Age of Monsters

by John Lee Schneider

  But most of them were like the dragon-beast that loomed before her now.

  She couldn't guess how many – they were spread across the entire city.

  To her credit, Rosa remained calm – detached, even – just as she would when slicing into a human abdomen – delivering an otherwise ghastly mortal wound under carefully controlled conditions.

  From her vantage atop the parking garage, her observations were professionally cool and collected.

  Rosa was strictly an indoor-girl, but she loved animals – as a kid, that meant a lot of trips to the zoo, and she remembered the first time she saw a live elephant.

  As a tiny person then, herself, she specifically recalled the way it moved – sort of an odd slow-motion – but that was actually an illusion created by greater mass moving at a living speed.

  She had noticed the same thing years later, driving in the mountains, when a herd of elk had crossed the road in front of her – in contrast to the sprightly deer that darted between cars along the outskirts of the urban areas, these animals were the size of horses, carrying their weight in that same illusory slow-motion – yet moved with the same bouncing spring, tossing eight-hundred pounds in the air in a fawn-like bound.

  But the closest analogue to what she saw now, was the slow rumble of an avalanche she had once seen skiing – fortunately from the opposite ridge – it was as if the mountain had suddenly shaken itself like a wet-dog, and a layer of snow had simply dumped off its back. You could see it coming for a mile, racing at breakneck speed.

  Or perhaps the eruption of Mount Saint Helens – another active volcano in the Cascade chain – in a single blast, a quarter of the mountain had simply collapsed off to one side, rolling down into the valley.

  What Rosa saw today was like that.

  Only it was in something alive.

  And it could SEE you.

  It was AFTER you.

  That was the second thing, Rosa realized.

  This was no rambling amble through town.

  Make no mistake, THIS was a rampage.

  These living mountains were smashing the buildings in front of them to dust. They were destroying everything in their path.

  Rosa was reminded of rhinos on the Savannah, which were known to stamp out fires – there was more than one evening campsite that had their dinner rudely interrupted – rhinos could exceed two or three tons – and they were known to do the same thing to nests of stinging ants.

  This was the same sort of deliberate effort.

  Anyone inside any of the crumbling skyscrapers would be crushed into nothing. On 911, when the World Trade Center had come crashing down, it had not even left bodies.

  The Twin Towers had fallen in that same false-slow-motion. Rosa remembered reporters on the street starting to run as they realized the concrete avalanche was cascading down on top of them.

  Like a Tsunami – charging across miles in moments – and then suddenly it was upon you.

  Rosa had met a young man who had survived the Thailand Tsunami of 2004 – he had been laying on the beach and then suddenly he was being crushed by something like the weight of a house. He had somehow popped to the surface, and been pulled out of the rushing wave by a woman perched on a third-story roof – together they had fielded other survivors out of the backwash. Rosa had treated the young man for part of a finger he had lost in the incident.

  He said the wave had been upon him in seconds.

  Rosa looked around in sudden realization at the concrete tomb she stood on top of – even as the colossus was now towering directly overhead, staring down with its glowing green eyes.

  The tsunami was upon her.

  She turned, staggering, as the worsening tremors threatened to knock her from her feet.

  Ignoring the elevator, she ran for the stairs.

  She had just made the second story when the parking structure was hit from above.

  Around her, the concrete and steel began to crumble.

  She made one more story before the floor beneath her simply gave way.

  For one crazy moment, she clung, dangling from the railing, before that tore away as well, dropping her into the basement-level below, along with the collapsing stairwell.

  Something struck her head and the world went dim.

  Her last thought before successive blows knocked her unconscious was that she was going to die.

  She actually took a second to get ready – that Catholic upbringing again.

  Then for an indeterminate time, the world was simply dark.

  The next thing she was aware of was hands upon her, and the sound of grating rubble.

  She felt herself carried, and remembered being gingerly sat down between two parked cars.

  When she finally blinked awake, she recognized a nurse from her own ward – a young, painfully-dedicated woman named Julie – 'Nurse Price' – whose heart bled for every skinned knee – who Rosa herself had predicted would never last.

  Julie was tending to her cuts, apparently with a first-aid kit stashed next to the fire-extinguisher, dabbing alcohol and applying gauze.

  “Doctor Holland? Are you okay?”

  Rosa sat up painfully, looking around the small circle, sitting among the assorted rubble.

  The entire garage had collapsed. The basement level was underground, and now a cratered opening nearly forty-feet above their heads was their only window – that and the remaining stairwell, filled with rubble from the four stories above.

  Rosa turned to the group of eyes that blinked back at her in the dark – she recognized the girl from the coffee shop, as well as the young security guard that worked nights at the garage. There was an older couple – likewise battered in the collapse, and who Julie was tending to beside her.

  Also among them, was the couple Rosa had seen crossing the street – the guy with the future welfare-mom.

  “Bud and Allison pulled you out of the rubble,” Julie said. “They saved your life.”

  Rosa blinked, still a bit groggy, and hoped her own finished thought didn't show on her face.

  She regarded the two of them sincerely. “Thank you,” she said.

  The man – 'Bud' – nodded, but said nothing, simply huddling back, glancing nervously up at the still-crumbling ceiling.

  Overhead was darkness – Rosa could see stars.

  She could also still feel the staccato quaking in the ground – impact tremors from massive weight – and the roar of thunder that was not thunder – echoes of primal rage.

  This storm was not passing – it had settled on the city, growing in strength.

  Rosa wondered what must be going on in the streets.

  By some miracle, the little group of them had fallen through the cracks. In terms of survivability, there were critters that survived in a field under a rototiller – bugs, worms, mice – fragile life-forms that had somehow missed the churning blades.

  But that wasn't the way to bet.

  “What's happening?” Rosa whispered, as if the sound of her voice would bring the beasts down upon them.

  She looked at the blinking circle around her.

  No one answered.

  But whatever it was, it wasn't over.

  Chapter 5

  In San Francisco, it lasted for ten days.

  The small group of them hunkered down in their little impromptu bunker, waiting out the blitz.

  San Fran was one of many big military hubs along the California coast – the invasion of dragons did not go unanswered.

  The counter-strike was prompt, and soon enough, there came the sound of jet-engines.

  And with the roar of the war-birds, came the bombs.

  Officially, all hell had broken loose.

  For better than a week, America's Finest battled the Beasts from The Pit for possession of the city.

  By the third straight-day – feeling every impact, every explosion, breathing the stench of burning smoke – hearing the gale-storm roars of the outraged beasts – Rosa was beginning to wonder if anyon
e in the city besides themselves might have survived.

  Really – how could they?

  Rosa had been waiting for a lull – that was the part when the aid-groups came in – just like the ones she had done so much volunteer-work for – they waited until the principals took a break from killing each other, and then she and her fellow bleeding-hearts would go scrape up all the human wreckage.

  This time, however, there was no lull.

  Sometime early on, Rosa stopped believing in rescue either – and actually felt a touch of resentment – she had spent her life giving aid, but there would be no FEMA coming for her.

  Ten days eating out of vending machines, breaking into cars – the coffee-girl had a week's stash of cookies and crackers. They had stored water from a fire-hose in janitorial buckets.

  And all along, they could hear it – all around – just above – waiting for the moment when the eye of the storm might finally decide to descend directly down upon them.

  Whether dragon-beast behemoth, or stray missile – the blades of the rototiller were still turning.

  In the main part of the city, once the skyscrapers had started cascading down, for most people, it was simply over – it was not a question of waiting out the storm.

  And if you made to the street, all there was left was to run.

  The screaming in the streets, however, had not lasted much past that first night.

  There was the difference from a Tsunami – once it rolled over, the wave didn't circle back to finish the job.

  Another seemingly deliberate action – like rhinos stamping out ants.

  Rosa knew their little group had somehow been missed, but didn't yet realize how near a thing it was.

  In fact, they knew almost nothing at all – they didn't even have radio after the second day – and all they got from the initial reports was that things weren't any better anywhere else.

  And so the group of them hid away in the cracks.

  Go back far enough, Rosa thought, and humanity's humble roots were not much more than that – tiny mice, hiding in their little holes. And in the course of a single day, they had come full circle.

  Eight of them – out of a city of eight-hundred thousand.

  Or initially eight. The older couple had both been injured badly – the husband had gotten the worst of it, having thrown himself on top of his wife as the stairway above started to collapse.

  He had only lived for a short while, dying sometime before dawn after that first night. He had lain discreetly, under a plastic seat-cover for the next two days – that is, until he began to stink in the heat, and they had carried him up the surviving steps to the street level, where he had lain ever since.

  The old man's name had been 'Larry' – or 'Uncle Larry' to the children in their neighborhood, since he and his wife couldn't have children of their own. Rosa knew this because his wife – 'Aunt Rita' – sporting two broken legs, and a great deal of pain to go with her fresh grief, had spent a lot of time talking about him in the days since.

  Julie had been in constant attendance to the old lady – she was a nurse, and here were people to help. Here in a crisis, she was the very caricature of Florence Nightingale, right there in the garage.

  Rosa had worked enough disasters to recognize the psychology – people took on roles – shielding themselves with the balm of activity and purpose – that all-important distraction. Rosa watched, semi-amused as Julie all but duplicated her morning rounds at the hospital – tending to the old lady – to all of them, including Rosa herself – checking on every last scrape and cut.

  Then there was the poor girl from the coffee shop – with her pathetic little label-maker name-tag – 'Jamie'. On the second day, Rosa had found her in the corner, crying.

  Her cat, she said, was home alone – and then apparently unable to continue, had burst into helpless tears.

  Rosa had almost laughed – in the face of the world literally exploding around them, it was at once absurd, yet at the same time, the thought nearly brought tears to Rosa's own eyes – the tiny, helpless little thing – a much-loved pet that depended on you for everything – frightened and wondering where to find you when the end came.

  And then throw in the fact that a cat was apparently all this young girl had.

  On the other end, there was the kid – the security guard – 'Jeremy' – also with an identifying name-tag – Rosa could tell he was just dying to save the day.

  “No,” he had told her, when Rosa asked, “they wouldn't let me carry a gun.”

  Mostly, he simply moved around a lot – evidently from an urge to be proactive – he just didn't have a clue what to do. So instead, he burned all that energy pacing back and forth in the small space. He seemed to hover over the rest of them, like a self-appointed guard dog – an attentive fox-terrier.

  He had also expressed particular concern over Nurse Julie – who had rolled her eyes in Rosa's direction.

  Rosa sighed. Men were always men.

  The quietest member of their little group – excepting a few loud bouts of morning sickness – was Bud's lady companion, Allison.

  She was an attractive woman, albeit in a hardened, dangerous way. Rosa couldn't guess her age – she bore the sort of dark circles under her eyes that would make a nineteen-year-old look forty.

  Of course, being pregnant didn't help. Rosa recalled her own uncharitable thoughts right before she'd learned the woman had saved her life.

  Still, Rosa had seen a lot of the type – trashy and knocked-up – the kind that brought all the drama. It wasn't surprising she would be cool in a crisis – she probably wasn't afraid of a fist-fight in a bar, either.

  And they always seemed attended to by a certain type of guy – usually after a long line of the other kind.

  Rosa felt a moment's pity for the man who sat beside her – the one not responsible for those dark circles – but who would certainly be paying for them.

  Rosa had seen a lot of Bud's type too.

  She wondered, but did not ask if he was the father.

  Cynical, she thought.

  But she supposed it was something to think about – better that, than the reality around them.

  Because the reality was, pretty soon they were going to die here.

  In all the disasters Rosa had worked – even in hurricanes, even in the floods – even war-zones – she had operated out of protected areas – always just a chopper-flight away from safe-ground, far away from demilitarized madness.

  This was something different. There wasn't even any direction they could reasonably go.

  The bombing raids alternated with missile strikes. There was no effort to preserve the architecture – the city was a total loss – they were just trying to take the beasts down.

  From the bottom of the collapsed basement of the garage, they couldn't see much of the battle – they didn't know how many planes – how many creatures – or even what effect the missiles had on them.

  And somewhere in the middle, Rosa wasn't sure if the behemoths weren't just killing each other as well.

  At least one plane had crashed within their view – almost right above them. There were monsters in the sky as well – nothing they could clearly see – but things that were bat-winged and very BIG.

  The jet had landed nearly on top of them – it sounded like it hit the tarmac somewhere beyond the neighboring block. In the garage, they could smell smoke from burning fuel.

  That had been on the last day of the bombings.

  All at once, the air-campaign ceased. The military retreated.

  And whether that was cause or effect – Rosa wasn't sure which came first – whatever had hit the city, seemed to have receded as well.

  Just as abruptly as the siege had started, the storm above seemed to have abated – no more thundering roars – no more earthquake-footsteps.

  As suddenly as it began, it all just stopped.

  But it wasn't until the second day after that, when they first dared creep back up towards
the surface.

  Chapter 6

  The stairway to the street level was mostly preserved – the elevator shaft had deflected the bulk of the collapsing upper-stories off to one side.

  But looking up the narrow path that remained, Rosa was still reluctant.

  She recognized that psychology too – the paralysis that kept you from acting to save your own life.

  As if to spite herself, she finally brought it up to the others.

  “We need to at least see what's up there,” she said. “Maybe we can get out of here.” She looked around at their little group. “Anyone with me?”

  Bud had started to rise but Allison's hand latched onto his shoulder, pulling him back down.

  He had glanced at Rosa, who nodded understanding.

  Julie stood up. “I'll go,” she said.

  Upon hearing that, Jeremy stood as well. His eyes were wide and nervous, but he swallowed determinedly. “Me too,” he said.

  Running over to the fire-house, he broke the glass canister next to it, pulling out the fire-ax. Wielding it like a club he turned back, his teeth-set.

  Rosa and Julie exchanged looks.

  “You know,” Rosa said, “we're just going to take a quick look – maybe just the two of us.”

  Jeremy started to protest, but Rosa reached out and took his ax.

  “Here, I'll just take that with me, thank you.”

  Jeremy frowned uncertainly, but subsided.

  Allison, however stepped forward. In her hand was a semi-automatic pistol.

  “Here,” she said. “Take this with you.”

  Rosa regarded those dark circles once again.

  “You didn't mention you had this,” she said.

  “It didn't come up,” Allison said. She eyed Rosa seriously. “I want it back.”

  “Here,” Julie said. “I'll take it.”

  She tossed her nurse's ponytail, cocking the pistol. “My dad made me take lessons.” She glanced at Jeremy meaningfully. “I've also got a brown-belt in Kenpo.”

  Rosa looked up to the empty sky, summoning courage.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let's go.”