Page 3 of Doom

He tipped his navy baseball cap, then walked away.

I understood his words all too well. The same thoughts plagued me daily. My parents had spoken along the same lines when I’d decided to stay behind to care for the patients who couldn’t travel. Knowing they were safe in our cabin, with my sister, Elizabeth, and her husband, Michael, to look after them, gave me some peace of mind. But they worried about me caring for people with little chance of making it, and who couldn’t help me fight if things got hairy.

“Let’s load up what we’ve got so far,” Andy suggested, his troubled look echoing my inner turmoil.

“Okay,” I mumbled, ashamed to even be considering that man’s words.

Knowing I only had to say the word and Andy would hit the road with me made it even more difficult. Without flat out saying it, he’d hinted that we were uselessly prolonging the agony of doomed patients.

In the first days of the invasion, before they’d managed to blow up most of our power grids and communication towers, the news reports had all shown footage of the bugs focusing their attacks on heavily populated areas, with hospitals being key targets. We didn’t know what they were doing, but they wanted people—the more vulnerable, the better. They weren’t killing us—or at least, not right away. All the videos merely showed them shooting people with a stun gun, and implanting something in everyone … except certain women.

It didn’t take long to realize they were all women of childbearing age.

We could only speculate that the ones injected with implants would serve for experimentation or maybe as slave labor. But that they also targeted the elderly, the critically ill, and children made us fear they were being gathered as food instead. We only knew that they were dragging their victims into those hospitals in a continuous flow.

Hence, we moved as many patients as possible out of Sacred Heart and into makeshift hospitals away from the city’s center. We’d set ours up in a state-of-the-art retirement home for the rich which had been scheduled to open in a few months. It possessed its own medical clinic in the basement and had fully furnished bedrooms.

Only a handful of doctors and nurses had remained at the hospital to care for those too critical to be moved. I’d walked out when word of euthanasia had started circulating. I hadn’t studied all those years for that. And yet, with power out and no more pharmaceutical companies producing the drugs we desperately needed, did it make sense to ‘waste’ what supplies we had left prolonging the suffering of those who had little to no chance of making it, rather than saving it for those who did?

How did it come to this in less than two weeks?

We stuffed our loot in the back of our van next to the medical supplies we’d scavenged from a couple of pharmacies en route. There was still a bit more room, which I wanted to fill while we were out and supplies were still to be found. But as we approached the back entrance, loud, masculine voices stopped us dead in our tracks. Andy and I exchanged a look. These guys could be peaceful like the family we’d run into, but they also might not. We had enough to last us a few days. It wasn’t worth the risk. More importantly, we couldn’t afford to lose our vehicle and all the supplies.

I shook my head at Andy who didn’t hide his relief. We hurried back to the van and started the engine. Angry shouts from inside reached us immediately.

“Step on it,” I urged Andy, while putting my seatbelt on.

I couldn’t make out what the men said, but it sounded to me like a predator angered at prey slipping through its claws.

The tires screeched as Andy slammed his foot on the gas. In the rearview mirror, I saw three men storming out through the back door. They looked rough, with patches of blood on their clothes, and a few bruises testifying to brutal encounters. Two of them cursed, but the one who appeared to be their leader aimed a long rifle at us and fired just as we turned the corner into the parking lot.

I screamed, immediately feeling embarrassed. The bullet had missed, but it had freaked me out.

“What the fuck is wrong with these people?” Andy asked, visibly shaken.

I could think of a million different things. But in the parking lot, a banged-up car I hadn’t seen upon our arrival sat near the front entrance. Our van would have been a major upgrade for them, not to mention our loot, which is why we’d parked in the back.

“Let’s just go back,” I said with a trembling voice. “Anyway, we shouldn’t still be out.”

“Right,” he mumbled, maneuvering swiftly around the debris littering the streets.

I turned on the radio, one of our last means of staying in touch with the rest of the world. The same depressing reports trickled in, listing the names of the fallen cities and the direction in which the bug armies were marching. In between the gloomy stuff, they shared pearls of wisdom from the kind of water that was safe to drink, to smart places to hide, to basic security measures when scavenging or traveling.

At least one good bit of news came through. In multiple regions, with the bugs and the golden aliens busy fighting each other, many of the locals had seized the opportunity to flee to safer areas. With luck, both species would obliterate each other, and we could start rebuilding our world before it was completely destroyed.

We drove past a few lurking people, some going in and out of abandoned houses looking for who-knew-what. The hardest to ignore were people lying in the streets. They were few and far between, but before the invaders had taken out our communication towers, we’d been warned, by too many in our little underground medical network, of people faking injuries to hijack vehicles the minute people got out to help.

A sudden explosion, far to our left, had me nearly jumping out of my skin. Another series of explosions detonated in quick succession in a straight line from the first one. We couldn’t see what had triggered them. Then square holes started appearing in the sky above small buildings.

“Oh God, help us,” I whispered, my blood turning to ice in my veins.

At least two dozen Kryptid ships in stealth mode had gathered above the city. The gaping holes gave us a glimpse into the otherwise camouflaged ships. In seconds, like a swarm of locusts, hundreds of Kryptids jumped out of the ships. They dropped from at least thirty feet high, without parachutes, their three-segmented legs allowing them to land effortlessly atop the buildings. Running to the edge of the roof, they jumped down to the ground with the graceful ease and assurance of cats.

Andy sped up, taking a detour to avoid the area where the majority of them had disembarked. There were few vessels near us, most of them appearing over the area by Sacred Heart. My throat tightened at the thought of all the people there, some of whom I had cared for, and the fate that awaited them. For the first time, I hoped whoever stayed behind would help them go peacefully.

“I’m not sure we can make it back to the hospital,” Andy said, his voice strained with tension.

My heart sank. Guilt and sorrow ate at me, but as more Kryptids continued to drop from the sky, I had to face some harsh realities.

---