Year 3. Sterling City. The Day of Dusk.
The air smelled of the normalcy of any afternoon in a big city: the light ozone of electric traffic, the distant aroma of street food, the constant murmur of millions of intertwined lives. The ten-year-old boy was absorbed in drawing on a tablet on the living room carpet. The muffled sound of the television and the quiet conversation of his parents in the kitchen were the backdrop of his small world. Outside, the afternoon sun reflected off the windows of the tall office and residential buildings that formed the recognizable skyline of Sterling City. The flow of vehicles was dense on the avenues, an orderly circulatory system for a prosperous metropolis.
Normalcy shattered.
A deep tremor shook the foundations of the building. It wasn't the familiar rumble of the underground subway, but something more violent, more primal. In the apartment, objects vibrated on the shelves, some fell to the floor. The boy's parents appeared in the kitchen doorway, their faces tense. The television abruptly switched to an emergency news signal. A pale-faced anchor was speaking rapidly about "chain structural failures" in the underground network and industrial districts, mentioning confused reports about... "attacks of unknown origin."
Then they heard the screams. Not distant. From the street. Sharp howls, torn by absolute panic.
The boy ran to the panoramic window, his heart pounding in his throat. Horror stole his breath. The pavement of the avenue, several blocks away, had erupted upwards as if from a volcanic eruption. And from the jagged jaws of asphalt and shattered concrete, they were emerging.
They were a dark, chitinous plague. Creatures the size of small cars, with multiple segmented legs that moved with impossible speed, swarming over the rubble. Runners. He saw one crash into a taxi, tearing off the door and dragging the driver out amidst muffled screams before the sound was lost in the growing din. He saw another climb the facade of a low building, smashing windows and disappearing inside.
And there were others. Much larger. Monstrosities that stood on two or more thick legs, over two meters tall, with armored torsos and enormous claws like butcher knives. One of these giants swept aside a row of parked cars with a single blow of its upper limb, sending them flying through the air as if they were empty cans. Another, with eight legs like infernal spiders, impaled a delivery truck against the wall of a building. Chaos seized the streets. Explosions of colliding vehicles, the cacophony of useless horns, the sharp and piercing screeches of the creatures, and the incessant screams of humans.
"To the basement! Now!" his father ordered, grabbing an emergency backpack and pushing them towards the door. The city's alarm sirens began to howl outside, a belated funeral lament. The building's hallway was chaos of terrified neighbors. They tried to make their way to the emergency stairs.
On a dark and crowded landing, a reinforced window burst inwards with a shower of glass. A six-legged Runner burst in with terrifying violence, its multiple eyes glowing, its jaws snapping with a wet sound. People screamed and recoiled. The boy's father tried to protect them, pulling out a standard pistol, a nine-millimeter he kept at home. But before he could aim properly, the creature ignored him and lunged at the mother, who was standing right in front of the boy.
He saw, in slow-motion nightmare, the Runner's front claws sink into his mother's side. A horrible sound, like tearing fabric, followed by a guttural scream. Blood gushed out, dark and thick. The impact threw her against the concrete wall with devastating force. Her body fell to the floor like a broken doll. The father fired several times. The bullets seemed to bounce harmlessly off the creature's dark carapace, which let out an irritated screech and turned towards him.
The mother lay in a growing, sticky pool of her own blood. Her eyes, glazed with pain and shock, met her son's. A last breath of strength animated her. "Silas...!" she whispered, choking on the blood rising in her throat. It was his name. The boy – Silas – heard it clearly above the chaos. "Run, Silas! Run away! Live...! Please... live!"
The Runner charged at his father. "Listen to your mother! Go!" the man yelled, firing again as he braced for impact.
Silas froze for an eternal instant, his mother's dying face burned into his retina. Then, the final command, the instinct for survival, broke the paralysis. He turned and ran. He ran down the stairs, stumbling, pushing, not daring to look back, tears blinding him, the sound of the struggle and his father's final scream chasing him.
He emerged onto a side street that was a slaughterhouse. The smell of fresh blood and something else, something acrid and alien, filled the air. Burning buildings illuminated scenes of carnage. He saw the remains of an overturned police car, the bodies of the officers half-devoured. He saw a group of soldiers in bulletproof vests and assault rifles trying to form a defensive line, but they were being overrun. A Runner tore a soldier in half with its jaws. Another was dragged into a broken sewer by something moving too fast in the shadows. He saw a dark, slender figure, almost invisible against the buildings, climb a wall and jump on a soldier on a rooftop, a quick movement and the man fell like a dead weight. Blood and viscera painted the sidewalks and walls. The screams of the wounded mixed with the triumphant screeches of the creatures.
He fled aimlessly, following other survivors, venturing into the labyrinth of shattered streets. The city was a death trap. He reached a large public square, now a monument to the massacre. Destroyed military vehicles, broken makeshift barricades, and corpses everywhere: human and alien. In the center, dominating the scene even in death, lay the colossal corpse of one of the giant, armored creatures, surrounded by the mutilated bodies of the dozen soldiers who had managed to bring it down.
Desperately seeking shelter, he approached the rubble near the fallen monster. One of the smaller, stealthier creatures, which appeared dead, suffered a violent convulsion. Silas recoiled in terror and stumbled, falling onto a jumble of twisted metal and bone fragments. He felt a sharp pain and saw blood gush from a deep cut on his forearm. At that instant, the convulsing creature burst in a final spasm, spraying him with a thick, hot, and dark rain of its bodily fluids. It covered his face, hair, clothes, and seeped into the open wound on his arm with unbearable burning.
It was like liquid fire injected into his veins. A chemical and searing pain that made him scream silently, paralyzed. His free hand, seeking support among the rubble, instinctively closed on something small, irregular, and strangely warm. A fragment the size of his thumb, with a sickly opalescent sheen, broken off from the corpse of the nearby giant. An Alpha Pearl.
The contact intensified the agony. He felt as if his own flesh was at war with itself, the alien blood dissolving him from within while the pearl in his hand radiated a strange and stabilizing energy. He saw, through a haze of pain, another nearby survivor, also splattered by the fluids, scream as their skin bubbled and melted. But he did not dissolve. He remained there, trembling violently, his body tortured, clinging to the fragment of alien power.
Alone. Surrounded by death and the stench of the massacre. Covered in blood and viscera that were not his own. With his mother's last command echoing in his head: "Live." Silas survived the first day of the end of the world. But survival would come at a terrible price, and the thing that now grew inside him, born of blood and pain, would change everything forever.