The floorboards tasted of lemon polish and iron.
Elara lay on her side, her cheek pressed against the wood, watching a small bead of her own blood trek across the grain like a crimson river on a map. Her left eye was swollen shut, throbbing with a dull, heavy rhythm that matched her heartbeat. Her lip was split, a flap of skin hanging loose.
"Get up," her father hissed.
He didn't sound like a father. He sounded like a machine that had overheated. He was standing over her, his knuckles split and raw from where they had connected with her jaw. His chest heaved, sweat staining the armpits of his dress shirt.
"I said, get up, you little monster."
Elara pushed herself up on trembling arms. Her ribs screamed-a sharp, jagged lightning bolt of pain that wrapped around her torso. She didn't cry out. She just cataloged it. Rib four and five. Fractured, maybe. Breathing is shallow.
She looked at him. She wasn't angry. She was just confused.
"You hurt me," she stated, her voice thick with blood. "You're breaking me. Like I broke the butterfly."
"Don't you dare compare me to you!" He kicked her in the stomach. It wasn't a precision strike; it was a sloppy, desperate punt. Elara slid backward, her head cracking against the baseboard. "I am trying to fix you! You humiliated us! The police, Elara? The police?"
He paced the room, grabbing a vase from the mantle and hurling it at the wall. It shattered, shards of porcelain raining down like snow.
"They looked at us like we raised a serial killer," he spat. "Do you know what that does to my reputation? To your mother's face at church?"
Elara looked past his legs to the armchair in the corner. Her mother was sitting there, stiff as a mannequin. Her hands were folded perfectly in her lap, her knuckles white. She was watching, but her eyes were flat. There was no pity in them. There was only a cold, rotted disgust, like she was looking at a piece of meat that had been left out in the sun too long.
Elara crawled slightly toward her. "Mommy?" she whispered. The word bubbled through the blood in her mouth.
Her mother didn't flinch. She didn't reach out. She smoothed a wrinkle in her skirt. "He's right, Elara," she said softly. "You deserve this. You have to learn. Normal girls don't kill things."
Elara blinked. The logic didn't fit. Normal girls don't kill things. But Daddy is killing me. Does that mean Daddy isn't a normal girl?
"I just wanted to see inside," Elara murmured.
"And now you're going to stay inside," her father growled.
He grabbed her by the collar of her dress, lifting her until her toes dragged on the carpet. He hauled her to the basement door, threw it open, and tossed her into the darkness.
Elara tumbled down the wooden stairs. She didn't try to catch herself. She rolled, her body hitting the concrete floor with a wet thud.
The door slammed shut above her. The lock clicked. Then, the deadbolt slid home.
Time in the basement was measured in hunger pangs.
It might have been days. It might have been weeks. The darkness was absolute, broken only by the thin strip of light under the door at the top of the stairs.
They fed her like a dog. Once a day, the door would open, and a plastic bowl would slide down the stairs, followed by a bottle of water. Sometimes it was stale bread. Sometimes it was cold leftovers. Elara ate it all. She needed the fuel. Her body was busy knitting her ribs back together, and that required energy.
She tried to be good. She wanted to show them she understood the lesson.
In the dark, she found a family of spiders in the corner. Her instinct was to pull their legs off, to see how they walked on three, then two, then none. But she stopped herself. Daddy says no breaking.
Instead, she spent hours in the pitch black, carefully catching flies that buzzed near the drain pipe. She didn't kill them. She pulled the spiders' webs apart and stuck the flies to the wall with her own saliva and grime, creating a perfect geometric line.
"Look," she practiced whispering to the darkness. "I organized them. I made them orderly."
She arranged the dust bunnies into piles by size. She licked her own blood off the floor so it wouldn't be messy. She thought, When they open the door, they will see how clean I am. They will see I am fixed.
But when the door finally opened, it wasn't for inspection.
It was late. She could tell by the heavy silence of the house above. The door flew open, banging against the wall. Her father stood silhouetted in the light, swaying. The smell of whiskey wafted down the stairs, thick and pungent.
He didn't slide a bowl down. He walked down, heavy-footed, the stairs creaking under his weight.
He was holding the carving knife from the kitchen. The long one, used for Thanksgiving turkey. The steel glinted in the weak light of the hallway bulb.
Elara stood up. She wiped her hands on her dirty dress. "Daddy? I made a line with the flies. It's very straight."
He reached the bottom step. He was crying. Ugly, wet sobs that shook his whole body. "I can't do it anymore," he slurped. "I can't wait for you to kill someone, Elara. I can't live waiting for the call."
He lunged.
He grabbed her hair, twisting it around his fist, yanking her head back. The blade came up, hovering near her throat. "It's better this way," he wept. "It's a mercy. I'm sending you to God. Maybe He can fix you."
Elara looked at the knife. She saw her reflection in the steel. Her eyes were huge, dark voids. She wasn't scared of the knife. She was just calculating the angle. If he pushes, it goes into the jugular. That bleeds fast.
"Mommy knows?" Elara asked.
"Mommy gave me the knife," he sobbed.
He tightened his grip. The metal touched her skin, cold and sharp. A bead of blood welled up.
BOOM.
The world turned sideways.
It wasn't a sound; it was a concussion. The ground didn't just shake; it heaved, like a sleeping giant tossing in a nightmare. The concrete floor of the basement rippled.
Elara and her father were thrown apart. He slammed into the washing machine; Elara skidded across the floor, hitting the wall. Dust and mortar rained down from the ceiling. The single lightbulb above the stairs popped, showering them in sparks before dying out.
"What..." Her father scrambled up, the knife forgotten on the floor. "What the hell was that?"
"Earthquake?" Elara whispered, tasting concrete dust.
Another boom. Closer this time. The sound of the house groaning, wood snapping like dry twigs.
Her father stumbled up the stairs, shouting. "Martha! Martha, are you okay?"
Elara followed him, curious. The knife lay on the floor, but she didn't pick it up. The noise outside was more interesting.
They burst into the kitchen. Her mother was standing by the sink, clutching the counter, her face pale. "John? The windows... look at the sky!"
Her father ran to her, grabbing her shoulders. "It's a gas main. It has to be a gas main."
The air outside began to hum. It was a low, vibrating frequency that rattled Elara's teeth. The kitchen window, which looked out onto the backyard, suddenly glowed with an intense, sickly violet light.
"Get down!" her father screamed.
He didn't get down. He stood in front of her mother, shielding her.
Then, the window vanished.
It didn't shatter; it was obliterated. A projectile-a long, jagged spike of black, obsidian-like crystal the size of a spear-shot through the glass. It was moving so fast it broke the sound barrier with a crack like a whip.
It hit her father first.
It entered through his forehead, right between his weeping eyes. It didn't stop. It punched through the back of his skull, spraying a mist of pink brain matter and bone shards, and continued instantly into her mother's face, who was standing directly behind him.
Squelch-CRACK.
The sound was wet, heavy, and final.
The force of the impact exploded their heads. It wasn't like the movies. There were no last words. There was just the sudden, violent erasure of everything they were. The black spike slammed into the refrigerator behind them, pinning the headless corpses of her parents together in a gruesome, standing embrace.
Their bodies twitched-once, twice-nerves firing blindly. Then, they slumped, their weight held up only by the alien spike skewering their necks. Blood didn't flow; it gushed, painting the white kitchen cabinets, the linoleum, and Elara's face in a hot, sticky torrent.
Elara stood five feet away. She blinked, wiping a piece of her father's skull from her cheek.
The room was silent, save for the dripping sound. Drip. Drip. Drip.
"Are you okay?" Elara asked.
The headless bodies didn't answer.
Elara tilted her head. "I guess not."
She felt no grief. No panic. No sorrow. She felt... lighter. The yelling had stopped. The judgment had stopped. The machine that hurt her was broken.
She walked past the bodies, her bare feet squelching in the pooling blood. She didn't look away. She noted the anatomy-the exposed vertebrae, the severed arteries pumping the last of the heart's rhythm. It was fascinating.
She walked to the hole where the window used to be.
The suburbs were gone.
In the sky, a tear in the fabric of reality stretched for miles-a jagged, pulsating wound of neon purple and bruised black. It swirled like a drain, and from it, they were falling.
Monsters.
They weren't animals. They were nightmares given flesh.
Elara watched as a creature the size of a school bus, with six legs made of chitinous armor and a mouth full of spinning gears, landed on the Henderson's house across the street. The house collapsed like a cardboard box.
Screams erupted-high, terrified shrieks that were cut short as the creature's mandibles snapped shut.
To the left, lanky, humanoid shadows with no faces and fingers like butcher knives were sprinting down the sidewalk. She watched one tackle the mailman. It didn't bite him; it grabbed his arms and legs and pulled.
Riiiiiip.
The man came apart like wet paper. His torso hit the pavement, entrails spilling out in a steaming heap, while the creature chittered a sound that sounded like radio static.
The street was a slaughterhouse. Cars were overturned, burning. People were running, but the monsters were faster. They were hunters, and humanity was slow, soft prey.
Elara leaned her elbows on the windowsill, ignoring the glass shards digging into her skin. The wind blowing in smelled of sulfur and copper. It smelled like the ant. It smelled like the moth.
It smelled like home.
For the first time in her life, the chaos inside her head matched the chaos outside. She wasn't the monster anymore. She was just... part of the ecosystem.
Elara looked back at her parents, pinned to the fridge, bleeding out onto the linoleum. Then she looked back at the apocalypse consuming her neighborhood.
A slow, genuine smile spread across her blood-splattered face.
"Finally," she whispered. "Everything is broken."