CHAPTER 300: APOCALYPSE ROMANCE 10

For a long, ridiculous second, the city held its breath like a gambler counting down to a roll. Then the lights hiccupped.

It began small—an optical tremor at the edge of the skyline that might have been a power surge if you’d asked some electrical engineer.

Fluorescents in the casino above them blinked twice and steadied. Outside, taxi radios sputtered with static.

Someone on the street screamed, and the sound threaded through the concrete like a needle.

Sasha felt the hair on her arms lift and knew, in the way bad things come, that the sky had changed its mind.

A tremor ran through the basement like a hand shaking the table.

Alvaro’s jaw tightened. Men at the doorway shifted into alert stances—trained reflexes overruling whatever disbelief they carried. The crates hummed with potential; their lids chimed once, a nervous metal laugh.

Above them, a distant bass note—not music, not manmade—rolled through the city. It was a sound that didn’t belong to any instrument: the earth groaning awake.

Outside, the first thing to fall was memory. Streetlights fizzed and died in long, theatrical ribbons. The casino’s neon bled into the night and then guttered.

Phones stopped displaying the time. For a moment everyone who looked up saw the same odd thing: the stars rearranging themselves, as if the sky were shuffling a deck.

Then the ground opened.

It didn’t open politely. A fissure split the avenue three blocks over, a black mouth widening with intent. A bus tipped slow as a falling tree and disgorged its passengers into a sprawl of limbs and luggage.

Sirens came late, as if the city’s infrastructure had been given only half a day’s notice. Cars abandoned their lanes and became confused islands.

The first buildings to go didn’t collapse so much as peel—a slow, impossible delamination where brick and glass slid apart like the pages of a falling book.

Monsters crawled from the fissures, and mosquitoes the size of fists buzzed through the air—their needle-like proboscises able to pierce human flesh with a single strike.

Sasha had been in a little prison of convenience—one of Alvaro’s "for security" rooms—when the city started unspooling.

It felt absurdly domestic at first: the stale cigarette breath of the air conditioner, the hum of a TV playing something nobody was watching. Then everything happened at once.

The door exploded inward with a sound like an iron chorus. Sasha didn’t have to look to know it was Alvaro; men in black shadowed him, but the smile that usually announced him was gone.

He grabbed her arm and hissed, "Let’s go."

"Let me guess. It’s happening," Sasha said, trying for calm and landing somewhere between defiant and sleep-deprived.

Alvaro didn’t answer. He moved like a man who had translated panic into choreography: short, efficient steps, elbows tucked, eyes scanning.

Men clustered around them—guard faces she’d learned to read in a glance—then the elevator, then the freight doors that led to the basement lot.

"They’re blocking the sky," one of the men muttered as they hustled past. "Choppers can’t get through—giant flying things, like shadows with wings."

"Maybe the sea," someone else suggested.

"Submersibles—there’s something in the water."

"Land’s the safest," Sasha said before she could stop herself, because she still had a writer’s habit of arguing with the obvious. "You got a bunker or are we improvising with concrete and prayer?"

Alvaro’s reply was a flat, practical thing: "I made one. You’re coming."

Sasha protested, half in anger, half because she wanted to keep control. He gave her a look that was soft around the edges only insofar as a knife can be called soft. Then he ran.

They didn’t run in a cinematic sprint—this was chaos logistics.

Alvaro shoved her into the armored car he’d had prepped "just in case," slamming the door before she could argue.

The engine coughed to life as if it too were trying to deny what it felt. Tires bit gravel. They burst out of the parking garage into a city that had gone feral.

The open space outside the hotel was a live thing: a riot of glass and ash and people behaving like animals that had just remembered how to be terrified.

Cars had been abandoned in every conceivable position—roof-up, nose-down, some sliced in half like fruit.

An elevated highway had buckled like a bent spine; a bus lay half over the edge, its passengers hanging limp like rag dolls.

Smoke stitched the sky into a new map. The air tasted of hot metal and ozone, with a bitter, chemical tang undercutting everything.

Above all of it the sky was wrong. Great, shifting shadows moved like clouds with teeth. Monsters—if you could call them that—drifted and beat their way across the upper atmosphere, blotting sun into a smudged, dim bowl.

One passed low enough that its wing shadow crawled across the hotel, and the temperature dropped as if a giant had breathed over the city.

People on the street looked up and either went silent or screamed; the sound ricocheted off buildings and made the air feel jagged.

The first wave of street-level horror arrived without warning. A living things’ bulk unfurled from a fissure like a black barnacle ripping free.

It walked on limbs that ended in wiry, oil-slick fingers. It smelled like iron and wet textile, and when it opened whatever passed for its mouth, the sound was wrong—an orchestra played through a knife.

The thing didn’t seek bodies out of hunger so much as out of curiosity; it prodded and measured, the way an appraiser touches a vase.

People scattered. Someone tried to drive a taxi through a swarm and hit a mound of rubble; the car folded in on itself like origami gone violent.

A vendor clutched his boxed fruit as if it were the only proof of his existence and ran until a falling shard of glass pinned him like an insect to the pavement.

The street became a hazard course of panic: flaming signs, overturned motorcycles, a streetlight toppling and cracking the sidewalk like brittle sugar.