Your hand finds another. It's warm. It squeezes you tight. It doesn't let go. You don't let go either. You squeeze back just as tight, so tight it hurts. It hurts, you know you must be hurting her, but she's hurting you too. You've both hurt each other plenty. But it's not enough to make you let go. It's not enough to make her let go.
"... understand," you whisper hoarsely.
Rob nods slightly. He claps his unbloodied hand down on your shoulder, squeezing. "Do exactly what Ms. Jenkins and I say, when we say it. You'll make it through this."
He releases his grip on your shoulder and straightens, scooping up that giant gun of his. Looks like it's compressed slightly, folded in on itself to save space. He levels it at the hip, rounding the couch to keep an eye on the front door. CLANG. The shutter dents in again. Ms. Jenkins slaps the butt of her shotgun's stock, telescoping it back into the main body. Following the line of the living room, past the TV, to cover the windows and rear hallway on the backyard-side of the house. Heat-haze rises from the barrel of her shotgun, the choke sizzling. Your eyes alight on Lakshmi's face, right next to you.
"... we gonna die?" she asks in a small voice.
You shake your head.
"I..." She swallows. Chokes back tears. "... didn't want you to go."
"You can come with me," you say. "Dad'll buy you another ticket."
CLANG. The shutter over the window dents, its housing rattling. Cracks spread along the wall. Ms. Jenkins readies her shotgun, sighting down the length behind a featureless mask of gleaming black bone. You and Lakshmi jump.
"Dad'll buy his own ticket," you ramble. "We'll all go together, all four of us. We'll go on a holiday and we'll be with Mum for a week or a month or a year if we want."
The entire house shakes. Lakshmi screams. You think you scream too. The sounds overlay so neatly you can't be sure. Dust rails down from the cracking ceiling. You throw your arms around your sister and she responds in kind, squeezing your lower back hard enough to make your spine click even as you crush her against your chest.
"And then Mum can come move in with us like we always talked about and we can go to Luna Park like we used to and show Mum all the best spots in Sydney and-"
The horrible squeal of shearing metal, inches-thick shutters buckling and crumpling like foil. You hear two steps, and Rob's gun opens up again. Ms. Jenkins leaps to your side, grabbing you roughly with one clawed hand and hauling you to your feet with Lakshmi. The claws dig into your skin, slash through, draw blood. She doesn't care. A few flesh wounds are worth getting the two of you to safety. She strong-arms the pair of you around the coffee table one-handed, still clinging to each other like limpets. She hefts her shotgun in the other, levelling it one-handed and keeping it firmly trained on the corner where the entrance hall meets the living room. Rob's firing down it, slowly backing away, lips curled back from his teeth in a grimace. You can't see what he's shooting at.
A furred outline, outstretched claws-
THOOM. You go deaf. You feel the heat of the slug's passage as it rockets from the barrel of Ms. Jenkins' shotgun. It goes in the thing's shoulder, punches through its chest cavity, rockets out the other side in a dark pink cloud of blood and bone and meat. The shape flies, hits the bloodied wall and slumps. A tangled pile of ruined meat, fur and blood. You almost want to laugh, to whoop. You had no reason to be scared. Just a big, stupid-
C-crak-crack. The mountain of meat moves. Eels slither beneath the flesh, making the pelt bulge. Clawed fingers twitch spasmodically. The entire corpse convulses, already-shattered spine bending almost to the point of snapping clean in two. One arm rotates, lining up with the pulverised socket. Driving right back into the mess of bone shards. You hear them clicking and scraping, crunching back into place. Like glass beneath a boot. The arm hangs limp, useless, only to be pulled taut with an audible snap as the tendons are restrung. The creature finds its feet, planting one paw, then the other. One arm still dangling by a single scrap of muscle, still bent backwards double. It turns, whips around so fast it's like it's trying to snap its spine at the pelvis. The nearly-severed arm swings like a grisly tassel. Swinging back sharply. Strands of meat and sinew lashing together like striking snakes, visible through the crater where its shoulder once was. Limb popping back into the joint with a sharp snap. Body hunching forward like an abandoned puppet as its vertebrae crunched back into place, one by one. Hunched over. Taking deep, bellowing, hungry breaths. Claws flexing as thick drool fell from its fanged maw. It looked up with eyes that were nothing but swirling emerald pits into endless-
THOOM. You go deaf again. Another bolt of white-hot metal nails the creature in the sternum, blowing out a hole so massive you can see the wall through the other side of it. It pauses, briefly. Then it keeps coming. Ms. Jenkins tosses the gun in the air, pumps it one-handed, throws it back into firing position. THOOM. A headshot narrowly missed. Half its face is gone. The flesh on one side of the snout is stripped bare, too many fangs in too small a mouth half-shattered. A slickly squirming tongue, a fat lump of meat darting out through the gaps in its fangs to taste its own dark blood. You can see brain matter through the hole in the skull. It keeps on coming. Rob backs up the hallway rapidly, giving the beast everything he's got. The bolts of energy scorch fist-sized craters in the thing's hide, the stench of burnt fur and sizzling flesh flooding your senses. Blackening exposed bone. But it doesn't stop. It only accelerates. It picks up speed for the pounce that'll take all four of you down at once, drive you to the floor so it can maul you to pieces.
The walls burst inwards. Metallic, humanoid silhouettes emerge amid clouds of dust and debris. You see metal cradles set recessed in the walls. They were there the whole time. There were androids hiding in the walls your entire life.
"Dane family in danger. Dane family in danger. Dane family in danger." The twin robots intone in unison as they level their chunky, semi-automatic shotguns and pump the triggers for all they're worth. A solid hail of buckshot peppers the beast, slowing it just a hair out of surprise if nothing else. It swipes once. The leftmost drone is dashed against the wall, a sparking mess of crumpled metal. It swipes again. The rightmost drone's head is sheared off. The beast picks up the body, hoists it overhead, and tears it in two with a single flex of its regenerating muscles.
Just enough time. Rob and Ms. Jenkins force you and Lakshmi through the doorway into Dad's study, and shut the door tight. Press a button you've never seen before and a steel shutter descends over the door. Once more it dents immediately, the beast at the gates howling with fury as it batters itself against the barricade over and over and over.
"Over here," Rob orders.
Dad's study. You were never allowed in here. It was always the place you Should Not Go and Never Touch Anything. Dad kept his files and folders and work stuff exactly the way he needed it, and messing with anything could cost him valuable time. It was a small request. And you had little need to go inside but sheer curiosity. It's airless, no windows, a little room all to itself accessible only by that one door. Defensible, you realise at last.
Suddenly you wonder why you and Lakshmi were kept home from school nine years ago, the day of the great dust storm that swathed the coast in scarlet. Why Ms. Jenkins took you and her into Dad's study with the door closed and played board games all day until the dust cleared.
Rob pulls a book from the shelf. Rips free, more like. It hits the floor, pages fluttering. The shelf slides out, slides to the left on hidden rails with a soft hiss. Exposing a door. Not just any door. A vault door. The kind of immense, chunky thing you'd see guarding a bank vault, made of enough steel for a fleet of cars. Rob hauls it open one-handed, grunting with effort. Ms. Jenkins throws you and Lakshmi over the threshold. You nearly trip and tumble down the long, dark staircase.
"What's happening?" you plead. "Where are we going!?"
"Get downstairs and hide," Rob replies curtly. "Only Mr. Dane can open this door once we lock it down."
"We'll be fine," Ms. Jenkins finishes. "This is what we trained for."
"I-if they can't break through the door then come inside with us!" Lakshmi cries out, her voice breaking. "Come with us, we'll all hide together!"
They don't reply. Rob doesn't look at you. They reach out and swing the vault door shut as one. You and Lakshmi throw yourselves against the other side of the door, pushing with all your might. They're stronger than you. Even together, you can't fight them.
"ROB!"
"MS. JENKINS!"
The door swings shut, locking with a pneumatic hiss. Steel rods shoot into the floor, the walls, the ceiling. Anchoring it firmly in place. You're plunged into absolute darkness. You can't see. You can't even hear through the thick steel. It's like you're floating in space, in an endless black void.
"L-Lakshmi?" you ask in a small voice.
Her hand finds yours. You squeeze. She squeezes back.
Light strips flick on, one by one. Lighting the way as the staircase plummets down, down, down, down into the bowels of the earth. You descend the steps together, one at a time, accompanied only by the soft scrape of your shoes on the metal and your own breathing. Neither of you lets go.
What awaits you at the bottom is a bunker. One vast room that must be the size of your entire house, maybe even bigger. And every scrap of space is taken up by two things - supplies and weapons. Everywhere you look there are cans of nonperishables, bottles or water, plastic- and foil-wrapped things of every size and shape. There's a stripped-down kitchen, a fridge, a freezer. Bunk beds and bathrooms, sectioned off by curtains. Enough rations to live down here a year, maybe more. Knives, machetes. And guns. Entire racks of guns, fit to equip the entire army that could live down here. Black plastic rifles and empty magazines, entire boxes of bullets. Other boxy shapes, shotguns and pistols, guns of every sort. Even the sort that don't exist. The ones you thought didn't exist until today. Until your world fell apart. And, almost as an absurdist punchline, there are bows. Modern torque-bows with pulleys and counterweights and what look like half a dozen different strings, more complicated than any you've ever tried to use.
The earth quakes. Dust rails down from a hundred tiny crevices in the high-arched roof. The shelves rattle. Indistinct sounds echo down the stairway. You and Lakshmi turn as one, hands still tightly clasped. Staring at the foot of the steps as you hear the beginnings of a low, muffled, metallic whine.
"... Meghanada," Lakshmi says in a soft voice. "They're going to get in."
"They said we had to hide," you reply. Voice shaky. Unconvinced.
"Where?" she asks.
You don't know. It's one room. You can hide, but not for long. They'll search. They'll sweep. They'll tip over every shelf and overturn every bed until they find the two of you. Will the extra minutes, extra seconds, be enough for Dad to ride home on a white horse and save you? You know exactly what she's thinking is the alternative.
"Rob and Ms. Jenkins couldn't kill those things," you say quietly. "Neither can we."
"Maybe." Her hand tightens around yours. "It'll be together."
It'll be together.
[ ] Pick up a machete. Simple enough. Just swing away. Leave a nasty mark. No chance of missing.
[ ] Pick up a gun. Any gun, so long as you can load it quickly. Probably worse than useless against those things. You've never used one before. You might miss. But it'll feel good to fire right before the end.
[ ] Pick up a strange gun. Like the ones you saw Ms. Jenkins and Rob using. Unwieldy, arcane, but they do more damage. You might leave a bigger mark. Might even fight your way out. Heh.
[ ] Pick up the bow. Just a toy in comparison to all the other weapons. You've never fired at a moving target. At a person. But you know how to use it. Draw and release.
