(CW: Monster eating people)

Someone shoved Hyejin so hard that she stumbled on the stairs and hit the wall. Another person elbowed her in the jaw as they scrambled past The disadvantage of being short. The sea of people was suffocating. She could hardly breathe. All she could see were bodies. All she could do was follow everyone else, pushing and shoving to avoid being crushed under the weight of the evacuees.

The mayhem swept her up as it spilled out of the building – of every building – and people flooded the street. The air was full of that cursed red dust. Even out in the open, it was hard to move freely in the panic. People continued to push past her, nearly bowling her clean over. She hugged herself tightly against the nearest streetlight to prevent herself from being trampled.

Those things were everywhere. They poured over the skyline like an army of spiders marching to war. Bone-chilling screeching competed with the wail of the evacuation siren and the screaming crowd to the point Hyejin had trouble telling all of them apart. The glow of the gate on the other side of the building was still a vibrant, angry red, exacerbated by the dust.

Where were Dion and Atticus? They had been right behind her. Hyejin bit her lip, hesitating, waiting for any sign of familiar silhouettes, or even a head of shocking blue hair. Nothing. She was alone. An ill feeling wormed its way into the pit of her stomach. They had either abandoned her, or they were still inside. 

On the roof, several people were shooting in all directions. They were being quickly overwhelmed by the beasts that were scuttling over the hotel facade. It wouldn’t be long before they reached the street — the street that Hyejin was on! Despite her best efforts, she couldn’t convince herself to let go of the lamppost.

BOOM! CRACK!

A missile of fire soared overhead, bursting on impact with the roof and sending debris through the air. She watched in stunned horror as the roof began collapsing. Only a few of the monsters had been dislodged; most of them still clung to any available surface with their gangly legs.

SKREEE!

Hyejin ran. She had to, she told herself. Her chest tightened, a lump forming in her throat as she followed the crowd. The boys will be fine, right? She was sure they could handle themselves. They were lowlives, like most of Tollindo. They’d probably already fled on their own. No one in their right mind would stay inside a collapsing building. 

She fought hard against her stomach when she saw another evacuee crushed under the hail of debris that fell all around her. She could taste her lunch coming back up as tears blurred the world around her. Just keep running. Save yourself, Hyejin. No one else will. 

The smell of cooking seafood filled the air, overpowering the smell of the dust. It was hard to breathe. It was so hard to breathe. The crowd was so dense it was difficult to tell who was fighting and who was fleeing. Laser shots zapped through the sky like fireflies from nearly every angle. 

‘Evacuate the city to prevent further casualties.’ Little drones buzzed in the sky, repeating the message over and over again. The voice was the same as the race announcer's, but it sounded calm and composed. ‘Get to the nearest underground bunker immediately.’ The advertisement holodisplays in the street were showing a map of the nearest escape route. 

More fire missiles soared overhead, this time aimed at other buildings that were being swarmed. At this rate, there might not even be any buildings left soon. It suddenly made sense to Hyejin why Tollindo was a desert city after the war with these monsters six hundred years ago. They’d destroyed their own cities time and time again to control the outbreaks and rebuilt on top of the ruins.

It took Hyejin another few minutes of running to realise that the hovering drones weren’t just making announcements. They were projecting arrows directly onto the street to give escapees a clear direction, visible now that the air was getting clearer. Bodies lay among the rubble, some victims of falling buildings and some victims of the toothy crustaceans; all of them very much dead or dying. 

Hyejin ducked and covered her ears when a fire missile shot out from beside her. She hadn't realised it a second ago, but there was a metal ballista set up in the middle of the street. Even though they were aiming at the monsters, the gunners seemed to have little to no concern for the people who might be caught in the crossfire.

The people on this planet were completely insane. They had no morals at all. It was almost a surprise they even had an evacuation plan and didn’t just wipe the city off the map altogether. The gunners weren’t uniformed. Hyejin suspected that, given the state of planet Agafra, most of the law and order was handled by local militia. There was hardly any security when Hyejin initially arrived in the shuttle.

The man loading the projectiles noticed her staring at them. “Move, lady! The trigbies will eat you if you stand around doing nothing,” he warned, waving his arm in the direction of the shelter. He turned away to continue reloading the ballista without a second glance.

BOOM!

Hyejin’s mouth suddenly felt drier than Tollindo’s desert. 

Trigbies: Now that they had a name, she remembered reading about them in natural science books as a kid. They were giant parasites with an insatiable hunger. They bred fast and ate everything. Each other included if there was nothing else available. Humanity had lost two planets to the creatures in ancient history. Populations were wiped out in a matter of days. Now they were here, on this nearly dead planet… and so was Hyejin.

A new understanding dawned on her. There was no running from the monsters. If you lost a city, you lost a planet. She hated to admit it, but it was better to lose lives in the crossfire than lose a city to trigbies. What were a few hundred, or even a thousand lives, if billions would die? Yesterday’s Children had gone too far. 

SKREEE!

Hyejin jumped out of her skin. She turned on her heel and locked eyes with a monster that was barrelling down the street, aiming for the ballista. Its mouth was open wide, showing all four rows of sharp jagged teeth.

Another fire missile flew past Hyejin, landing in the creature's mouth before it exploded in a spray of innards. The fishy-smelling meat rained down and she wanted to be sick all over again. The viscous fluids seeped into her new clothes, warm and sticky.

“Move!” the gunner stressed again. 

Hyejin didn’t need to be told a third time. She took off again as fast as she could, following the arrows blindly toward whatever the locals considered a shelter. According to the maps, the nearest was conveniently under the Tollindo Starport. Perfect. Hyejin didn’t want to be in this doomed city anymore. This whole trip had been one disaster after another. She wanted to go home and take a long, long bath with at least five different scented oils. 

WHUMP!

A trigby corpse landed in front of her, missing her by a hair. She didn’t have time to stop, instead smacking straight into the hard exoskeleton with a surprised squeal. Pain shot through her side where she caught on a tooth as she stumbled over a long crab leg. She landed on the asphalt hard enough to tear through her dense trousers.

“No, no, no, no!” Hyejin muttered, tentatively touching the spot at her side. Her fingers came away bloody. Not good. Trigbies were venomous. If their saliva got into the nervous system, it had the potential to leave a grown human paralysed, eventually stopping the heart. 

Her chest heaved. Her head swam. Her clothes were too tight. Her mouth was too dry. She clutched a hand to her chest, gasping desperately for breath.

What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?

A small number of people ran past, desperately clambering over fallen debris. Trigby screeching pierced the air. She clapped her hands to her ears again, using the dead trigby to hide from the very much alive one that chased after the group. At the rear of the evacuees, a young man shot at the monster’s mouth. It seemed to be working, but he stumbled over his own feet and landed on his back. 

The gun skidded across the ground toward Hyejin and their eyes locked for a brief moment. It was long enough to see the terror in his soul. They both knew. They both knew he was a dead man. He screamed wildly and held his arms up to shield himself as the monster came down on him.

Hyejin's eyes clamped closed as hard as she could, her hands tightened at the sides of her head to try and drown out the horrific wet noises. More screaming followed. She knew it was the rest of his group. The ones he tried so hard to protect. It was so hard to breathe.

SKREEE!

She couldn’t stay there. Not if she wanted to live. Dad…

Her stomach lurched as soon as she cracked her eyes open. She couldn’t control it. The smell, the heat, the sticky sensation permeating the fibres of her clothes… it was all too much. Hyejin’s stomach emptied itself, tears streamed down her face. Her body shook violently. A memory of carnage flashed across her mind. She could have sworn she could smell burning motor oil.

He’s not here. Save yourself, Hyejin. No one else will.

The trigby was still preoccupied, getting its fill. Cautiously, she crawled out of her hiding spot and picked up the gun the unfortunate soul had lost. The mana gauge still had 80% left. The starport was still a while away, but it should have been charged enough to get there as long as she didn’t run into too many of them. She just had to make sure not to miss.

She glanced at the mess that used to be the young man and took a deep breath. 

Hyejin aimed the gun at the freshly-fed monster and fired. 

SKREEEE!

It turned to her and charged, its gaping maw stretched wide and ready. It was so fast!

Four shots aimed at the roof of its mouth hit their target, sizzling holes through the flesh and into its brain. It collapsed dead in front of her without a fight, sliding right up to her knees. 

When her mind caught up with her, she realised how much she was trembling. Hyejin didn’t look at the thing's mouth again, or the torn cloth caught in its teeth. She couldn’t. She had to keep moving. She had to save herself.