Xavier stands stunned in the middle of the road staring off in the distance that the portal and the ''dragon'' as it vanished into the darkness as Balere screamed behind him.  Hundreds of feet long, the three pairs of wings that flowed out from its serpentine body were nearly as long as the body itself.


    A ripple passes through the air, a shockwave blowing aside smoke and detritus from the direction it vanished in.  Washing over Xavier a bestial roar stabs at his ears, deafening him and causing his knees to buckle from the shear volume.  A sense of dread and terror seeps from the roar into his chest and snaps him out of the shock seeing the creature fly out of the portal.  Standing back up, he turns and grabs his sister and pulls her back to her feet.


    "Not that way"  His voice sounds tiny in his ears despite yelling.  Balere nods as they turn the other direction down the street, facing away from the portal.  In the distance, they could see movement and chaos.  Fires breaking out and things moving around that were big enough to see around the buildings.


    That bug thing knocked me around pretty badly.  I wonder...  He walks across the street towards the side of Steve''s house, spotting his metal trashcan.  He hated this thing, it always made a racket when Steve drug it out to the road.  Taking the lid off, he flipped around, and slotted his hand into the handle and held it up in front of him like a make shift shield.  Better than nothing, might help if something attacked them again.  Everything seeming quiet around them, he checked to make sure Balere was following him and headed down the road towards the next intersection, staying near the buildings so they were less obvious.


    Peering down the side streets to make sure there wasn''t anything hanging around and spotting nothing, he stepped out into the intersection some and looked down the roads into the distance.  Seeing the same chaos in distance as was down the road they were on, he backed up against the buildings some to think.


    "What''s wrong?" Balere asks as he stands there staring into the distance.


    "No good direction.  At least from the road it looks like this went in all directions.  Trying to think of where we should go."


    Balere ponders for a moment.  "I think the main police station is downtown towards that portal or whatever.  Even if it wasn''t, that seems like probably a dangerous place to be.  Probably fighting going on there.  We could try to hide somewhere, but that''s not going to tell us what is going on.  And it looks like whichever way we go there just moves us closer to whatever is going on.  Maybe we head towards the beach?  It would put us up against a wall, kind of, but we could maybe find a boat and hide out on the water until this dies down.  Plus, we might get lucky and run into someone with an idea what''s happening on the way."


    "Better than any idea I got.  On foot though...well, I don''t think we will make it tonight.  Especially not if we are being careful.  And its probably a bad idea to use a vehicle and make extra noise to draw attention to ourselves.  We should keep an eye out for someplace that it looks like we can hide in while we are moving."


    Balere nods, and they begin making their way down the road towards the water.  What is it to the water from here?  Twelve miles, or close enough.  No way we make that, on foot, before one of us needs to rest.  Still better than sitting still terrified. As they continue down the road, they find an extension of the same destruction and chaos they were leaving behind with no seeming pattern to the chaos.


    A couple of blocks from their street, they were passing the remains of a house that was missing half the house.  Walls were torn away, as if one side of the house had been picked up and pulled away from the other, but the pulled away portion was missing and there was a large scallop out of the land it sat on, dirt rough and scattered, when they heard the crack of gunfire on the next street over and the crash of a building collapsing to the ground.  Xavier stares in the direction of the gunfire for a brief moment before taking off in that direction, forgetting any pretense of stealth.


    If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    "I thought we were avoiding trouble!"  Balere calls from behind and she chases after him as he slips between two houses, looking for any signs of the source of the noise.


    "Gunfire should mean people, right?  At least we haven''t seen any of them with guns yet.  Maybe they will know something.  If nothing else, another person, with a gun, might help us stay alive long enough to find out."  As he comes out into the backyard of the houses he slipped between, he stops looks at the destruction in front of him.  The privacy fences that divided the yards had been trampled into the ground, like a car or maybe a bear had charged through them.  No bears here, thank fuck.  Would be the worst thing to run into in the middle of the night in this chaos.


    Balere touches his arm to get his attention as she stares out across the yards.  "Do you hear that?  Kind of like a squeaking noise?"


    He stops, listening carefully.  At first, there is nothing, before he hears a noise similar to a rodent squeak, but several octaves too low, in rapid succession.  Seemingly coming from somewhere in front of them.  Looking across the destroyed yards, the house across from them has a large hole plowed through the side, siding torn and crumpled into the house, but with no sign of what caused the hole.  He hesitates before from somewhere ahead he hears a single shout and the crack of gunfire again.  It is almost immediately followed by a high pick screech of pain and the sound of buildings being torn apart again.  From over the front of the house he is staring at, a wooden board flips into the air before spiraling back down and clattering across the roof of the building.


    "Maybe you should stay here."  He murmurs to Balere as he starts to creep forward.


    A snort escapes her.  "Oh sure, the one of us that has actually killed something so far should stay here and watch the other get knocked out again.  Got it," she retorts as she ignores the advice and follows him.


    Moving forward, they look through the hole in the house, finding the interior destroyed and the path of destruction continuing into the house and around the corner.  A musky stench remains in the wake of the destruction that causes Xavier to pause as he smells it.  "What is that smell...?  Its familiar." He mutters to himself as he careful steps inside the building.  The smell gets stronger as a feeling of unease settles into his stomach and they follow the destruction through the house carefully.


    It snakes through the building, following what appears to have been a hallway at one point, based on the ruins left behind, although whatever put the hole in the wall also crashed right through the hallway walls on its way through.  The path crashes through the wall into the garage of the house, through the side wall and into the house next to it.  Stepping around the debris in the garage, something catches his eye.  A couple of drops of crimson blood on the floor of the garage.


    "Whoever is firing that gun is bleeding.  Must have gotten hurt by whatever is chasing it."  He says out loud as he crouches down and looks at the small droplets.  Ae he does, the shine of metal from under some of the debris catches his eye, and he reaches over and pulls out a club hammer from under a half collapsed bench in the wreckage.  Handle smooth from use and the faces dinged from repeated impacts, the hammer is well worn, but in good shape.  Setting the bat he has been carrying down, he replaces it with the hammer.


    Better balance for using with a shield. He hefts the garbage can lid.  Less reach though.


    Stepping through the hole in the wall and into the next door house.  Here the damage leads to a large family room and seemingly out the front door of the house, although not much is left of the door..  The house itself is eerily quiet for the amount of broken walls and furniture there was as they stand in the room  Looking around, he spots another bigger splotch of blood on the ground and walks over to it, seeing large claw marks in the carpet around it that have torn the carpet up and gouged the wood underneath.


    Balere comes over to look at the floor where he is standing, and he notices that the smell seems to be getting stronger while he is standing there.  The though tickles his mind once again that the smell is familiar to him while he looks at the swipe of the claws.  The spread on the claws are at least a foot across.  Whatever caused it had to be massive.  Which explains the giant holes in the wall, but what could it be?


    Behind him, much closer this time, the sound from before starts up again, and he freezes as he remembers.  That stink is the same as when they had to pull that raccoon out of the attic.  That sound?  The same chittering you hear raccoons make when they are talking.  But so much deeper than you normally hear it at.  From behind, in the wreckage of the doorway, the snap of wood under the foot of something heavy causes him to spin around, his vision drawn up by the overgrown raccoon looming over him.


    Standing on its hind legs and looking down at him, the raccoon was closer to the size of a bear, rising up 10 feet into the air easily as it looked down hungrily at him, as if it had found a fish served on a plate to it.


    What!?