Have you ever fallen to your death before? It’s a strange feeling. The world around you slows down, but the scenery seems to blur into an unrecognizable mess. You can somehow tell the moment you hit the ground. You can hear the breaking of your bones, the blood leaking out of every opening, cut, and scratch. But there’s no pain. You just remain there for an unnaturally long time, on the bottom of that cliff. Or maybe somewhere else, somewhere between consciousness and death, until something grabs you from the darkness and pulls you back to life.

“Number twelve woke up!”

She bolted up, loudly gasping for air, her eyes wide open. Her vision was still blurry, but she could hear the sounds of screams and people crying. A lot of people. Had that many people been around when she had died? She grabbed her head, she couldn’t remember and it hurt to think about.

“Shit, another one!”

“Where is she?”

“Over there!”

"Grab her and run, idiots!”

She had no idea who was talking, but whoever gave that last order was quickly obeyed. A young man with hair as white as snow grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet, a lot rougher than his small, adorable face would let on.

“Run for your life if you don’t want to die again,” he told her in a light voice and he pulled her along as he ran away himself, his gaze focused on a point somewhere behind her.

A low growling made her flinch and she carefully followed his glance.

“Ha…” she let out a half laugh and turned back to the white haired guy she had quickly dubbed Jack Frost in her head. “It’s okay,” she told him in a shaky voice, “we don’t have to run, it’s not real.”

"What?” He snapped his head to her, surprisingly sincere worry visible in his ice blue eyes.

"There’s no way something like that is real!” She burst out, tears forming in the corners of her eyes. She had no words to describe the monstrosity that followed them. It was like something from a movie. Big and scaly, with row after row of shimmering white teeth. A wingless dragon about the size of a big car. And its stretched pupils, like a cat’s, narrowed as they clearly focused on her.

“Did you hit your head when you died or something?” Frost snapped at her and let go of her arm. “If you don’t want to run, then by all means, stay behind and distract it for the rest of us!”

“N…” She reached out to grab his hand again. “No!” She was pretty sure that the only reason she had been able to move at all was because he had been pulling her along. If he let go, she might actually die. Again.

Again? She glanced around her. The two of them weren’t the only ones running, but wherever they were clearly wasn’t the same place she had died in. So what? This was the afterlife? She had gotten reborn here as herself? Same age, same clothes even?

“Over there!” She told the boy that had begrudgingly wrapped his hand around her wrist again and was dragging her along. She pointed at the wreckage of what seemed to have been some sort of tipped over armored tank, although she didn’t recognize the flag that had been painted on the left side. Not that it mattered. She heard the thundering footsteps of the monster running towards them, the sound of debris creaking and breaking beneath its clawed feet. They were going to be torn to shreds before they would even reach that tank.

They were saved by a stone hitting the monster’s head from somewhere in the distance, from behind a pile of rubble. It growled loudly, turning away from them. Frost didn’t even look up. In the instance the dragon lost its focus, Frost sprinted towards the tank, dragging her along, and jumped onto it. They slid down the back over pieces of stone and broken glass and she gritted her teeth not to cry out until they reached the ground, leaning their backs against the hot metal of that broken down tank.

They breathed heavily, both leaning their heads back against the warm steel, listening for any kind of sign that the monster had seen them hide.

“What is that?” She whispered in a far too high-pitched tone. “And who are you? What the hell is going on?”

“How should I know?” He snapped back. “I woke up like two hours before you. All we’ve been doing is running from that thing and trying to find safe places to hide.” He agitatedly rubbed his hands over his face, which she only now noticed was covered in soot and mud.

“Three others woke up with me, but they died not long before you woke up,” he added softly as he lowered his hands.

“Oh…” She lowered her head. “I’m sorry.” She observed him quietly from the corner of her eyes as he tried very hard not to look at her. He had barely known those others for about two hours, yet their deaths seemed to have already affected him this much. She felt a warm affection for him spread through her chest. She couldn’t help it, she had a weakness for people like that, people who could show kindness even in the face of danger and adversity. They made her want to do something for them. To move for their sake.

“How much do you remember?” Frost suddenly asked softly as he turned around and got on his knees to look through an enormous cut running all along the tank.

Not a cut, she suddenly realized looking at it, a claw mark.

She quickly turned back, glancing over the wasteland of rubble and broken, abandoned vehicles and buildings, trying to focus on his question to stop panic from taking over and paralyzing her.

“I remember like… basic things about the world.” She said softly. “Like, kids go to school, when you work in IT, you make bank, that kind of stuff, but…”

“Nothing else?” He finished her sentence.

She nodded. “I don’t remember any of the people I must have known or even my own name.”

“Not even your own name?” He groaned. “I remember my name, but not much else either.” He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “It’s Seren, by the way. Stay alive long enough to at least remember that.”

She snorted despite herself. “I’ll try my best.”

He gave her a crooked grin. “You were the twelfth of us to pop into existence and wake up, so I’ll call you Twelve for now.”

She shrugged, he might as well.

“It’s tearing into that car, but whoever threw that rock doesn’t seem to be there anymore,” he informed her.

“Good,” she sighed. “They saved our lives.”

“Yeah, well,” he sat back next to her, “keep your eyes peeled, we might have to return the favor sooner rather than later.”

She noticed the way his hands and arms trembled, and he still hadn’t completely caught his breath even after that much time had passed. “Is that how you’ve been staying alive this whole time?” She asked.

He nodded without looking at her. “It sounds easier than it is, though. That thing is fast and its reach is huge and all it takes is one strike to…” He clenched his jaw, lowering his head. She watched it with a twinge in her chest. She had no idea who this man was or if he had even come from the same place as her, but he had saved her life. And he did seem like a sweet kid.

She turned around the same way he had done and peeked through the claw mark. A mark too big to have been made by the monster that was currently terrorizing them.

“How many of us are there now?” She asked.

“About fifteen the last time I checked,” he answered in a suppressed tone. “But I’ve been hearing screams all over, so there are probably less by now.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Do more people keep waking up here out of nowhere or was I the last one?”

“How should I know?” He immediately snapped. “I just grabbed you because I happened to be closest, but I’m not your personal guide for this apocalypse.”

She chuckled awkwardly. “Right… sorry.”

He flinched and looked away. “Yeah, no… me too.”

She watched him from the corner of her eye. Eighteen or nineteen, he couldn’t be much older than that. Probably not even old enough to drink where she came from. Yet here he was, not only surviving this insane nightmare, but actually going out of his way to help her too.

“Look over there,” she told him quietly, nodding to their far left. “There’s people watching us.”

“Yeah,” he didn’t even have to look. “They’ve been there from the start, but they won’t do anything. We tried screaming for help, but they won’t even move and being too loud just gets you killed, so…”

She nodded and squinted to be better able to see them. A row of what could only be soldiers stood on the wall of what seemed like an enormous concrete base. They wore dark clothes and some kind of armor that she couldn’t make out from this distance, but they stood straight as candles, each one of them unmistakably holding some kind of fire weapon in their hands.

“Look below them,” she instructed Seren, and he curiously followed her order. A few meters below those soldiers an enormous door had been placed in that base, big enough to let in one of the tanks they were hiding behind. The door had been opened slightly. It hadn’t gone up far enough to be able to let through the monster they were hiding from, but a handful of humans…

“Shit…” Seren mumbled. “I can’t believe I hadn’t noticed.”

“I think they’re telling us to make our way over to them,” she concluded as she glanced back out over the battlefield. “Has anyone been able to do that yet?”

He shook his head, although not as confidently as he had done before. They had desperately been trying to keep each other alive here in the heat of the fight, he clearly didn’t want to have to admit out loud that he thought some people may have actually left them behind to get themselves to safety.

“Do you think we can get there unnoticed?” She asked softly, already knowing somehow what his answer would be.

“We can’t just go!” He turned to her. “Those guys just saved our lives, we can’t abandon them an-”

“Okay,” she stopped him before he would raise his voice any louder. “Okay, I get it. So, how can all of us get there unnoticed?” She stared at the dragon-like beast still tearing into that car, although there wasn’t enough left of it to possibly hide any humans. It may have been big and strong and scary, but it clearly wasn’t very intelligent.

“There’s no way…” Seren mumbled in a defeated tone. “That thing is too fast and it will notice that many people running at the same time, we won’t even make it halfway. None of us.”

I bet two people could make it out there without being seen, though, she thought as she quietly stared at him. Not that she disagreed. Whomever it was that had thrown that rock, they had saved their lives. She couldn't possibly abandon them there to only save herself, no matter how tempting the option. But the fact remained that no one would survive if they all went. Someone had to stay behind to distract it. She suppressed a sigh and glanced at Seren's scared face, already knowing how this was going to play out for her. She had already there was no way she could let this guy die now anymore, after all.