EMERGENCY BROADCAST: EVACUATE SAN BETRAL

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Warsman

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#1  Edited By Warsman
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San Betral, California.

Bustling metropolis of roughly a quarter of a million.

Families eager to start their day would wake up to identical television broadcasts on every channel. The radios were clogged with the same blaring message. Even trucks with intercom systems on the cabs were roaring through the streets, channeling some sort of reaction for the populace to grasp onto. Something. Anything. People started to understand. Some primal urge woke up inside. Rushing back into their houses for personal belongings of extraordinary value, car keys, canned food, bottled water...just...please...

RUN.

---

The explosions were distant at first. An entire section of the business sector, closed off. Civilians were ordered to evacuate by any means possible. The dockyards were still open, and ferries barely managed to contain the panicked swarms leaping to apparent safety. Some missed and dove into the water. Everything was going to hell, and fast. The National Guard was only a fleeting sense of security. They were not armed defenders of the peace.

They were meat shields.

Distractions of the flesh.

And, little more than a mile away from any given evacuation center, they were being ripped apart. One. By. One.

---

"For God's sake, sarge, order a retreat!"

"Nothing doing, private. We're here to show the metahumans that we can defend ourselves. Load the new anti-mutant shells, I want to see this f*cker punch tanks when he's weaker than a preschooler,"

It felt like tear gas at first, just swimming through eye irritants and toxic inhalants. Something felt weird about it, though. Stumbling through the mist, this 'metahuman threat' wandered to the nearest tank he could groggily lean into. He was still breathing. Sergeant Ross stepped out of the armored vehicle and removed a pistol from his jacket before his nearby lieutenant could advise him otherwise. He pressed the barrel against the metahuman's skull until the puffy edges of inflamed tissue almost burst open.

"Just another one of you monsters put down, like the dogs you are,"

Inherent racism or not, Ross plugged the man's skull without remorse, but with a slight hint of confusion.

There was no blood. No gore. Just the snap of brittle bone, and then silence. A silence that, against Ross's better wishes, was broken. The footsteps came at first. One after another, jauntily, no breakage in the pace. A perfect rhythm, uninterrupted by any injuries or pains. Ross fired off a few more shots, desperately thinking that there was more than one. The black shape within the mist, however, did not even register the .45-caliber rounds as anything more than further evidence of humanity's laughable resistance against death.

It kept moving, until it was right in Ross's face, testing the tensions of his thick neck with a monstrous hand. A fresh coat of red drenched the creature's body. As the gas cleared away, slowly at first, Ross soon wished that it did not leave at all. The image he had struggled with ever since he got here resurfaced, a pathway completely covered in death. A road of corpses, where the blood rose to knee-level and did not seem to drain away.

Throwing Ross aside, the creature moved on towards the rest of his platoon. Ross's husky form crashed through a window, and he rolled across yet more bodies, horrified to the point of not even moving. The sergeant had no more bullets in his gun. He knew that he was being preserved, like food. That didn't stop him from trying to shoot himself in the head.

The screams of his platoon-mates were enough to make him pull the trigger more than once, but to no avail.

Suddenly, the entire street shifted. An earthquake? On top of all of this? No.

Whatever that creature was, it was strong enough to shift the entire city sideways. If he could not capture the evacuees, he could sure as hell sink them. And Ross, just a sergeant in the National Guard, took it upon himself to at least try where countless others have failed. He picked himself up, and limped back out of the busted window. With a defiant sling of his empty gun, he glared at the metahuman straight in the pits of his empty eye sockets, simply a void where a face would otherwise be.

Without realizing it, he provoked the Fleshcrawl, and fell down, screaming in untold agony as his flesh sizzled under his skin, blood boiling and frying his own bones. Nothing could save San Betral.

Nothing normal.

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UnrealHeroine

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