Chapter 2: Monsters
Realising that he had spent too much time dawdling, Henrick takes the stairs and walks down to the ground floor. He exits the building and scoffs at the rats that keep falling to their deaths.
He makes his way to a crater surrounded by the bodies of dog sized rats and sees the rat leader writhing in agony. It stares at Henrick and bites at the air towards him in desperation. It’s wheezing breaths give him pause, and he kneels next to it. With a grunt, he pierces the rat leader’s already fractured skull with his fingers and gives it a quick death.
Immediately after the kill, a dark purple mist flows into Henrick’s body. His wounds visibly knit themselves together and he feels an intense energy flowing through his body like liquid lightning.
When the sensation ends, he stares at his hands and notes the faintly glowing veins leading to his heart. "That...was something." Unsure of what exactly happened, Henrick decides to stand up and see if he can replicate what happened with the other smaller rats.
As he approaches the hundreds of rat corpses, he feels a faint increase in his strength, though nothing compared to what he felt when he killed the rat leader.
Rolling his shoulder to check if he’s sufficiently healed, Henrick nods in satisfaction as he regains full motor control. He climbs on top of an abandoned van and looks around, only now noticing that the buildings are much further apart than they were before.
"Has the city gotten bigger? Nothing is where it’s supposed to be." Musing to himself he picks a direction and does his best to move quietly between alleys as he scouts for potential shelter. After a few minutes, he finds a relatively intact apartment building and enters.The walls are cracked and the ground uneven, but it seems stable and that’s enough.
Henrick sits against a wall and scowls at the inhuman screams echoing in the distance. He sighs as he realises that he lost the protein bars and water when he was attacked by the rat horde.
With a sorrowful sigh, Henrick hangs his head low as he looks to his bloodied hands. "Toots. I’m sorry." He clenches them into fists as images of his mutated companion being ripped in half flashes through his mind. Unknowingly, Henrick starts releasing sparks of electricity in his anguish. The faint rumbling of thunder echoes in the sky as his entire body trembles.
Suddenly, a scream cuts through his tumultuous thoughts and Henrick immediately looks out onto the street. There he sees a group of people, 3 adults and 2 children, running from an unseen creature. An inhuman scream rips through the air as a child is ripped from a man’s arms. "NOOOO!!" The man screams in horror, completely ignoring the fact that his arms were taken along with the child.
"The distance is approximately 200 meters, damn it." With a burst of speed, Henrick dashes towards the group. 150 meters. Another inhuman shriek, and a woman gets beheaded. 100 meters, another child is ripped in half. 50 meters, Henrick can see the lines of the final woman’s face as she is bisected from shoulder to hip.
Henrick roars as he slams, shoulder first, into a shadowy figure. The impact displaces the air and the human corpses as the creature is sent flying. Dark ichor sprays out as the creature skids across the floor and crashes through the wall of a building with a sickening CRACK.