The Lamplighters Omnibus

You turn and you run.

You're not in great shape. Piss-poor in fact. You've gone so soft and pale from five years of sitting at home or sitting in your apartment, eating too much of the wrong food, staying up late just because you don't want it to be tomorrow. Five years of abuse and five years of neglect. Your heart already feels like a war drum beating against the inside of your chest. But you've made your choice. You have to run. If you run fast and far enough maybe you'll wake up.

You feel like you're moving in molasses. Like every stride is too short, too slow, like you're trying to race a freight train barrelling down main street to meet you. Every time your feet strike the street it's like it strikes back, sending pained shocks up your legs. You don't look back. If you look back you'll make it real. You arms pump madly. What's it even accomplishing? You don't know but you keep doing it, you keep running because you have to. Your chest heaves like bellows. Every breath is a numb wheeze.

Thunder splits the sky, makes your ears ring with pain. It takes you so long to realise it wasn't just close lightning. It's the monster at your back, miles and miles yet still only a few lazy, imperious strides away. Sighting its quarry. A city full of prey.

How many blocks? You can't tell. You aren't looking at the signs. They're blurring anyway, between the wind and the rain and the tears. The tears - you're crying. You're sobbing and all you're doing is wasting precious air bawling about how you're going to die. You're suffocating yourself and you can't stop, you can't fucking stop crying your useless bitch-tears like that ever solved a fucking thing in your life. You dip your head and uselessly try to dry your eyes on your hoodie sleeve. It's already soaked from the rain. It just makes it worse.

You run right down the double-line in the centre of the road between the columns of abandoned cars. All shapes and sizes, all makes and models. So many sleek sports cars, painted garish colours, tricked out with the latest concept tech. Some still on, wipers running with hypnotic rhythm, their headlights forlorn lamps in the strengthening storm, every drop of rain standing out in stark relief as it falls through the beams. Your foot comes down in a puddle. You don't even feel the splash of water. It's no colder than your skin. It doesn't even touch the burning ache in your muscles.

How many blocks? One, two, three, four, you never had a reason to count. It was always just a quick train trip away, fifteen minutes tops. How long is it on foot? Can you even make it? Your breath escapes you in a pathetic whine, like you're trying to plead with the city to be smaller.

Hit another intersection. All the lights are flashing red. The warnings are still echoing in your ears, still visible on the rainsoaked screens and flickering holograms that festoon every building. Something falls with a crash. You jump. You scream. You stumble and nearly fall, your heart leaping into your throat. You only barely steady yourself on the hood of an auto-car, rooted in place without its owner. It was a trashcan. A fucking trashcan blew over in the storm and it's like the spell's been broken. You try to take another step and your leg shakes. You pull it back. You lean against the car and greedily suck in frigid, rain-reaved air. You choke and cough wetly, doubled over.

You look up. You're facing the south road. You can see a SERAPH APC clearing the way, tossing cars like tin cans with its shaped prow, just barely glimpse the helmeted gunner sitting behind the turret shield, scanning this way and that for signs of civilians or hostiles. You don't have the breath to call out to it nor the energy to start forward but it's something. It's something.

There's a shape moving through the rain. There's nothing there. But the raindrops hit the nothing and shatter into a thousand more. Leaving a perfect, barely-humanoid rainshadow.

The APC dips on its suspension as the cloaked spawn lands on the roof. The air ripples, the gunner cries out. It's too fast to see. Something long and slender and whipcord lean. Something quick and sharp. You see the spray of arterial blood as the gunner dies in one swipe to the throat. Catch a glimpse of its squirming tail as it disappears down the hatch and into the vehicle itself.

Fear gives you strength you don't have. You keep running.

Another block. Another block. Every breath hurts so much. Your lungs are trying to burn through your ribcage and out of your chest. Every time you want to slow down, even think of daring to slack off again, you hear another sound. Another ear-splitting shriek or bestial roar or the skitter-skitter of talons across sheer rain-slick walls.

There are other people running. You can't see them clearly, you don't turn your head to look, but you know they're there. All sorts of people running in every different direction. Maybe they actually know where the bunkers are, where real safety is. Maybe they're just trying to get home too. You know they'll survive. You know they'll survive just like you know you'll survive because that's how the world works now, right? A hero will show up and save you all because that's what they do.

"So who wants to be superheroes when they grow up? Raise your hands!"

You threw your hand up with what must have been the whole rest of the class. In those days it seemed so possible.

Gunshots everywhere, near and far, echoing through the streets, slicing through the storm. No room for careful aim now. A hail of bullets slices across your path out of nowhere, nearly cuts the leftmost car in front of you in two. You skid to a stop on the slick asphalt. You scream. You barely steady yourself, grab and bend a wing-mirror so you don't fall. The ruined car sinks low on its suspension, one tire popped. Your breaths are coming so fast and so hard you aren't even registering the distinction between them any more. It's just another deafening sound in your ears, fighting to be heard over your own pounding heart.

1%. That golden number, that impossible figure. 1%. You checked it and re-checked it, you obsessed over it. Something like five million people in the US alone with some kind of powers, or at least going by pre-Conjunction numbers. People won the lottery on worse odds. People bloomed late all the time.

The rivers of rain swell. The storm-drains hold. Your every step splashes, flinging up more sprays of ice-cold water. You unzipped your hoodie at some point, trying to let a fraction more air in. Your shirt is soaked, sticking to your chest, your swollen and soft stomach. The kaiju roars again. So much louder. So much closer. Don't look back. Everything hurts. Everything hurts so much but if you stop you'll die.

Twenty kids or so in your school with powers. Powers safe enough to let them go to school with the normal ones, at least. You didn't go make friends with them but you definitely paid attention to them. Why? All your memories are jumbled now. Like they're fading away into fog. Getting blurrier and blurrier every time you look back on them because they just seem so bright now, so warm and bright and hopeful compared to what you've known for the past five years.

One of the maglev trains passes overhead, what passengers managed to catch it huddled inside on the promise of safety. More fliers, just like the one you saw get destroyed so casually what feels like seconds before. Four-winged wyverns dive-bombing the toughened windows, rocking the train in its magnetic cradle. Slamming their angular skull-heads against it again and again. The train curves off behind a building, out of sight. They'll all get out fine. You know they will.

What happened to you? How did you get like this? Something, something twisted up in all that wishing and wanting. Something that ached too much for someone your age when all your comics were packaged up and sold.

You can't breathe, your head's light, your thoughts are swimming as hard as your vision. Your chest's getting tighter by the second, like there's a vice slowly crushing your ribcage. You're going to pass out. You realise that with a sickening certainty, even as the city starts to look even slightly more familiar. You're going to pass out mid-stride and fall, just a few more blocks from safety. You'll die anyway.

A lightning bolt strikes sideways. A SERAPH chopper falls, spewing black smoke, spinning wildly out of control. An orange fireball lights the stormy sky for just a moment. Quickly extinguished by the deluge.

Your parents lied to everyone. You lied with them. Told everyone you were sick. The only thing wrong with you is you.

You fall to your knees in the rushing inch-deep water. Your hands splash down against the asphalt, once so warm from the sun. You can't feel your fingers. You crawl forward, drag yourself by your fingertips. Gasping. Shoulders shaking. Crying for all the good it'll do. You can't even feel the tears, if they're coming at all. The rain hides them well.

You lift your head up. A little, just a little. You can't manage any more. Not now. You're at another intersection, the furthest you've ranged from your apartment when you've felt well enough to go for a walk. You're right next to a construction site, the rain turning the bared dirt into a sucking quagmire. The chain-link fencing's been torn clean through like paper. Spawn, this far inland? How big is that thing's disruption field?

You keep moving, inches at a time. If you stop moving you'll seize up. If you seize up you'll never move again. You'll die. Whether from a spawn or just from the fucking cold. You climb the front grille of an autovan like the face of Everest, slumping against what meagre warmth the still-running engine can give you.

"HELP! SOMEBODY HELP!"

You turn and look.

There's someone in the construction site. A shape, squirming, writhing, caked in mud. Slipping on the slick clay, clawing through it for some measure of purchase. Alternately crawling on their belly and scrambling on their back to get away from the freshly-opened tear hovering a foot above the muck. The creature that slipped through. It makes no difference. The spawn knows its prey is cornered.

It's almost beautiful. Mesmerising. You haven't seen a spawn of this type up close, not in real life. It's made of mercury, to call it a 'blob' would be reductionist to the extreme. It's an ever-shifting mass of gleaming quicksilver, flowing smoothly from one form to the next yet not even rippling as the rain cascades down its reflective form. It stalks forward, one pseudopod at a time. They call them squid but it has as many or as few limbs as it likes. It traces a lazy zigzag pattern towards is prey like a spider, anticipating any angle of escape.

You know how this is supposed to end. You've seen it so many times, time after time after time. On every news channel, in every story, in every movie, in every comic. A hero swoops in and saves the day at the last second because that's what heroes do.

No one comes. Even the signs of SERAPH's presence are far away. Here and now, the only sound is the mud-caked man's whimpers for mercy as the metallic monster draws close enough to strike. He's going to die alone. Just a statistic in tomorrow's news.

You're the only one that'll even see it.

[ ] Do something.

[ ] Do nothing.

[ ] Run.