It was night. And the power went out.

A woman gasped. Children screamed before being quieted. Everyone was afraid. There was no measuring it either. This was the kind of fear no one imagines. No one can imagine. This was the kind of thing that was only supposed to happen in trashy comic-books your mom told you not to read, or on a late night horror anthology program. It wasn't real life.

Except that it was.

Daniel was really here. Really standing on that hospital floor in a foreign country he'd only agreed to visit because his fiance had insisted it would be good for his writing. A lot of good it would be doing him now. None of them were going to be getting out of here alive.

He could hear them through the walls. At first it was just the moaning. And then if you listened harder you could hear the shuffling. The things moving around outside the building. Looking for a weak point. Sooner or later they would find it.

"Daniel!" that was Charlotte. She'd been standing beside him when the lights had gone out, but now she sounded far away. That was strange. Now that he thought of it she hadn't reached for him when the lights went out.

"Charlotte?!" Daniel hollered back in the direction he'd heard her voice. He took a step toward the sound and landed on someone's foot. "Sorry," he said, and kept on pushing. The place was packed. He couldn't see anyone in the black, but he could feel their body heat. They had all been gathered outside the Royal London Hospital right before it happened. The latest COVID vax had just been opened to the public, and Charlotte didn't want to wait till they returned to the states. So, here they were.

Daniel saw the flash. It was so bright, the vision of the blast, for a moment he thought there was light in the room again.

There wasn't. It was still pitch black, and he was shoving through the crowd, apologizing to non-sympathetic men and women as he went.

He had been standing beside Charlotte when the explosion happened. It was like a movie. It looked like one of those mushroom clouds with CGI fire burning yellow and orange in the middle. At first, everyone was staring, pointing fingers, saying things like, "Look at that." "What is that?"

But then came the wind. It knocked the elderly over. An old man busted his head on the cobble stone not ten feet from where Daniel was standing. And then everyone was screaming. Daniel could barely hear it over the sound of the blast. The wind carried the sound. Along with a heat that felt hotter than anything he'd ever felt before.

He ran, and so did everyone else.

"Daniel!"

"Charlotte?!"

It sounded like she was above him. Hadn't he seen a ladder when he came in? He wasn't sure. They'd all been shoving when they made their way into the round atrium of the hospital. And, from there, Daniel had been focused on the news reports on the televisions.

"Up here."

Daniel's hand slid to a cold metal bar. A rung! He gripped the steel tight and pulled himself up, one boot at a time.

"I'm here, Charlotte!"

He almost felt happy. A smile twitched across his face and he pulled himself up what felt like a makeshift structure. Almost like scaffolding. Scaffolding? He thought. Why would that be here, in the hospital? Were they painting something before everyone rushed in?

His knee buckled, and he almost fell of the edge before catching himself.

"Daniel."

Her voice was closer now, but still not right in front of him. Daniel reached out and felt nothing but air. The blindness and constant buzz of noise from the crowded atrium was disorienting. He had to push his weight into his heels until his head stopped spinning. He took a breath. And then another. Deeper.

The room was starting to stink. The AC was out, and people hadn't stopped sweating. The unnatural heat brought on from the explosion was still washing over them. And it, along with them, was coating the outside of the building.

"Charlotte, where are you?"

He kept walking. Until his knees banged against something hard. His skin cracked; he could feel the blood soaking through his pants.

And then he heard the song. Charlotte's song. She played it in the gym. She'd made him listen to it while she did her lunges, or kettlebell squats. He hated it. It was too morbid. It was Imagine Dragon's Cutthroat. 

Daniel could feel a breath on his face.

"Charlotte?" He trembled.

Only One of Us, Only one of us is getting out of here alive—

She chuckled. "And it's not you..."