swaths of walls and most of their roofs. Deep meters-wide craters dotted the streets, lawns, and flowerbeds, with debris strewn across everything. The area was something reminiscent of the targets of a 1940s carpet-bombing campaign.

Still sitting on the wet road in the rain, I started piecing more things together as soon as I began thinking again. 

The smell hanging thickly in the air that I hadn't acknowledged was of burnt, well, everything and the gloom wasn't because of the time of day -even if it was evening- but because of a smoky haze and thick dark clouds blocking the sun. 

An oppressive feeling also permeated the dark street, and slowly anxiety started seeping into me. 

A shiver not caused by the cold ran down my spine, and my eyes flicked towards the enormous sword I'd dropped, my only weapon. I quickly scrabbled to recover the slab of sharpened steel. Then, with both hands wrapped around the hilt, I awkwardly held it in front of me in some form of defensive sitting position and frantically looked around. 

The street was silent except for the constant hiss of the rain, which was becoming louder while it did its best to go from drizzle to torrential as fast as possible. But there was also something else. 

Something is out there. 

I need to hide. Now. 

I'd seen a house that hadn't been entirely destroyed a little down the street before the sheets of water blocked more of my view. 

I bit back a grunt when I pushed myself to my feet and started ambling towards the building, using the stupidly large sword as a makeshift cane. 

It was all I could do to force my cold muscles to put one foot before the other. My ill-fitting boots let in lakes of water, and my hands and feet were like lumps of ice. Each step I took hurt. It felt like I was walking on pins and needles. But at least the pain was keeping me awake.

It took a long time before I found the edge of the slowly flooding tarmac, but I couldn't see beyond a few meters. I started to panic that I might have gotten turned around and would miss the house in the downpour, but I almost cried in relief when a flash of lightning showed the house only a few dozen meters away from me. 

I shuffled from the tarmac onto what was left of a lawn. With each step, the squishy earth blasted out of the bomb craters sucking in my too-large boots. 

My left boot got stuck by my third step and slipped from my foot, causing me to almost trip when the boot slipped off, and the laces I had tied kept hold of my calf. I stumbled forward, the mud sucking at my sock when I planted my feet to stop falling. I turned to look at the boot but decided that pulling the stupid thing out of the mud would take too much time. It took a few tugs, but I eventually dragged my foot from the bloody laces. 

A minute or so of hasty squelching steps later, I'd also lost my right boot and left sock to the mud before I'd skirted a crater to reach a big hole in a wall and awkwardly clambered stumbled into the dimness of the house.

Hide.

The ominous rain still beat behind me, so I quickly hobbled into the dry room. But unfortunately, my second hurried step was putting my entire weight onto a piece of glass, a sharp stone, or something else sharp. I could feel it stab deeply into my foot, and I yelped in surprise and pain. 

I froze, clamping my jaws together tightly, biting through the pain. 

Frantically, I looked through the hole in the wall behind me. The sheets of rain still blocked my view, but I peered through the occasional lightning to see if anything had heard me. 

Raw dread crept up to grab me by the throat. 

What I imagine a mouse would feel when faced with a predator sent me scuttling deeper into the room and looking for a place to hide.

Something is coming to kill me.

My eyes had adjusted to the deeper gloom of the room far too slowly for me, but I still saw what looked like a cupboard against an almost pristine wall on the far side of the room. 

I limped over, yanked open its door, frantically forced my way between the clothes hanging inside while forcing the sword in with me, and pulled the door shut behind me. 

The wardrobe hadn't been as undamaged as it had looked. There was a musty, damp smell inside, and I could see through a few holes ripped through its wooden doors. I adjusted myself to see the hole in the wall from inside my hiding place.  

Then something moved outside in the rain. 

Lightning flashed, and even if it was only silhouetted for a fraction of a second, my breathing became ragged. 

Then four segmented arms with gleaming claws pulled it through the opening smoothly, and I was certain it wasn't anything natural.  

It was at least two meters tall and looked like some sort of giant bipedal insect. 

The creature bent down and brought its prominent mandibles close towards where I'd cut my foot. 

Where I'd bled. 

I heard it inhale loudly and then looked straight at my hiding place. 

Please, please, please go away. Please ignore me. 

Even in the gloom, I could see its eyes clearly. 

They looked human. 

My breath hitched when it looked straight at the hole I was looking out of. Its thin lips pulled back, showing dark, needle-like teeth behind the mandibles. 

It knew I was there. 

Its segmented leg moved forward slowly, and I heard the rubble crack under its weight. Then, slowly its head started to bob up and down. 

It was stalking me. 

[NO! Please go away!]

It stopped. Something in my head burned. I felt my eyes hurt, and the gloom tinted a slight shade of red. I tasted blood but couldn't take my eyes off the creature. It stood shuddering, twisting its head from left to right. 

Then it took another step towards me. 

[GO AWAY]

The insect thing rocked back a few steps as if physically hit. Then unceremoniously turned around, climbed through the hole, and disappeared into the rain. I saw as much before the red covering everything darkened even further, and I felt so tired, even with the adrenaline making my body thrum. 

My eyes started drooping, but I forced them open again. I couldn't sleep, not with whatever those things were out there. 

I kept staring through the hole but could only see the rain relentlessly falling. 

Nothing. Did it just leave?

Before long, the adrenaline faded, and my eyes started burning from constant staring. 

I closed them to give them some rest. 

Just for a minute. 

***

Everything was crushing me. 

I woke with my heart pounding in my throat and gasping for breath. I clawed and pushed at the earth that had buried me, and it moved without effort. 

It took a moment before I realised I hadn't been buried alive. 

Breathe in, breathe out. 

Breathe in, breathe out. 

With more than a bit of effort, I forced my breathing to slow down, and the mind-numbing terror slowly decreased. 

My first realisation was where I was. The second was that I was not comfortable. 

Take a moment and just breathe. 

Forcing the unwieldy sword pushing into my shoulder to the side, I lay down again and dragged back the clothing that had functioned as blankets, trying to regain some of the warmth lost when I bolted upright.

One of the holes in the closet let through a beam of murky sunlight that had me squinting. That had probably woken me, and I thanked it quietly for waking me from whatever nightmare I was having.

But the nightmare hadn't ended with me waking up. 

I took a minute just to breathe and trying to think of nothing. 

The breathing part worked. 

The holes in the closet allowed me to see outside, and I could see weak light entering the room through the fissures in the walls and roof. I still had a slight red tint covering everything, but the morning gave me a good look at the place where I had taken shelter last night.

It looked like it had been somebody's bedroom going by the remnants of what I assumed was a queen-sized bed. I saw a brownish-red stain covering most of the bed.

Blood and a lot of it. Nobody could survive losing so much, could they?

I pulled my eyes from the stain and saw mirror pieces scattered across the ground. That was probably what had cut me when I stomped onto them.

I turned toward the hole in the wall where that insect thing had run off. 

'What the fudge had happened?' 

'What the heck had that thing been?' 

'Why did it leave?' 

Those questions set off more pertinent ones.

'Where are the others?' 

'What did they do to them?' 

'What did they do to me?' 

None of which I had any answers for. 

My fingers unconsciously moved before brushing against the slick metal embedded in my neck. It told me it was all real. 

Unbelievable but real. 

I curled up deeper under the covers, feeling hopeless again. 

At least I kept my crying silent.