He heard the noise first.
Not screams. A low rumble that wasn't coming from the road. Like something heavy waking up the ground.
He took off his earphones.
The rumble was coming from the garden side.
He went to the kitchen window. Garden still there. Gate still closed.
And just outside the gate, in the street, something that wasn't there when he arrived.
An opening in the ground. Two stone columns on each side. Red light coming out of it. Not normal light. Thicker. Almost alive.
Above the opening, white text in the air.
INITIALIZATION- MORTEM SYSTEM
TUTORIAL ACTIVATED IN A RADIUS OF 800 METERS
PARTICIPANTS DETECTED : 47
Macon had the stupid reflex to go look closer.
He went into the garden, walked to the gate, put both hands on the metal.
What he saw in the street made him let go and step back three steps at once.
Complete chaos.
Monsters everywhere. Not one or two. Dozens. Things that looked like no animal he had ever seen. Some running on four legs with bodies too long for their legs. Others gliding, wings that didn't look like bird wings, wider, more silent. Houses burning at the end of the street. People running everywhere.
And people fighting.
Not soldiers. Residents. With tools, sticks, bare hands. Some discovering things in real time, you could see it on their faces.
Macon watched all that from his gate. About four seconds.
Then he saw the neighbor.
A man he didn't really know. Fifties, gray hair. Passed him two three times since he came to Chevreuse. The man was running toward the gate of his own house a few meters down the street.
99% above his head.
Macon opened his mouth to shout something. He didn't find what.
A four-legged monster jumped from a car roof.
The man didn't have time to see it.
The number went to 100% exactly at the moment of impact. And one second later, when the man fell, Macon watched the 100% turn off.
Not disappear like the others.
Turn off. Like a lamp you unplug.
Black. Nothing.
Macon ran back into the house.
What followed was probably the most panicked thing he had ever done in his adult life.
He locked the front door. Realized all the ground floor windows were open because he had aired the house when arriving. He ran to close the first one, tripped over a cardboard box of canned food in the hallway, managed not to fall by a miracle, closed the windows one by one trying not to look outside.
He looked once. By reflex.
Something with wings passed in front of the window.
He threw himself against the hallway wall, stayed there two seconds with his heart going crazy, then continued.
Windows closed. Front door. Back door. The garage. He had left the garage door open for the generator.
He ran to the garage. Closed the big door from inside. Closed the small door connecting the garage to the house. Took two empty fuel cans and pressed them against the small door.
It would do nothing against a monster probably. But it made him feel slightly less useless.
He came back to the hallway. Took the big wooden dining chair and wedged it under the front door handle. Took the entrance cabinet, solid wood, a ton of weight because his parents liked old furniture, and pushed it in front of the door with both arms making noises.
The cabinet moved fifty centimeters.
Better than nothing.
A tremor shook the house.
Not huge. Just enough to move the frames on the walls and break a glass in the kitchen. Macon who was on his knees behind the cabinet ended up flat on the floor without quite understanding how.
The narrator noted that in a worldwide apocalypse, Macon had managed to hurt himself more with his own furniture than with any monster.
Macon got up. Left knee now too. He ignored that.
The basement.
He needed to bring the supplies down. If monsters got into the house, he at least wanted food somewhere closed below. Not the best plan in the world. The only one he had.
First box. Rice and pasta. Second. Canned food. He was going too fast and knocked over the third on the basement stairs. Six tuna cans rolled to the bottom. An oil bottle got stuck between two steps.
He collected everything, went back down, stored as best he could.
Outside the noises continued. Gunshots now. Tremors. Monster sounds he couldn't really tell apart from each other.
His phone made the national alert sound. The heavy siren. The text said MAXIMUM TERRORIST THREAT STAY HOME CLOSE DOORS AND WINDOWS.
Terrorist threat. That's what they found.
Macon sat on the floor in the basement, back against a shelf full of his parents canned food.
He thought about the neighbor above whom the 100% had turned off.
Complete black.
He thought about his own 101%.
101 was above the maximum. Maybe it meant something completely different.
Maybe.
He thought about that for thirty seconds. Then something hit the exterior wall very hard and his heart did something not normal and he fainted.
Just like that. On the floor in his parents basement, surrounded by canned food and water bottles, in the dark.