Close Your Eyes

The world exploded around me. I almost couldn't breathe from the echoing concussions from explosions. I wanted to scream, but didn't have enough breath to do so.

I wanted to stand, to run, to flee, but if I moved, I would die. I had been hammered to the ground when the bombardment began, when the hell was unleashed, when the titans decided to press down, down down on me to crush my life from my body, one hammer blow at a time. One crushing blow after another.

I am going to die. I am going to die! I am going to DIE!

There is one last crashing explosion. I am lifted and thrown and ... I do not know what happened next. I smashed into the darkness.

I came to and heard...and quivered. That hissing foulness. They were here. They were hunting. For me. The demons...demons...demons...I looked for my gun. I could not see it in the depression around me.

I pulled my pistol. I would go down, but not as a sweet meat, consumed like a delicacy.

I crawled up to the lip of the crater and could see them. Three unholy beings scouring for the scent of my soul. They raised their sinister snouts and caught wind. They paused and rushed and closed the gap between us.

I bang firing. One, two, three shots hit and took down one of the beasts. The second and third though closed too fast. A body blow. Falling to the ground. Crashing once more, but not with the force of the Titans.

I fire, fire, fire. Click. Click Click.

One beast that was atop me is no more, but the other tears away its hordling and throws it to the side. I scream and futilely try to escape. There is no escape. I am damned.

It forces me down, holds me and tendrils begin to sprout from its head, slowly, inexorably closing in on my eyes, ears, nose, mouth and...worse.

Its hissing, a foulness so rich, so rancid, the worms would turn away. Its breath a curse so complete, so crushing the holiest could not survive. its touch a searing pain, exquisite and deadly, hateful and seductive.

The tendrils close so slowly, ever slowly, there's no escape, but my terror engendered is to great, to delicious for the fiend.

Then...a light. a light to bright and so pure bolts across my vision to smash back the fiend off of me. I screamed, the scream of terror and redemption, with all my might.

But I could still not move. The terror was too great. Its touch too fouling.

The beast rose up and flashed claws and teeth ready to leap at the new source, only to have bolt after bolt of holy light take it down into a smoldering corpse.

Trembling, shaking, quivering in terror, with what nearly happened, with what nearly consumed and seduced and destroyed and damned me.

A great mechanical hand reached down and placed itself upon my shoulder.

"You're alright kid. Come, get up."

He pulled me up. He was not alone. He was one of several soldiers in powered armor. Centaurs. Not horse shaped, but men with machines in an armor that would crush a mere mortal.

He checked me out and quickly treated my wounds. We were getting ready to withdraw when flashes of red lightning struck all around us. And there stood pit devils of the worse sort, an honor guard for a Prince of Hell. The soldiers arranged themselves around me. They locked and loaded, but it was with energies far, far beyond what I had thrown with my pitiful pistol and rifle.

The soldier who had treated me, talked with me simply said:

"Listen kid, you're going to close your eyes, count to ten, and then everything is going to be fine."

I closed my eyes and the world exploded once more.