Lucas, was shocked. He was so shocked, he didn’t even know how to react. In barely an instant, his home, his parents, were gone. He thought he should cry, at least be sad, but he still wasn’t able to process that they were actually gone.

He stood at the edge of the crater, his bike long forgotten, hardly aware of anything other than the flag blowing in the breeze. The symbol on the flag was familiar, one his mother had warned him about when he was only a few years old. Thankfully he’d never actually run into anyone wearing the symbol, and for the last five or so years, people had been acting as if they didn’t exist, since no one had ever seen them in a while.

It seemed like a nightmare come to life, the symbol had always seemed more like a representation of bad things in the stories he’d been told, never being anything more than a symbol. Now that he was seeing it, marking the destruction that he stood before it finally set in, all the stories he’d been told were true, all the things that seemed like stuff made up to scare kids was true.

He wanted to run and hide, find a dark crevice to crawl in and never come out. But these people owned the dark, every nook and cranny was theirs, and theirs alone. Where could you hide from something that controlled everywhere you could hide. It was simple, you couldn’t. This realization parallized Lucas with fear, so much so, that he didn’t notice the person walking up behind him.