Tearing of flesh, munching of meat, crunching of bones. Aaa, I can't take it anymore. I clutch my ears shut, whimper. I am overwhelmed by the memories of what I've seen till now, what I’ve experienced till now. I think I'm finally realising what I've gone through, and it doesn’t feel good. I was so close to dying - I’m mortified by how happy I'd thought I'd be dead, oh how wrong I'd been. I feel cold.

"What exactly is going on up there, Mark?" Asks a gruffly voice. I try to answer, to summarize the reality of what I've seen till now, but I can't - the images, the screams, the Krees. I shake my head in the negative, unable to answer. 

"You better answer!” croaks a shitty sounding voice, “I saved your life, you're sitting in my chair, in my bulletproof room. Speak, boy, speak!" I stare, dumbfounded at the actual f*cking audacity this man has. How dare he spout such bullshit. I try to infuse all my rage into the stare I give him. 

"You didn't save me, m*therf*cker. Winston and Conny did. If I must answer, I will - to them." I turn to them, and in turn, I look both of them in the eye, with my better eye. "If I tell this to you guys, then all the noises you've been hearing till now will no longer be only noises. They say ignorance is bliss. So with that in mind, do you guys still want to know?"

"If that freakshow down there is any indication of what's outside then I'm sure that it's terrifying, but ignorance can get us killed. So, yes, we do want to know what's going on out there, Mark," explains Winston. 

I take a deep, calming breath, readying myself to begin. "Wait," shrieks a voice. I look up to see who it is, and there, over my old Boss's shoulder, I find the speaker. Sally–the 5''8', fashionably dressed, blonde, ex model, trophy wife–my Boss's trophy wife. "Can't I opt out of this? I think I'm not ready to hear this." Whatever goodwill she had earned from me by listening to all of my plans for progress have been swept away by the actions of her bald-brained husband, so I look away from her, I won't hold back precious information on her refusal alone. So I look to someone who's opinion I care about, Melissa. 

"You can hold your ears shut if you don't wanna listen." I tell her. Then, turning to Melissa, I ask, "Melissa, do you feel the same?" She nods in the no, indicating that she wants to listen too. So, I too, mimic her nod and begin my tale.  

"Calling it Hell would be the most accurate way to describe what it is like out there. 

I was at the Russian roundabout. At half past ten or so. The air began crackling with electricity, I was feeling pretty numb to everything, but even to me it felt like I was about to get hit by lightning, hah, would have been quite a fitting end to a day like this." Conny coughs awkwardly at this. 

"And so that's when all this started. A massive gaping hole the size of a football stadium opened up in the sky, purple electricity crackling all around it. And from that abyss, this massive stream of red came gushing out. What–at first–looked ethereally beautiful to me, turned out to be the dreadful reality that we are in right now. That ethereally beautiful red stream was actually hundreds of thousands–if not millions–of tiny red demons. 

They began picking up the people from the streets, and carried them back to the red stream, and once they'd carried enough people up in the sky, they began snapping their necks mid-air. It was a horrid sight, a fountain of blood pured down like rain."

Sally bursts out into violent fits of sobs, Melissa drops to the ground, her eyes watering with tears as she hugs herself, rocking back and forth. Winston sighs out loud while massaging his temples, Conny squats down clutching his head, and my asshole of a Boss strides towards the far right wall, and extricating a key from his pocket, he unlatches a casing with a shotgun inside and begins tinkering with it. 

Everyone had begun trying to cope with it in their own way, while I just tried to shove down my frothing emotions for later. I fail to cope with it - fail to deal with my inner demons, almost as bad as I've failed to deal with those outside. 

"Wait, you only said that tiny demons came out, then why is the demon down there so big?" Asks Winston. 

"I'm not too sure about that myself, Winston, all I can tell from what I've experienced thus far is that that red demon down there gained size and strength as it killed its own kind. I think they don't eat their own kind though, in fact, I don't think I've even seen a demon corpse stay for long till now. Once they die, they just blow up into brilliant red and gold flakes of ashes - it's quite mesmerizing actually." I surmise from my experience with the demons, and still actively try to piece together the missing plots of information from my index of intel. 

Sighing deeply, I close my eyes, an attempt to relax a little, to catch my breath, after such a long time. My eyes feel a lot better now, so I open them once completely, before shutting them back again, and repeating the process a couple times. 

Thash! Thash!

Taking a peek at the lid I came out of, I see the once only vibrating, 'bulletproof' metal lid begin to slowly form dents. Following the loud bangs, everyone else looks at the lid too. 

One tiny dent, multiple tiny dents, a moderate sized dent, a big dent, a massive dent. 

Bam!

The lid bursts open. 

"Fuck!" Conny exclaims, I agree. 

Large red hands jut out from the black hole, and they're followed by bulging blood-red forearms. They grab onto the bent metal lid and pull on it, and slowly but surely, the red giant’s head emerges from the abyss.

Properly placing its hands on both sides of the metal lid, the creature does a pull up, pulling its massive form completely up and into the enclosed room. 

They all look in a quiet stupor at its massive red form, and I too, seeing it in its full glory for the very first time, feel frozen in place. Its form looks exponentially more otherworldly in the intense light of the room. It looks as I thought it looked, only a hundred times more menacing. 

It searches the faces, looking for someone - looking for me. Its golden orbed eyes finally meet mine, and its face breaks in a wide grin, "Oh shit."

The walking danger sign charges at me, nostrils flaring, eyes bulging. I still feel frozen on the spot, but my instincts take over before I get killed. Flight or fight are the only options open to me, and my body chooses flight. I dive to the right and it exacerbates the pain in my fractured leg, but I get to live a second longer. Sparing a momentary glance I look back to see what the monster would have done to me had my survival instincts not taken over. The chair I was calmly lounging in just a few moments ago is no longer there, its disappeared. I step back in shock.   

The demon, however, does not relent with just a broken chair. Turning around, it again hyper fixates on me, and I yell for help. But as I do, I hear a cacophony of yells erupting all around me, as if the collective stupor everyone was in has finally given way to complete chaos. 

As it chases me around the vicinity of the whitewashed room, I catch glimpses of motion behind it. Winston running over to the bald headed prick, the two of them tussling over the shotgun, and then, as I finally catch a glimpse of Winston start to take aim, I come to a halt in the farthest corner of the room, trying to make sure that the gigantic demon faces me, its back turned to the aiming Winston. It displays a large grin, the largest grin of triumph I've ever seen. Belching a loud Kree of joy it plunges its claws at me and I instinctively close my eyes, my arms shooting up in a vain attempt to defend myself.

Bam!

The shotgun goes off with a resounding boom in this enclosed space. Peeking behind the curtains of my eye, I gape, astonished at the humongous gaping hole that decorates the center of the damned creature. I never knew Winston was such a good shot. Mentally thanking him profusely I begin to sit, expecting the demon to fall on its face any minute now. 

It doesn't. 

Eyes turning red, pupils dilating further, nostrils elongating into almost chimney sized holes; it turns to look at its assailant. Winston looks at me, his eyes shining with tears of regret. The demon, now angry like a bull, inflates. Large foreboding wings open up from behind its back–almost twice the size of his body at its maximum width–and then subsequently it shrinks as his hole patches itself up, a hard sheen closely covering its body, and then it starts its bull-like rampage towards its assailant, Winston.  

Winston shoots at it, the bullets simply flying off of its shiny hardened body. Losing all hope, Winston dives to the right at the last moment, letting the rampaging creature hit the far side door straight on, the door from where we heard the wailing man die. It completely goes through it.

The large white washed room remains pin drop silent; all of us stuck to our positions in limbo, unsure of what to do or how to proceed. The freeze frame persists for a few seconds longer when the bald headed jackass runs across the room and snatches his shotgun out of Winston's hand and begins reloading it, his trophy wife scurrying after him. 

The seconds stretch into minutes as I questioningly begin to exhale a sigh of relief, the others following suit. But then our collective ill luck strikes again. Similar to what happened before; two beefy, giant muscular hands grab onto the doorframe, and try to push itself in through the small hole it created itself. But that is not what scared me, what scared me were the other five pairs of tiny red hands that came with it. It's almost like it has learned that it's stronger if it's got more numbers on its side.

Surprisingly squeezing through the tiny little gap, the demons emerge into the whitewashed room. The bald eagle runs off to his bullet stash on the far corner of the room and begins jamming bullets into his retrieved shotgun, leaving his wife behind like discarded trash. 

Two of the tiny demons track his dash across the room, following suit. They charge at him, not letting him finish reloading his gun. Caught in a dire situation, the bald bastard stops trying to reload the damn thing and instead uses it as a shield, a tiny shield, to hold off the clawing arms while he desperately tries to get out of the clutched situation he's in. Conny, left with Sally to defend along with himself, breaks off the main office table's steel stand and begins swinging it at the two demons that charge at him and Sally. The remaining demon begins to lunge at me but is stopped midway by the extended hand of the Giant Demon. 

The larger demon, having lost its red rampage in that wall tackle, again hyper fixates on me. He redirects the halted tiny demon towards Winston as it begins to charge towards me.

As it reaches me, I dive at the last moment, and scurry off to the hole I came out of. Standing over the manhole that may lead me out of this situation, I ponder a moment on whether I should save myself, abandoning them all. That moment of hesitation is all that it takes for the big red demon to catch up to me. 

"Mark, watch out!"

"Oh God."

Thwack!

I feel myself fly for a fleeting moment before hitting a surface hard. AH, I feel my bones smash and crumble to dust. How the hell am I still conscious?

The charging demon wastes no time in its relentless pursuit of me. Looming above me, it readies its fists in the air–it's going to smash me into the ground. 

"Die! You monster," exclaiming with all her might, I watch lifelessly from around the demon as Melissa drives a swivel chair into its feet, and successfully trips it. 

"Mark, are you okay," why do they always ask that, I think it's more of an instinctual response than a proper question, "No," I say as I spurt out blood from my mouth. I feel her hands dragging me. She rests my back against a wall, her hands skimming frantically across my injuries, hot tears splash on my skin. She's crying. Sniffing, she says, "H-hey Mark, how about we get that cup of coffee after this is over with?" I laugh, a weak laugh, but my first laugh in a month. 

"No!" Behind Melissa I see the giant demon, its fists descending upon us. In a near instant decision–and unfounded strength–I manage to shove Melissa to the side, and accept death's descent upon me. 

I've used the fleeting moments of my life to save a soul, I am content. 

Glowing wisps of threads coil around me in my lingering last moments. I'll close my eyes, feel a little pain, and it'll all be over. 

. . .

VTOOM.

“You alright there, kid?"