• “Did it always look like that?” The child pointed toward the sky.
    The woman smiled, “No, once it was pretty. Something children could look up at and dream about.” The woman looked up at the pale, grey-green sky, the faint shape of a broken moon hidden behind the smog.
    “What happened to it?”
    The woman sighed, “We did. We opened a gate that should have stayed closed.”
    The child looked up at her, puzzled.
    She smiled, “They destroyed the light, everything on the surface died. Our race is just persistent and didn’t die with everything else.”
    “Is that why we hide when the darkness comes?”
    “Yeah, they come when it’s dark. They take what’s left of us.”
    “Where do they take us?”
    “I don’t know.”
    She picked up her child and walked to over to an old cellar. The grey world around them darkened slowly, casting twisted shadows over the remains of blackened trees.
    Something stirred beyond the smog. A grating mechanical wail filled the wasteland. A single red beam scanned over the land. Black smoke poured out of the beast. Long skeletal fingers made from metal and bone pierced the ground. The woman held her child close and silently prayed as they hid in the old cellar. Mechanical clicks came from the beast as it crawled away, searching for them.