A few minutes later, he learned the truth. He’d been hearing sporadic gunfire since they first entered Talas. It had become background noise. But as they neared the cordon and he angled them closer to the road to join the others fleeing, the staccato bursts increased in frequency and volume. Marcus couldn’t see what was happening until he came up over a rise and got his first good view of the cordon. It wasn’t the scene he’d hoped for.

The soldiers were shooting, but not to defend the refugees. They were firing right into them. Bodies littered the highway. The place was in chaos. People running for cover. Others pleading with the soldiers, approaching with their hands held high, only to be shot down where they stood. Some cut away from the road and tried desperately to climb through the barbed wire and over the barricades. Many hung caught in the barbed wire, macabre, bloody rag dolls. Marcus remembered the soldier in the tank in Talas. Why had he ever thought these ones would be any different? He knew. He’d thought it because he had to. Needed to. Wanted to.

Things whizzed through the air above them. A moment later he heard the machine-gun reports that trailed the bullets. He ducked, pulling Olena down. Soldiers along the barricade nearest them had opened fire. Pressed to the ground, exposed, Marcus cast around for someplace to hide. Back down the ravine, he thought. That would take them out of the line of sight.

He’d just started to try and explain this to Olena when a blast of tank fire stopped him. A tank? They’re shooting at us with a tank? What the fuck? The machine-gun barrage increased as more soldiers turned their guns toward them and other tanks maneuvered to fire. That’s when Marcus realized they weren’t aiming at him and Olena. They were shooting at something beyond them. As soon as he understood that, he felt it, that something enormous was approaching from the city. He heard the impact of its steps on the ground, crushing plants, snapping things. He felt tremors through his tail. Just like back in Talas, when …

He snapped around and looked back toward Talas. There it was, the harvesting monster he’d seen from the casino. It was huge, bigger than before, prehistoric in its dimensions, with more grotesquely long legs than before. Its body had swelled, widened, stretched taller and pocked with even more of those horrible cells. Above it all that sightless, earless, mouthless, amorphous thing that was the creature’s head swayed and wobbled in a strange slow motion. But the creature wasn’t slow. Those long legs moved it forward with deceptive speed. Forward, right toward Marcus and Olena.