“Leave them alone! What did any of them ever do to you?” Emily demanded from where she’d been placed in a chair with her bindings holding her tightly in place. The terrorists stood around her on all sides sneering at her, especially the woman who appeared to be their leader.

  They were in the main lobby of the living exhibits building. The bears and wolves were staring at them curiously from behind the shields of their enclosures towards the commotion going on in front of Emily.

  Across from her her family and the staff were on their knees with their hands on their heads and lined up, with a large group of over thirty terrorists standing behind them and pointing the weapons at the back of their heads. All forty of the staff and her family were dear to her. She’d known almost all of them ever since they were children, if not helped raise them herself. Despite how long it had been and how many of them she’d known over the years, she always tried to do her best to give her all to them each time…

  “Give us the codes to your vaults. Keys, passwords, everything. I want it all,” the terrorist woman demanded, although Emily detected a strange sense of disinterest from her as she said so.

  “Sure, sure, I’ll give it all,” Emily agreed quickly after a quick glance back at her family in their leaf green museum uniforms. Reese looked like she was about to cry as she sat there with her lip trembling.

  Their eyes met for a moment and Emily saw the fear in the girl’s eyes.

  “Whatever you want,” Emily said again as she looked away as the terrorist moved again, “I’ll tell you the codes.”

  The female leader waved at her subordinate and the man came forward with a device and started accessing various accounts. Emily told him whatever he wanted to know as he drained all of her massive wealth to their accounts. The tension in the room subsided a bit as Emily complied with their demands. Besides the museum and her lab could run itself for a long time, Emily didn’t have access to their coffers directly, so she would be fine even if all her frankly massive personal fortune was stolen from her.

  It only took them ten minutes to transfer most of her wealth out of her personal accounts and into the ones that the terrorists controlled. Accounts that were likely dummy accounts that would be drained away and hidden after they were done here.

  But they were done, and Emilly waited. She’d given them what they wanted. They should be rushing to escape now that they had their money, right?

  “Now the museum funds,” the woman said with disinterest, “I bet there’s even more money squirreled up in this place. Transfer those too.”

  “I… I can’t,” Emily stammered and the tension in the room ratcheted up again, “We have a manager, I don’t have access. I haven’t for centuries.”

  “I don’t believe it,” the woman said flatly, “What did I say I would do if you lied to me. No more warnings. Kill the one on the left.”

  Before Emily could respond there was a gunshot and the old man in his leaf uniform went falling to the ground, shot in the back of the head.

  “No! Austin!” Emily screamed as she thrashed in her bonds on the chair, “You bitch! I don’t have access! Why, why did you do that…”

  “Lies again,” the terrorist said mercilessly, “Shoot the next one.”

  Emily could only feel her rising panic and anger wash over her as Rialla was shot dead next. How could people be so cruel? Why were they like this? Why was her family being stolen from her again like this?

  Emily sat there, the panic and anger rising in massive waves over her and for some reason it kept building more and more without washing away on its own.

  She felt herself connecting to something. Something that she’d used before in her desperation on Earth. When the infected men had attacked her on Earth in the plagued city. When those men had broken into their apartment and been hurting her brother Sean. She had to use it again, to save her family that she’d spent so long caring for.

  “The longer you don’t answer me, the more of them die.” the female terrorist said with a cruel smile as she watched Emily panic and thrash in her chair, completely unable to escape her bindings.

  “Stop them,” Emily whispered to herself, “Please, somebody has to save them. Anybody. Please… Stop them… Please…”

  Another gunshot, and another member of her family was dead. Reese. Oh, why Reese? She’d been so excited about joining the family business. She’d loved showing that Immortal around, the one who’s name kept seeming to slip from her mind.

  The terrorists were going down the line and killing them one by one. Just to be cruel, to hurt her. Emily could see it in the female leader’s eyes that she didn’t care about the money. She was doing this on purpose.

  “Why are you doing this? Why did they have to die? Just stop this… Let them go.” Emily pleaded as the terrorist moved down to the line and put his gun to the back of the head of the next person.

  “Give us the codes,” the leader said mercilessly, “The more you lie the more you lose. Next!”

  Gunshot and Elena went tumbling to the ground dead. Emily took a shaky breath and felt the warbling connection in her, that power that she had used before. She looked up and saw that the brown bear in the nearby enclosure was staring at her with unnatural focus.

  She wasn’t sure what came over her, but she felt a connection with the animal as she met its eyes.

  “Stop them, please!” Emily pleaded to the bear as her gaze locked with it, “You have to protect them. Somebody has to save them! Somebody… Anybody…”

  “Nonsense won’t save you,” the terrorist insisted, “Next! Next! Next!”

  Emily’s head whipped around and she saw that all of the animals in their enclosures were pressed against their shields and staring intently at her as one.

  Emily’s voice started warbling slightly and the evil woman’s sadistic smirk faded slightly at the sudden shift.

  “SaVe tHem!” Emily said, “You hAve to saVe theM, tHey’re all I hAve leFt.”

  “N- Next!” the terrorist stammered before controlling her expression and gesturing to the executioner who carried out his work.

  Emily turned her tear stained face over to the evil woman, causing her to flinch, “I hate you!” Emily screamed, “I wish that you would all just GUIDE!”

  Emily twitched and her eyes rolled back into her head as she felt an invisible wave of something carry across the connection she now felt within herself. And like that everything suddenly went dark around her and just like the two times before all memory of what came next washed away from her mind.

  — — —

  Sean finally managed to pull himself through the heavy shield blocking his path into the building after finding the entrance door. He was forced to injure his hands to push them halfway through the shield. The shield twisted and fluctuated around Sean’s endlessly regenerating hand, and with a second hand plunged into the barrier it formed a flickering spot of weakness where the shield struggled to keep reforming.

  He carefully put the machine gun strap over his shoulder and carefully crawled through the weak zone created by his hands that was less than three feet by three feet around. He had to contort himself slightly to fit through and his clothes became singed and ragged as he finally managed to push himself all the way through and out to the other side.

  His heart dropped as he heard the sound of a gunshot and shouting as soon as he made it to the front door.

  He raised his machine gun and flung open the unlocked front door to the living exhibit building and rushed inside, throwing all caution to the wind as his mind ran through all the horrible scenarios that could be happening right now.

  Sean emerged into the main lobby to see Emily glaring daggers at the terrorist leader. There were seven bodies sprawled over the ground in a line in front of her and thirty three more crying and quivering staff in a line next to her.

  Emily seemed to be having a seizure of sort and was thrashing with her eyes phasing from intense focus to staring at nothing.

  “I wish you would just all ” Emily screamed at the female terrorist before throwing her head back and screaming at the top of her lungs and spasming uncontrollably.

  All around them the animals in their enclosures joined in and in a thunderous cacophony started roaring and screeching as well.

  All the animals started suddenly attacking the shields for their enclosures in a rage, tearing and biting at it in a maddened rage.

  But they wouldn’t be able to get through, the shields would be too strong…

  The brown bear in the enclosure’s body pulsed, rippling like it was made of water and someone had thrown a stone into its placid surface. In the next second when the ripples died down the bear was nearly half again as large as it had been and its claws gleamed with the gleam of shimmering metal.

  Sean looked around and saw that all the other animal’s forms were rippling and changing as well even as they continued their attacks.

  Sean and everyone else’s eyes widened as the enraged bear’s next swipe with its claws tore cleanly through the shield and it let out a massive roar.

  The pack of ten wolves were pushing through the shield with their heads, but weren’t quite strong enough. But Sean could hear the distinctive whir and buzz showing that the shields all around them were on the edge of failing.

  “Kill it! Kill it!” the female terrorist shouted and pointed at the bear that lowered its head and started barreling straight towards the woman.

  The terrorists raised their weapons and unloaded a blaze of gunfire on the animal all at once.

  The bear rose to its feet and roared again even as it stopped its charge and turned its head against the gunfire that carved deeply into its body.

  It stumbled under the onslaught and whimpered before falling on its back, dead.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  With an electric crackle, the shield containing the pack of wolves suddenly fell and they roared as one as they charged forward towards the group of humans in the center of the room.

  The museum staff screamed and started to flee, and the terrorists largely ignored them as they focused on shooting the wolves charging at them. The animals went down with a few well placed bullets, but they were agile and surrounded by a bright sparkling haze as they charged forward as a group.

  The wolves forms blurred like an illusion as they grouped together and charged towards the frightened terrorists.

  The spray of gunfire focused on the forms of the wolves themselves, but Sean noticed that the animals only became injured or killed when a bullet went a few feet to the right of their blurry image in the distorted sparkling cloud.

  But the sheer amount of bullets managed to hit them purely by accident, until only one of the ten wolves was left alive.

  The wolf roared and leapt forward on top of the nearest armed man. There was one of the members of the museum staff crouched on the ground and looking frightened as the terrorist fired directly over him at the wolves. Sean noticed that the wolf completely ignored him to leap onto the armed terrorist instead.

  The wolf managed to land one firm swipe with its claws on the man it had leapt onto before with a few more loud booms the animal went limp and fell to the floor dead.

  Sean ran forward as he saw the terrorists refocus on the museum staff fleeing in all directions in the chaos on top of about half who were locked in place and just shaking in fear. Three of them were crouched over the comatose and twitching Emily and trying to remove her bindings.

  Sean saw the female leader turn to them and start shouting as she raised her weapon at the museum staff attempting to free Emily…

  But Sean was there first and gunned down the woman before she could fire.

  The other terrorists immediately fired on Sean as they saw what he had done, and he fell back to the floor from the force of the impacts on his torso.

  The whole space was a chaos of noise and animal cries. Sean looked to the side and saw the forms of the animals were rippling like water again as they morphed and changed all around them.

  The changes settled as Sean sat up and noticed to his surprise that the terrorist leader was doing the same. She was an Immortal too, Sean could see the holes in her shirt from where he had shot her with perfectly healed skin beneath. Her eyes widened as she stared at him and saw the same.

  There was another electric crackle as another enclosure shield failed. Sean instinctively looked over to see a massive boa constrictor over twenty feet long slithering out at high speed towards the group.

  Sean saw that the three staff members had given up freeing Emily and had picked her up as a group and were retreating towards the door with her limp and spasming body in her bindings carried between them.

  The terrorist leader raised her weapon again towards the retreating group and shouted something that Sean couldn’t hear over the chaos going on all around them as more and more of the enclosure shields began to fail in rapid succession.

  Over three quarters of the living hostages had fled by now, but that last quarter were running around aimlessly, trying to avoid the terrorists who shouted at them and waved their weapons around in the chaos.

  Sean fired his weapon into the terrorist leader again and she fell back before she could kill the people carrying Emily away. Sean stood to his feet and fired again at the woman.

  The rest of the terrorists were distracted. Sean heard a sickly crunch and snap, and looked over to see the giant boa constrictor snake had wrapped around one of the terrorists and crushed him into paste with a single flex of the coils looped around his thrashing body. The snake was bleeding from several bullet wounds, but its scales seemed the have a slight metallic sheen and resisted the gunfire slightly as it left the dead terrorist and started slithering to attack the next armed man.

  Sean saw a screaming man with wide eyes in the leaf green museum staff uniform in the snakes path curl into a ball as it approached him. But the snake just angled around him and slithered right by, too focused on attacking the female terrorist firing her machine gun at it.

  The woman ran out of bullets just as the snake reached her and reached into her belt to reload the weapon. But the snake was faster and wrapped itself around her in a flash.

  Sean ran forward and started helping the staff wearing leaf green stand and usher them away from the center of the chaos. About five or six of them were trapped in the center of the circle of fighting terrorists. All of the terrorists had instinctively clumped together with their weapons pointed outwards as massive birds started swooping and diving down from above to attack them in addition to the massive snake.

  Emily and the three carrying her were out the open doors and out of sight by now.

  As a human, the terrorists didn’t immediately register Sean as an active threat as he charged through the chaos and shouted to take command of the frightened and practically paralyzed museum staff.

  The large snake was dead, but had managed to crush another man under its coils before a lucky shot went through its eye and into its brain.

  The female terrorist leader tried to shout a warning to her fellows, but she was too late and no one heard her through the noise.

  Sean shouted his plan at the top of his lungs at the frightened staff members, and they all nodded as he shook them by the shoulders to snap them out of their paralysis.

  Hearing his words, several of the terrorists turned around and widened their eyes as Sean swung around and freely fired his weapon into their backs.

  The four men that Sean managed to ambush went down in an arc that broke the containment between them and the front door. The hostages immediately started fleeing through the gap and started running towards the front door as Sean remained behind and kept firing in an arc to try to take down as many of the terrorists as he could with his ambush. After taking down a fifth man with his weapon, Sean felt something grip his ankle hard and with a sharp tug pull him from his feet.

  The man that Sean had shot that must be an Immortal crawled over him and they struggled over Sean’s weapon. Sean could see from the man’s unbroken skin, that he was an Immortal too.

  A massive bird of prey that was unrecognizable from any species that Sean had seen in the museum swooped down and grabbed one of the terrorists that had drifted away from the tight ball of fighting in the chaos of Sean’s attack. The man screamed as the bird tightened the grips of its sharp talons into his shoulders before powerfully flapping its wings and rising into the air again.

  Sean kept wrestling for the gun as the man who’d been carried upwards was dropped from three stories up and died as he hit the ground.

  The group of fighters largely ignored the struggle of Sean and the unknown Immortal as they refocused on firing their guns upwards to shoot down the flock of birds that was growing ever larger above them as more and more of the animals escaped their enclosures.

  Sean saw through his struggle with the male Immortal that the female Immortal was looking between the gun in her hands and the museum staff that were fleeing towards the door. She was separated from the rest of the cluster of fighters by ten or more feet right now.

  Even as Sean watched a pack of rodents burst out of their enclosure directly in front of the main doors and piled out to block the way. The six hostages stopped and started to panic as the pack charged them. But despite the humans scrambling around them, the rodents ignored them and ran right past underneath their feet like they weren’t even there as they went towards the battle.

  The female Immortal looked at her machine gun one more time and threw it to the side and started running to the door.

  She must think that the animals were only attacking people who were armed… Sean realized as his distraction caused him to lose his battle with the male Immortal briefly. The man tore the gun from Sean’s hands and with a vicious snarl turned it around and fired a barrage directly into Sean’s torso.

  A barrage that Sean mostly ignored much to the man’s shock as he kept wrestling for the gun once more. The terrorists were being picked off one by one by the swarming animals. There were only twelve of the original thirty or so that had been alive during the beginning, including the two Immortals.

  Sean pulled the gun from the male Immortal’s grip and threw it to the side away from both of them as they continued to wrestle with each other. Sean glanced over and saw that all of the living hostages had escaped out of the front door of the building.

  However as the Immortal terrorist leader tried to follow them with her hands empty at her sides, the swarm of rodents diverted and leapt onto her and started attacking.

  She thrashed and slapped at the animals even as she screamed in pain as they attacked her all at once.

  Over the course of a few seconds that Sean caught between the flashes of his fighting with the male Immortal, Sean saw the woman gradually defeat the swarm despite their efforts to pin her down and gnaw into her.

  The angry cries of the animals reached a louder fevered pitch as the assault grew more and more intense as all the gathered birds from above dived down towards them all at once.

  The frightened terrorists pointed their guns upwards and fired. But half of them only fired a few rounds before clicking empty. The people searched their belts and vests desperately for more ammunition to reload, but they weren’t fast enough and the birds descended upon them and started tearing through the humans with their sharp claws and beaks.

  The few people who still had ammunition managed to shoot and kill the remaining birds, but only seven humans remained alive and even most of those were heavily injured.

  Sean finally managed to push off the male Immortal from him and scramble away closer towards the door.

  Sean went to flee, but saw that the female Immortal was thrashing there on the floor being attacked on all sides. She was struggling to crawl towards the door as large birds swooped down on her to slash at her back with their talons and various lizards and reptiles tore into her from all sides like some bizarre kind of feast.

  Sean diverted around the woman as he went to flee as the last of the ammunition ran out for the living men and women behind him. He glanced behind and noticed that two men and a single woman in the crowd of terrorists were completely uninjured. One was the man that he had been fighting before of course. But it seems that there were two more Immortals with them too.

  There was only one living mortal left and they looked close to the end as they were barely able to keep themselves standing as the three Immortals clustered around them to protect them from the onslaught of creatures.

  Sean went to loop around the women. If Sean grew too close or got in their way, then the swarms of creatures around him would snap or briefly attack him. But they weren’t focused on him, and viewed him more as an obstacle than a target.

  Sean ran outside and saw that the exterior shield had been lowered at some point. The windows of the living exhibit building were broken and all sorts of creatures and birds were exiting and running in all directions like they were on a mission.

  He could see a few of the staff running in the distance towards the main gate, likely to call for help for the museum.

  Sean ran after them only to divert when he heard the sound of gunfire to his left. He went and saw a group of three with machine guns firing on what looked like an alligator. The creature hissed and charged and snapped its jaws around one man and started shaking its head as the man screamed.

  The bullets of the men bounced off the alligator's scales as it let go of the dead man in its jaws and turned to attack the other three.

  Sean turned away and started running towards the main gate again. He had seen the dead hostages before all this chaos started. These people deserved it. Peter Rose deserved it. Sean felt the guilt rise up within him as he considered the deaths. He had been so arrogant, cutting his arrival so close. He had thought he was being so clever, leaving it to the last moment so that Peter couldn’t call off the attack.

  But he had gotten here too late, and now everything was going crazy. Something unnatural was happening with these animals as they solely targeted the terrorists for their revenge right after Emily had seemed to go into a coma of sorts…

  Sean diverted his course as he remembered Michael. He went inside into the grand main hall and ran towards where the teenager sat slumped unconscious at the wall. Heart in his throat, Sean leaned down and quickly felt for a pulse before letting out a sigh of relief as he felt a weak pulse. But still a pulse.

  Sean lifted the boy in a princess carry and after adjusting his grip for a few seconds turned and started running towards the main gate again.

  Sean heard the roars of aircraft engines as he ran outside towards the main gate.

  Just outside, Sean saw a hovering military aircraft and a gathered crowd of traumatized and clustered museum staff as well as a comatose and unconscious Emily. There were ten dead bodies clad in black scattered around the lawn just inside the gate. He could see from their gear that they had been terrorists that had likely gone after the people or who had been guarding the exit to the property.

  The angles of the bullet and large caliber showed that it was likely from the military aircraft hovering over the crowd right now that had shot them down.

  Sean joined the crowd as many of them called out in concern as they saw who he was carrying in his arms.

  Sean quickly dropped the boy off onto a stretcher with the serious military medic who started treatment for Michael’s bulletwound.

  It was another twenty minutes before more transport aircraft arrived and started loading up the people and airlifting them to the nearest hospital in a nearby city.

  There were enough transports that the rest of the museum staff and Sean were loaded up as well and flown away.

  The explosions and animalistic roars and cries from inside the museum itself had only grew louder and the military seemed to be fighting the creatures back as they all waited there nervously.

  Sean let out a long breath. But Michael would likely make it. Once he got to the Gaian hospital then he should make it through fine.

  If only Sean had been able to save Michael’s sister Reese in time too…