THE SURVIVORS
by Marc Mason
It had been twelve full days by our
counting since last we heard sound from above. Before that, the sounds of
battle echoed for at least three days, thunderous explosions tearing their way
through the waning infrastructure of the city, erasing civilization as we know
it.
The
quiet was harder to take.
The
group of us had found our way into a bunker as the carnage began. That day had
begun so simply: my intern, a bilingual young man with a fantastic sense of
style, had stopped and brought in donuts, making sure to save me a maple-iced,
and those of us on the design team gathered in the conference room to eat
sugary goodness and discuss our next move with the athletic shoe company that
had just hired us. It was smoggy, as Los Angeles usually is, but the sun seemed
particularly radiant, like it refused to be shut down by the brown haze in the
sky. Then we felt the rumbles begin.
Earthquakes
are a fact of life for Southern California, so no one really panicked. Plus,
the rumbles were rather short, not sustained. But then they began to increase
in intensity, and they felt… closer is, I guess, the right word. My intern
thought they might be coming from somewhere on the opposite side of the
building, so he ran that way to see if he could see anything. This was to be
his one and only mistake while he was under my supervision.
Goodbye,
Jose. You were a fine web designer, and your taste in donut shops was
impeccable.
We
all heard him scream his final words: “Holy shi--!”
The
“t” was silent as what looked like a huge, white beam of energy tore upward
through that side of the building, eradicating everything in its path.
Everything around us shook, and pieces of the ceiling began to cave in. But I
didn’t move. Not at first. I was frozen in horror as I stared through the
gaping wound in our building and saw what was out there. It was so insane, my
mind could barely cope with it. What I would estimate to be a three hundred
foot tall dinosaur was walking toward us. Toward downtown, really. I watched as
its jaws flared wide and that energy beam erupted, the creature destroying
buildings next to ours, too.
I
would have stayed still, but one of the team members grabbed me and yelled at
me that we needed to go. So I ran, following my crew down the stairs and out of
the building and into the streets. The insanity outside was worse. Emergency
services vehicles were clogging the roads, a select few ridiculously brave
people answering the call of duty. Helicopters zoomed by overhead, and it
looked like a couple of them might be military. I went numb as my body
registered the fact that my city had just become a warzone.
But
war against what was the lingering
question.
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