Page 2 of Fall of Dawn

They? They who?

A squad of soldiers emerges here and there, all of them headed back the way I came. “—many bogies. Air support can’t tell friend from foe. We have—” A snippet from a soldier’s radio offers no comfort.

“Help!” A woman cradles her arm and kneels on the sidewalk. “Please!”

People run past.

I slow.

I stop.

“Help me!” she screams.

Though it sets my teeth on edge, an ache growing in my chest, I turn and walk to her.

“Someone cut me.” She looks up at me, her eyes watery in the faint light. “I don’t know how. I-I was running and?—”

“Let me see.” I have no light, no supplies, nothing except my instinct to save her.

I swipe up her tattered sleeve and find gashes down the length of her forearm. Blood and some sort of pale crusting ooze along the edges.

“It burns. It burns so bad,” she sobs.

“We need to wash it. We have to clean the wound. I don’t know what?—”

Someone yells behind me, the sound guttural and turning watery.

The woman I’m helping screams.

I whirl.

The man who yelled is dangling in the air, impaled on the clawed hand of … of a monster. It looks like a woman. But it also doesn’t. It’s wrong, wrong on a level that I can’t put into words but that I canfeelin my bones. It leers at us as the man twitches. Bile rises in my throat. Disbelief tries to destroy my thoughts, to turn me numb. I can’t let it.

“Up!” I drag the woman to her feet and pull her along with me.

The creature just watches, its eyes silvery and semi-reflective like a nocturnal predator.

It drops the dead man and follows us.

“Faster!” I yank on the woman’s good arm. “Come on!”

More people run past us, but the monster ignores them. It’s focused on us.

“I can’t!” the woman wails.

I’m still pulling her when the monster swipes its claws across her throat, warm blood spurting onto my cheek. I scream as she reaches for her neck.

The creature wrenches her away and sinks its fangs into her bloody jugular, then scurries backwards with her, dragging her away from me.

“Run!” Another woman rushes past me.

I do. I turn and run, my body in agreement, as if sighing in relief as my feet take me in the ‘right’ direction once again. Screams rise all around me.

The gunfire has stopped.

I run.

The earth rocks beneath my feet as a deafening explosion hits the Capitol building. The round roof falls in as flames leap up.