text: The air inside the bunker is stale and dry. I sit back against the wall and slowly sip my water, yearning to feel the warm breeze of summer blow through my hair, or the warmth of the sun on my skin. Instead, I shiver in my frosty bunker, huddled under my thermal blanket. The makeshift calendar across from me glows in the faint candlelight and I sit down my canteen, gripping the chalk in my stiff fingers. What I wouldn’t give for a space heater right about now. I won’t say I haven’t been lucky, because I have. I have a bunker filled with survival supplies, a built in fireplace, years worth of MRE’s, as unappetizing as they are, and a whole childhood of survival training under my belt. When my father was discharged from the military and came back a disgraced and changed man, the townspeople mocked him behind his back, and pitied my mother and I. After all, who wouldn’t pity the ten year old girl of a crazed man who screamed about secret experiments the government was conducting, who drove hundreds of miles, dragging me and my mother along, to break into a government funded testing facility. Hell, even I started to mock him, leaving home at the ripe age of eighteen to go to college back east, and wouldn’t have ever come back, if it wasn’t for my fathers dying wish. His nurse called me seven months ago, telling me my father begged for me everyday to come home, to see him one last time. I came home, expecting his usual spiel, but this time he was calm, collected. He told me it was coming, that he could smell it in the air, feel it in his bones. What ‘it’ was, he never said. He just gave me a key, and explicit instructions to follow when it happened. He gripped my hand tightly in his and told me he was sorry, he didn’t say what for, and I didn’t ask. I think we both secretly knew, but our hearts wouldn’t let us speak about it. The next morning, I got the call. My father passed in his sleep, and I was needed to come claim the body and his personal affects. The days following feel like one big blur, until the morning I woke up to the bone rattling rumble of the ground beneath his house. It shook everything around me, and I stumbled through the house, my heart near to bursting from my chest, when I hear the screams. I watch with wide eyes as the ground tears open and these, things, these creatures crawl out, some flapping their leathery wings and taking flight, clutching people in their claws and soaring away, blood and limbs scattered around me. I remember feeling the crinkle of paper in my pocket, my father’s instructions, still wadded up from where I stuck them the night before, after once again reading them until my eyes hurt. I briefly remember grabbing my car keys, and running to my car. When I close my eyes, I can still see them, the creatures, as they filled the streets. Their bodies were twisted, taut, and lean, as if they’d been starved. Their skin was as brown as the ground that they crawled from, skin with jagged edges and sunken chests. Their teeth glinted in the sunlight, sharp and curved, almost as if they were designed to tear through human flesh and bone. A sound I’ve never heard before, a strangled shriek, a sound so sharp, and yet...sad. I remember feeling as if I could almost hear a cry of agony being ripped from their mouths, as they ate the people around them. Their legs were jutted at the knees, as if they were walking on their kneecaps instead of leg bones. Leathery wings sprouted from their skeletal backs and I don’t think I’ll ever get the sound of their fluttering skin out of my mind. I think what I remember most vividly is their faces, terrifying disfigured faces, thin and horrific, with red beady eyes, that seemed to see right into my very soul, their expressions still holding a faint trace of something, something almost human....