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The parking lot no longer bore much resemblance to its original purpose. The tarmac radiated an unreal heat even from this distance, the late evening breeze transformed into a languid desert wind. Instinct demanded a blast site, but there was none immediately apparent. The handful of cars clustered near the store were mostly untouched. A sweltering crescent had been drawn across the ground, its final point blistered and deformed, the whole line haphazard in shape as if a bored deity had tried to burn ants. Tufts of foliage had crackled and folded or was in the process of humbly complying with its fate, stray embers fortunately contained by the deep urban landscape, having lost whatever ludicrous strength the original force had once possessed, now hesitant to gnaw further at the mostly artificial landscape. Eerily unperturbed, moving with passing curiosity, some nameless character traced his path along the inside of the crescent, one hand's thumb half resting, half brushing against the underside of his nose. A dual set of sirens in the distance were reduced to silence, bathing the area in an alien calm.
A muted cry ended up as abruptly as it began, a flickering shadow against the backlit windows of the store, like someone deciding in afterthought that silence was the best means not to be discovered and ducking behind the low walls under the windows. They were certainly not the first to have that idea.
Keneh's subconsciousness had clasped her left hand against her lips at an awkward and useless angle, a confused brand of horror battling against an instinct - deemed useless at best and stupid at worst - to shout across and ask if the figure needed help. Groceries had beend discarded hastily but in a way that was almost embarassingly apologetic nearby, bag near-neatly folded against the wall, pizzas thawing in passive-aggressive disregard for the local apocalypse. Her right hand clung to her friend's left sleeve, pulling down as if gravity weren't doing them that favour already - and as if she needed unbroken, continual prompting to stay put.
A very different fire glinted further away, a golden, flickering sheen somewhere between the buildings, appearing silent and tame for the distance. A shadow of some forgotten bystander sprinted like a soundless gazelle into deeper shadows.
The apocalypse felt like it should be louder - like there should be gunshots, like there should be ceaselessly crying babies in discarded prams, like ambulances should be piling on top of each other trying to uselessly contain whatever had been pushed into motion. But for the time being, the world was held still with bated breath, trying to untangle its own surprise.
It's a car crash, her brain told her. It's a car crash and the vehicle must be one of those hoons that drag race and have nitro tanks or something a heck of a lot more flammable than nitro because that heat was beyond mere petrol. And then the car exploded without wreckage. Or flipped onto a roof like something out of a movie.
It was a car crash, or maybe a satellite crash or some other man-made object crash because the alternatives were not possible and she was not going to think on them because they couldn't be real. This was an ordinary disaster she had some hope of dealing with and that was that.
Instincts were busily disagreeing with her brain and implementing millennia old survival mechanisms constructed when the brain had no idea what was going on and left that sort of business to reflexes. Which was probably a good thing, because instincts were focused on being small and being quiet and stretching senses to look for the danger and figuring out if it was the right time to start running yet. And that seemed more productive than standing frozen and gibbering.
Crouching awkwardly wasn't making her knees protest like they should, so apparently they were siding with instinct and adrenaline while her brain rebooted and frantically sought nice calm logical scientific explanations that had to be there and preferably stayed put until the firefighters came because this was their area, right?
Keneh's knees were less agreeable. A moment later, she's tipping forward awkwardly, free hand pressing against the concrete wall, then pressing the top of her head against it, silently shifting her legs until the crouch morphed into a sit on her heels, marginally more acceptable. Near the end of the awkward motion, her fingers finally relented their useless grip on Delaney's sleeve, only to set against her nearest shoulder in some schizophrenic mixture of reassuring and desperate for protection.
Across the road, the glass from the store front bent, ballooning a few inches into the store before bursting as transparent shrapnel. The splintering briefly punctured the silence, overture for the nameless one's glance travelling along the luminous interior. A moment later, a scraping sound mingled with a soft, quivering sob, distant and insignificant enough to be imagined, shards of glass still lodged in the battered window's frame dislodging by the hand of some invisible force trailing in the wake of the disaffected man's gaze, visible at a distance mostly by the lazy motion of his head.
To Keneh, jolting at each spike of sound, he'd now unmistakably identified himself as the author of the carnage, extinguishing the trait of his humanity like one of the earlier flames that no longer danced across the tortured pavement. A creature - something that only coincidentally had a human form.
Bundling her panic and pushing it aside, distracted by the distressingly familiar ache of joints in a body that didn't know exercise to save itself, Keneh slid herself around, wincing soundlessly at the soft noise from the cloth of her trouser legs brushing across each other, breath laboured in frequency but painstakingly silent, hunching her back but sitting down with her back against the wall - or mostly the pillar that she and Delaney were both exceptionally close to. Her shoulders betrayed a slight shiver. She was still trying to figure out how to parse the sequence of events, with more primal parts of her psyche seeking a way to persevere against whatever this creature was and whatever its unreal powers were. Keywords bounced through her head - 'telekinesis', most prominently - that knotted themselves rudely into her gut as impossibilities. Amongst her fear, a self-loathing surfaced: How could she not figure out what was happening? Why was she reaching into a bag of vapid, childish notions like this?
In defiance of the situation, her mouth opened, ready to at least whisper something to Delaney - then closed again, for the moment still muted by a crushing fear of being discovered. An unrealistic fear - if the creature on the other side of the road was still endowed with human senses. Not to mention 'unrealistic' was rapidly losing its hold as an acceptable addition to her vocabulary. A hand freshly reached across to Delaney, stroking at her nearest shoulder in a 'it'll be okay, I promise - …am I right?' gesture.
A hand came up to silently clasp the one on her shoulder, comfort given and taken by the touch of something that was clearly human because that being may not be. Alien? Mutant? Some form of technology, it should be, but she hadn't seen any and her mind was wedged on X-Men and if they'd been caught up in some film as unwitting extras she was going to figure out who was responsible and then go find a lawyer willing to sue them for emotional trauma.
The existence of said trauma should be easy to prove and there was a crater in the street. It'd be an easy case.
But first they had to escape that being because there was no way 'fight' was going to work out for squishy untrained mortals like her and Keneh. Maybe there was a back door? They should sneak out a back door while it was busy being destructive elsewhere and surely a building or two in the way would be enough to cover them. A plan. That was a plan and it seemed practical and yet she wasn't moving, still frozen in place just in case it could sense their motion and turn into a cheetah and eat them or something freaky, she wasn't excluding anything right now.
At least it didn't seem to have noticed them. For something that set a section of parking lot on fire and punched through glass without touching it, it seemed remarkably unperturbed by the idea of someone showing up to riddle it with bullets.
The alarmed cry is audible even before the source become apparent - a slow, comically cautious approach of the creature toward the effortlessly destroyed storefront. Despair- and distance-garbled words fluttered in tatters through the silence, just as the shape of the creature passed into the building, increasingly eclipsed by its own shadow until a moment before it disappeared, it was nothing but a silhouette.
At the shapeless fragments of sound, Keneh's attention had jerked back across one shoulder and over the edge of the low wall, shoulders and spine twisted to catch a glimpse of what was happening now, a fresh bout of adrenaline spiking through her. Two seconds after the nightmare's disappeared from sight, an exhale of hers finally became audible, only to morph into a tense whisper: “…let's go.” Nevermind that the flames in the distance suggest this wasn't necessarily something they could run away from… but that was a problem they could face when it became pressing. Staying here was certainly not an option, regardless how dire their chances.
This was the part where they were supposed to summon a deep well of heroism and, if the movie was feeling kind, discover a hidden power. With or without some ability it was clearly the bit where they grabbed an impromptu weapon and charged over there to save the innocent bystander from the big bad monster as something triumphant and dramatic with lots of brass played in the background.
Screw that for a joke. She'd always thought the villains had better wardrobes anyway.
“Agreed, going is good,” Delaney whispered back as she forced her eyes away from the window and tried to work out the best way to do so. Stay low. Instincts were firm on that one. Stay low, move fast, and move away from the predator. “There's got to be a back door and a loading dock, right?” And hopefully someone would have sensibly fled first and left them open.
That seemed a step ahead of what Keneh had been thinking, registering to her as somewhere to hide for a while, thoughts muddied. Instinct was guiding her home in the simplest sequence, which for the time being meant leaving the far too obvious target that was her own car behind, and leaving through any regular way meant as an exit, then taking a road shielded from the sight of the affected parking lot in a mostly straight line for as long as it took for her gut to shut up about immediate danger. She gave Delaney a look of confusion devoid of any subtext of accusation - then her gaze skittered along their immediate surroundings, realising for an instant of panic that she didn't have much of a sense of direction in her shell-shocked state. As if to make up for the 'needlessly' childish fear, a guilty glance finds the discarded groceries… should they take those along? It both seemed like an irrelevant question and the single most important one. Then she's nodding, agreeing, finally parsing the words correctly, finally grasping the situation, immediately on all fours, crawling away from their cover as rapidly as possible, toward the nearest substitute, driven to near-silent action, struggling against the instinct to get up simply to be able to run faster.
✘ IN PROGRESS