Before the sky tore open, Rami believed in plans.
He believed in deadlines, blueprints, stress fractures that could be calculated, disasters that followed rules. He believed that if something was built correctly, it would stand. If something failed, there would be a reason.
On the morning the world began to end, Rami was late to work.
Traffic had slowed for no reason. Radios hissed with static. People leaned out of their cars, staring upward at nothing they could quite explain. Rami checked his phone—no alerts, no warnings—just a strange delay between taps, like the screen needed to think before obeying.
When the silence came, he felt it before he heard it.
The city's usual noise—engines, horns, voices—thinned, as if someone had turned the volume knob of reality slightly to the left. He rolled down his window.
That was when the first shadow passed overhead.
Not fast.
Not slow.
Heavy.
Rami looked up just in time to see something fall from the sky.
It struck three blocks away.
The sound reached him a second later—a deep, concussive thud that rattled his ribs and shattered nearby windows. Car alarms screamed. People poured out of vehicles, phones raised, mouths open.
Then the screaming started.
Something moved through the smoke.
Rami abandoned his car and ran.
Across the city, Layla was already recording.
She had been chasing smaller stories lately—protests, corruption, rumors of strange electromagnetic disturbances—but when her camera glitched and the skyline warped on her monitor, instinct took over.
She climbed.
By the time she reached the roof of her building, the sky was no longer pretending to be normal.
A dark line stretched across it, wide now, pulsing faintly like a wound that refused to close. Shapes dropped from it at irregular intervals, striking the city with lethal finality.
Layla zoomed in.
The thing crawling from the impact crater had too many limbs.
She didn't stop filming when it stood upright.
She didn't stop filming when it lunged into traffic and overturned a bus with casual force.
She only lowered the camera when people started dying too fast for her to count.
Rami ran until his lungs burned.
He turned a corner and nearly collided with a crowd fleeing the opposite direction. Someone shoved him. Someone fell. Someone didn't get back up.
A creature vaulted over a building and landed behind them.
It wasn't large—only the size of a truck—but its movements were violent and erratic, joints snapping into new angles as it bounded forward. People scattered. The thing grabbed a man and flung him aside like refuse, barely slowing.
Rami ducked into a parking structure.
Inside, darkness swallowed the screams.
The creature followed.
Rami hid beneath a car, heart hammering so loud he was sure it would give him away. He watched feet run past. He watched the monster's shadow slide along the concrete walls, warped and wrong.
Then the shadow paused.
Something deeper—heavier—passed far away.
The monster stiffened.
It made a sound—not fear exactly, but confusion—and fled back toward the light.
Rami didn't move for a long time.
Layla's broadcast went viral before she realized she was live.
Millions watched as monsters poured from the sky, as cities burned, as soldiers fired and died and fired again. Commentators argued. Governments denied. Religions fractured in real time.
Layla narrated through shaking breath.
"This isn't coordinated," she said. "They're not attacking targets. They're—" She paused as two creatures tore into each other below her, shrieking in alien rage. "They're fighting everything. Even themselves."
Behind her, sirens died mid-wail.
The ground trembled—not from impact, but from pressure.
Layla frowned.
"Something's changed," she whispered.
By nightfall, the city was unrecognizable.
Fires burned unchecked. Streets were clogged with abandoned cars and bodies. Monsters roamed freely, some nesting, some hunting, some simply wandering as if lost.
Rami emerged from hiding and stumbled through ruins that had been buildings hours earlier. He helped people when he could. He failed more often than he succeeded.
At an intersection choked with debris, he saw Layla for the first time—standing atop a wrecked news van, camera still rolling, face streaked with ash and tears.
Their eyes met.
They didn't speak.
They didn't need to.
Both of them felt it—the pressure building, the air thickening, the way every monster nearby suddenly went still.
Some fled.
Some dropped to the ground, limbs twitching.
The earth bowed again.
Layla slowly lowered her camera.
"What is that?" she asked, not to Rami, not to anyone.
In the distance, something vast shifted.
Not visible.
Not yet.
But unmistakably there.
And for the first time since the sky opened,
the monsters were no longer acting like predators.
They were acting like prey.
The pressure did not announce itself.
It simply arrived—a subtle wrongness in the air, like standing too close to a massive engine you couldn't see. Rami felt his teeth ache. His vision blurred at the edges, as if depth itself had begun to fail.
Around them, monsters reacted in fractured ways.
One bolted down the street, smashing through storefronts in blind panic. Another froze mid-step, its limbs locking as though some unseen hand had seized its spine. A third collapsed entirely, its body folding in on itself, flesh compressing until bone punched through skin.
Layla swallowed hard and lifted her camera again—then hesitated.
For the first time since this began, she wasn't sure she should be filming.
"This isn't like before," she murmured, voice barely audible over the crackle of distant fires. "This isn't them."
Rami nodded, though he didn't know why.
He felt like a child again—small, helpless, standing too close to something adults whispered about when they thought he was asleep.
The pressure passed.
Not gone.
Just… withdrawn.
Like a hand pulling back after testing how fragile something was.
The monsters that remained fled in scattered directions, their confidence shattered. The street fell quiet except for the fires and the distant, distant sound of something collapsing far away.
Rami exhaled for the first time in what felt like hours.
Around them, survivors emerged from hiding.
A woman sobbed over a body she already knew wouldn't move again. A man laughed hysterically, repeating the same sentence until someone slapped him to make him stop. Children clung to strangers because they had lost the concept of familiar faces.
Layla climbed down from the van.
She finally shut the camera off.
"I don't think people should see everything," she said softly.
Rami looked at her, surprised.
"Isn't that your job?"
She met his gaze, eyes hollow. "It was."
They moved together without discussing it, drawn toward the same instinct: away from open streets, toward places with walls, cover, something resembling safety. They found a half-collapsed office building where a handful of survivors had gathered, barricading shattered windows with desks and doors.
No one asked names.
No one asked where anyone was from.
Those questions belonged to a world that no longer existed.
As night deepened, the city changed.
The monsters that hunted by sight withdrew. New sounds replaced them—scraping, clicking, wet movement echoing through alleyways and underground spaces. Something howled far away, answered by nothing.
Power flickered once, twice, then died for good.
Darkness claimed the city.
In the building's lobby, survivors whispered theories.
Aliens.
Demons.
God.
Punishment.
Correction.
Layla sat against a pillar, knees pulled to her chest, staring at her hands. They shook even when she tried to still them.
"I keep thinking," she said quietly, "that this is just the first wave. That whatever came through the sky… it wasn't the real problem."
Rami didn't respond right away.
He was listening.
Not to the voices.
To the structure.
The building groaned softly, settling under stresses it had never been designed to bear. He imagined stress fractures spreading invisibly through concrete and steel, load paths failing one by one.
"This city's not going to last," he said finally. "Not like this."
Layla gave a bitter half-smile. "Neither are we."
Sometime after midnight, everyone slept in fragments.
Dreams were worse.
Rami dreamed of standing in a vast empty place, holding blueprints that kept dissolving in his hands. Every time he tried to draw a line, the paper bent away from him, refusing to stay flat.
Layla dreamed of filming something she could never bring into focus—movement too fast, too close, always just outside the frame. Every time she tried to adjust the lens, the camera screamed.
They woke at the same time.
The building trembled.
Not violently.
Deliberately.
Dust fell from the ceiling. Somewhere below, concrete cracked—not breaking, but compressing, as if pressed by an invisible weight.
The survivors stirred in panic.
Then the monsters outside reacted.
Screeches cut short. Heavy impacts followed by silence. The sounds of pursuit—running, smashing, tearing—ended abruptly, as though erased mid-action.
Rami stood, heart pounding.
"This isn't the sky thing," he said.
Layla nodded slowly. "No."
Whatever this was, it wasn't descending.
It was moving through.
The pressure returned—focused now, directional. People collapsed to their knees, gasping as if the air itself had thickened. Lights from fires outside bent strangely, stretching toward a point no one could see.
Then it passed.
Again, no explosion.
No visual confirmation.
Just aftermath.
They ventured outside at dawn.
The street had changed.
Buildings were intact—but wrong. Metal twisted inward, crushed without signs of impact. Monsters lay torn apart with impossible precision, bodies separated cleanly, as though reality itself had rejected them.
No scorch marks.
No footprints.
No sign of struggle.
Layla filmed again, hands steadier now—not because she was less afraid, but because fear had settled into something colder.
"What did this?" she whispered.
Rami stared at the destruction, at the way the city seemed to curve subtly toward an unseen center.
"I don't think it's a 'what,'" he said.
Far away, something moved too fast to follow.
Just a distortion.
A suggestion.
And for a brief, terrible moment, Rami had the overwhelming sense that whatever it was—
it was not new.
The sky had opened.
The monsters had come.
But this?
This felt like the world answering back.