Kieran ran.
The city had become a graveyard, buildings reduced to skeletal remains, their steel guts twisted and smoldering. Cars lay overturned, their occupants burned into blackened husks. The air was thick with the smell of cooked meat, and every step he took crunched over something he refused to identify.
But worse than the devastation was the silence.
The screams were gone.
Something about that absence clawed at his sanity. He knew there had been people running, crying, begging—just minutes ago, the streets had been filled with desperate souls trying to escape the wrath of the angels.
Now, it was just him.
And them.
The angels stood in the distance, scattered through the ruins like statues. Some hovered inches above the ground, their wings spread but motionless. Others crouched over the bodies of the dead, their fingers brushing over cooling skin, as if studying the way life had been snuffed out.
Then, there were the ones that smiled.
They were different.
Kieran didn't know how he sensed it, but the ones who grinned were the worst. Their lips curled impossibly wide, stretching beyond human limits, teeth too white, too sharp. They didn't move like the others. They twitched, jerked, as though they weren't meant to be inside the skin they wore.
And they were looking for something.
Looking for him.
Kieran ducked into the remains of a convenience store, pressing himself against a shattered freezer. His breath came in sharp, shallow gasps. He needed to think. He needed a weapon.
He needed to wake up from this nightmare.
A shuffle of footsteps outside.
Kieran stilled.
Through the broken window, he saw one of the smiling angels standing in the middle of the street. Its body was thin, too thin, its limbs elongated just enough to be wrong. Its wings weren't gold or silver like the others—it had no wings at all.
Just that awful, splitting grin.
Kieran didn't dare breathe.
The angel tilted its head, the movement sharp and unnatural, like something mimicking human curiosity. It sniffed the air.
And then, it spoke.
Not in the ancient, hollow voices of the others.
No.
This was something worse.
Because it spoke in his voice.
"Where are you going, Kieran?"
His stomach twisted into ice.
"You can't hide from us."
The thing took a slow step forward.
"You were chosen."
Another step.
"Let me show you what you really are."
Kieran's body screamed for him to move.
But the moment he shifted, it turned its head directly to him.
The smile widened.
And then—it moved.
Too fast.
A blur of bone and stretched skin, racing toward him in a grotesque, twitching sprint. Its limbs bent the wrong way as it barreled forward, slamming into the broken window, sending shards of glass into the air.
Kieran ran.
He crashed through the back door of the store, his lungs burning, feet slipping on debris. Behind him, he heard the thing crawling through the shattered window, its laughter warping into something wet and bubbling.
"You were always meant to be one of us."
Kieran didn't know where he was going.
He just knew if it caught him—if it touched him—he wouldn't be Kieran anymore.
He would be smiling too.