“We’ve got to go! Peter’s got an exit. The swarm will be on us in minutes. They’re after us Immortals.” Alex said as he tugged Sean towards the door.

  Peter and the others were already above loading everyone into their cars and driving off. Peter had made preparations to get off world after the years of disappearances of Immortals.

  But the day had come. The creatures that Sean was sure must be the Endless Flesh were attacking around the globe.

  Sean and Alex went outside and quickly jumped into the back of the last van. The other vans were already driving away at high speed down the road away from the direction of the encroaching swarm. Most people were following the stay at home orders right now, but those who were fleeing clogged the streets.

  The vans filled with Immortals aggressively weaved through traffic, taking damage and being scraped as they speeded and scraped through any gaps between cars and jostled for dominance with the other drivers.

  Peter looked at Alex and Sean who both nodded to the man. Peter jumped into the back of the van and closed it behind him.

  “Clear! Let’s go!” Peter called out and his second in command started driving like the others, leaving them as the last to leave.

  Peter eyed Sean and Alex for a moment as they started moving.

  They all lurched to the side as the driver violently swerved to dodge someone who had crashed their car into a nearby building, leaving crumpled metal from the impact.

  They recovered and Sean went to look out the back windows alongside Peter and Alex.

  At the far end of the street they could see the procession of the ants splitting off to enter the buildings even as more kept moving towards them.

  “Fuck!”

  They all looked forward as the driver swore and swerved again. Farther down the street one of the vans had crashed to the side of the road. The covers on the storm drain covers all across the street were shaking and shifting. It only took a few seconds for the metal grates to lift and be tossed to the side and more ants to pour out of the tunnels and onto the street from all sides.

  Everyone started shouting in a panic as they tried to figure out what to do. Neither Peter or Alex had any combat experience. Sean wasn’t sure about Peter’s second in command, but probably not enough for this.

  “Stop near them,” Sean shouted over the argument as they started to get close to the crashed van. Even now five Immortals were climbing out of the totaled van and backing up away from the ants closing in on them from all sides, “We’ll take them here.”

  The argument stopped and Alex looked unsure. But they were now less than twenty feet from the crashed van and Immortals standing in a circle and looking panicked as the ants approached them.

  “Be ready for them,” Sean warned just as the driver suddenly braked to a stop. Sean flung open the back doors and jumped down onto the street, leaving his weapon behind in his rush. There were a few scattered palm sized ants scurrying around the road, but the majority that were boiling out of the storm drains were moving into the nearby buildings.

  Sean sprinted towards the five Immortals and waved to them. Their eyes lit up before moving to the ants all around them. After a moment's hesitation, the group of five Immortals ran towards Sean and the parked van, trying to hop and jump to not step on any of the ants crowded at their feet.

  Somehow they pulled it off and were nearly halfway to the van without stomping a single ant below them.

  Time seemed to slow as Sean watched a man in the back trip and fall to the ground. His eyes widened as the other four passed by Sean and climbed through the open doors. An ant nearby opened its jaws wide and latched onto the fallen Immortal’s calf. Its jaws tightened slightly as the man hit the ground as the ants beneath him scuttled away from the shadow of his falling body.

  The ant held position with an almost gentle grip on the fallen Immortal’s leg. Then as if a switch had been flipped its jaws tightened violently and it started shaking its head violently. An oddly citrusy scent filled the air and the other ants across the street all froze in one large wave as the scent spread quickly.

  Every insect on the street turned towards them as Sean reached down and started to help the Immortal to his feet. Then time sped back up and all the ants on the street surged towards Sean and the other Immortal all at once.

  Sean heaved the Immortal to his feet with all of his strength and started dragging the confused man bodily towards the open doors of the van barely a few feet away.

  Dozens and dozens of ants latched onto the man behind Sean as well as himself with their jaws and tried their very best to throw them from their feet and drag them away. The man started screaming and thrashing in pain as the ants bit into his body.

  But with a groan of effort, Sean kept moving and ignored the weight of the ants gripping him and the tugs from the creatures shaking their bodies in an effort to unbalance him while still dragging the thrashing man towards the open back doors to the van.

  There were only a few dozen of them latched onto the two of them right now, but there were hundreds more only seconds away and closing in. Sean ignored the ants lodged onto himself as he moved.

  Peter suddenly jumped out of the back of the van and helped Sean almost bodily toss the thrashing Immortal into the bed of the van. Sean quickly jumped up to follow, and ignored the shouting and crunching of ant carapace inside as Alex and the other Immortals packed inside worked to kill the ants on the flailing Immortal.

  The rest of the swarm was less than two seconds from skittering to their position and assaulting them from all sides. Peter climbed in after him as Sean shut his half of the two open back doors.

  “Go, go,go!” Peter shouted as he went to close his own half of the door behind him. The van lurched into motion and started jumping up and down as they ran over dozens of the tiny insect bodies at once as they went under their tires.

  Peter shouted as he was thrown back and his door went swinging back open wide with him clinging to it tightly. Sean leaned over, gripping his own closed half of the door tightly as he leaned out to Peter as the door started to swing out.

  The van swerved and the door swung inwards violently with Peter still clinging to it. Sean kept his grip in the open doorway and extended his free hand that Peter grabbed before the door bounced back outside. The sudden motion of the swinging door and Peter’s lunge for Sean’s hand made the man lose his grip on the door and fall to the ground. Sean anchored himself firmly as Peter’s legs dragged on the road as the van kept driving at full speed with the ant swarm coming in from all sides.

  Just like how Sean remembered from the Endless Flesh, despite their vehicle it seemed that the more time passed the more and more of the creatures there were.

  Another motion of the van threw Peter to the side as the two of them maintained a tight grip on each other. But Peter’s hand slipped slightly as Sean struggled to keep his arm steady as he gripped Peter.

  Sean looked up and met Peter’s eyes. His mind raced as Sean had a sudden moment of clarity that pierced through the frantic action. Why was he trying to save Peter? Peter was right on the edge of falling. All Sean would have to do was let go of him, and he’d be swallowed by the Endless Flesh forever. Left behind far too quickly for any of them able to save him in time.

  Sean loosened his grip slightly as the decision kept weighing on him.

  But Sean couldn’t change the future, he already knew that. Even if Sean betrayed him, then somehow Peter would end up escaping or being saved later on. It wasn’t worth it.

  Sean tightened his grip and heaved backwards to draw Peter’s arm slightly farther upwards. A series of hands grabbed Sean and his forearm from behind a moment later and added their strength to his own. After a few seconds of effort and swearing as the van kept jumping and swerving as it plowed through the ant swarm, a panting and disheveled Peter was finally dragged inside the vehicle and lay panting on the floor. Sean quickly shut the back doors with a firm thud even as the driver kept moving, her eyes laser focused as her foot was pressed to the floor and she moved the steering wheel with micromovements to precisely dodge around crashed cars and debris on the road besides the ants.

  Sean looked down at Peter. The man’s shoes were nearly gone and his pants were scraped open across their fronts from thigh to ankle. Peter looked shaken from the experience, even if his body had already healed his friction burns before he’d even fully finished being hauled into the van.

  “Thank you… Malketh,” Peter said, “That… was close.”

  “No problem,” Sean replied as the bumping stopped as the density of the swarm grew thinner. Sean looked out the window and saw that they were traveling fast enough to be reaching less dense areas of the swarm. Behind them a solid mass of ants covered every surface as they crawled towards them, sometimes even over each other in their efforts to reach them.

  But in front the road was clearer as they started going even faster now that the swarm wasn’t able to slow them as much.

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  “No problem at all,” Sean said, “How long is it to the launch site again?”

  “About thirty minutes,” Peter said as he recovered a bit of his composure and sat up from the floor, “The others should start warming it up even now. Shouldn’t be more than five or ten minutes to launch once we’re there.”

  Sean glanced behind them out the back window to the solid mass of ants charging after them.

  “We might not have a few minutes when they catch up.”

  Everyone followed Sean’s gaze and Alex gulped.

  “...We have heavy weapons,” Peter said after the brief silence, “The ones up front are trained to use them. We should be able to fight them off for that long.”

  — — —

  Sean reached behind him and was hurriedly passed another magazine that he slid into his heavy machine gun. The rocket was about to launch and Peter was standing just inside the crowded space and talking to someone over the radio.

  Sean and the others trained with firearms were standing at the top of the ramp down and firing into the swarms of bugs scittering after them towards the inside of the rocket.

  Originally they had tried to close the doors and raise the ramp entirely, but it had backfired. Instead of directly targeting the Immortals, the ants had crawled all over the rocket and started biting in an attempt to get inside, damaging it the longer they waited. And with all of the Immortals clustered inside, they hadn’t been able to fire outside at the swarm to clear them off.

  After some argument, Sean managed to convince the others to lower the ramp and open the doors, which did the trick. The swarm of ants soon noticed the opening and surged as one into the gap while ignoring the rest of the vessel.

  The fight was frantic as Sean fired his automatic weapon again to carve large swaths out of the ants swarming up the metallic ramp and into the rocket.

  Behind Sean he could hear shouting and screaming as the other Immortals fought the ants filling the rocket hand to hand in the tight space even without any real combat training. But Sean and the other fighters up front cleared out enough of them that the others were able to prevent themselves dragged away.

  Sean himself was kicking and elbowing ants that crawled all over his body and beneath his feet even as he kept fighting.

  He could see that the others were panicking and firing wild shots rather than remaining focused as they fought.

  The ground suddenly rumbled, and three hundred feet away dirt shot out of the ground as if from an explosion. Sean swatted away an ant that tried to crawl over his face and turned to look at the massive creature emerging from the hole.

  The insect was as large as a car. It was an ant, but its abdomen was swollen massively in proportion to its body as it turned towards the rocket.

  The metal floor beneath Sean’s feet kept rumbling and the ramp started retreating upwards as the doors above started to slowly close. The rocket started to lift off the ground and in a wave of flame all the ants covering the ground were roasted into a crisp.

  Everyone started to retreat backwards into the safety of the rocket as they ever so slowly started inching away from the ground as the rocket started climbing into the air. The remaining ants worked to unsteady their footing even as they kept moving across the shaking ramp towards safety. Sean was the farthest out from taking the lead in beating back the ants during the battle.

  The car sized ant screeched as the flames washed over it, but it was far enough way that it was only lightly burnt rather than killed. After recovering from the pain, the ant reared up so only its rear legs were touching the ground. It opened its mandibles wide and Sean widened his eyes as he realized what it was about to do. He turned around and started sprint, but he was too late.

  A massive glob of searing acid washed over Sean as the massive ant sprayed its acidic payload directly into Sean’s back and the base of the retracting ramp.

  It ate through Sean’s muscles and despite his best efforts his body stiffened and collapsed as the muscles within his back and torso keeping him up were no longer there as the acid ate through them.

  Sean landed face first on the retracting ramp and before he could recover with his newly healed muscles, the shaking of the lifting rocket shook him off the ledge and sent him flying in the open air.

  Sean had only an instant to mentally curse as he fell through the air. Looking up, he saw that the acid had eaten through a large segment of the retreating ramp and halted the retraction mechanism. But luckily the main door was still closing and everyone else seemed to have made it inside. Sean caught a single instant of Peter standing inside and looking down at the falling Sean through the crowd of other Immortals running by him to get to safety farther inside.

  Then the moment passed and Sean fell far enough that he was beneath the rocket’s engines.

  His body was completely crisped and regenerated so much that he barely even felt when he finished his fifty foot fall and slammed directly into the ground.

  The rocket kept climbing, a bright ball of fire directly above Sean that slowly grew smaller as he stood to his feet and dumbly looked up at it flying away and leaving him behind.

  He was only woken up from his shock by a sharp pinch at his ankle. Sean looked down and saw a living ant had latched itself onto him by climbing over the crisped corpses of its fellows.

  Despite the moment of peace, Sean was still surrounded by the Endless Flesh. Only this time he had nothing but his body to fight them off. No exosuits, no weapons, nothing. Even escape was impossible. Sean could see more of them crawling out of holes of the ground as far as he could see.

  Sean crushed the first ant, and then the next hundred with his strength. Even managed to defeat one of the car sized ones after some effort. He fought well. But there were just too many of them. And so despite his best efforts he was dragged underground and through the tunnel networks, even his skill not letting him escape. Especially when the car sized variants stood at the entrance of the large tunnels and would shove him back violently with their jaws whenever he broke free from the smaller ones and made a run for it.

  Eventually after who knows how long Sean was far underground in complete inky blackness as he fought the current of ants dragging him ever downwards. He was thrown into a pit of some sort and felt tiny ants barely the size of his pinky crawling all over him and taking bites out of him before walking off with their prize.

  He rolled around in an effort to crush them, but their small bodies resisted his weight as they kept feasting on him with their raw numbers and take away little bits of his flesh for the larger swarm.

  Sean tried to climb up the sides of the pit several times, but every time he did a hard blow of carapace hit him and he went flying back down into the pit filled with ravenous tiny ants.

  There was no escape…

  Sean just lay there in the darkness motionless after struggling for who knows how long to escape. It was useless, Sean doubted all his efforts to kill the little ants around him had even slowed down the Endless Flesh’s progress even a little bit. They could recycle the flesh of their dead near perfectly, all Sean was doing was wasting a little bit of their time as they dragged off the bodies of the dead to be recycled.

  Sean lay there and thought about what to do. The pain didn’t bother him as the ants took little chunks of his flesh away as he remained motionless. Feeding the food to the creatures at the center of the nest who could make use of it.

  Sean finally concluded after a long while that there was nothing to be done. He was fully trapped with no hope for escape.

  So he lay there and closed his eyes and tried to breath long and steady breaths. Time to practice his meditation again. It seemed like he would be here for a long time.

  Everything passed in a blur around him. The loose dirt beneath him slowly transitioned in warm and wet flesh pulsing beneath him. The small ants slowly disappeared and a multitude of other creatures took turns harvesting his flesh. Some only tried for a short time while others did so for a long time before they disappeared again and were replaced by another insect of a different shape or form. Sean could identify them by the sounds they made and the displacement of air from their movements to gain a rough sense of the creature harvesting his flesh.

  It all passed in a blur around Sean as he remained in the darkness with only minimal input to his other senses to distract him.

  Sean now understood what the others had meant about everything being the same, making it fade into the background. The Endless Flesh kept feasting on him as his body regenerated. But after enough time of discomfort even with him able to ignore the pain, he barely noticed it. Not until the species of the harvester changed again and the pattern of sensations across his body changed again.

  Then, all of a sudden it all stopped.

  Sean opened his eyes as all sound, all sensation, all of it froze. Standing above him at the top of the pit was the Shadow as the rest of the world was frozen around it. Its glowing orange eyes blazed like beacons as it stared down at him from above.

  Everything should have been pitch black. Sean could have sworn that it still was. But somehow his eyes could still make out the dark silhouette of the Shadow. As if the Shadow was a darker void than even the pure darkness of the tunnels could ever be.

  “The last journey of the three.

  “The last connection known.

  “You’ve seen it yourself.

  “How there were plans unknown.

  “But tell your tale, and convince Emily enough,

  “And another may listen.

  “How Peter Rose…

  “Always had another mission.

  “Now back to your time you go.

  “It has only been a moment, but your lover has missed you.”

  The world fuzzed and distorted around Sean and the darkness around him suddenly changed into the deeper blackness of the Shadow’s body. The bright orange eyes lingered only for another instant before fading away like a dying candle flame before disappearing entirely.

  And then with a wave of new sensation he appeared again in a confined space. He was lying belly down with his arms extended over his head and material all around his body. He squirmed a bit and felt something like glass break beneath his feet.

  A pair of hands grabbed his ankles and started to drag him backwards as Sean worked to worm out of the space backwards as he felt moving air tickle his bare feet.

  It took over thirty minutes before he finally managed to escape with the assistance of the pair of hands outside helping him.

  He came free and fell back onto a ground filled with glass and closed his eyes at the sudden rush of light entering his eyes all at once.

  “Sean? Sean, what happened? What did you see?” Lira’s worried voice said from above him. He fully opened his eyes and saw her leaning over him with a lock of her hair dangling down as she leaned over him looking over his whole body as if to make sure that he was still there.

  “I’m fine. Fine, Lira. Sean…” he said, letting the word roll around his mouth, “It’s been a while since somebody’s called me that.”

  He sat up and looked towards the hole he’d just crawled out of. What he had thought was glass was actually the black screen of the television. His body had regenerated inside of the wall with the flats of his feet just inside the television.

  “Sean? Are you okay? Really?” Lira asked again as she helped him to his feet and started brushing the half dissolved glass shards that were clinging to his back. He hadn’t even noticed their sharp edges entering his skin before his regeneration got rid of them.

  “Yes,” Sean said as he refocused on the current moment and gripped Lira by the shoulders lightly, “I am now that I’m back. Let me tell you everything. I’ve missed you.”

  Lira blushed slightly, but also smiled and nodded. She handed him a clothing band that he put on to cover his body again.

  “You’re lucky I only had a few seconds to start panicking,” Lira said as she took him by the hand and sat next to him on the couch, “Or things might have gotten really bad. What happened? How long were you gone?”

  And so Sean told his, or more accurately, Malketh’s, story from start to finish as Lira listened to him intently.