Valley of the Kings, Egypt
Dr. Hassan sat on the ground outside the collapsed entrance of KV62, sweat streaking through the dust on his face. Two other teachers knelt nearby, both ashen and silent, their eyes locked on the collapsed tomb entrance.
He had made the call, demanding a rescue team for the student he'd left behind inside the tomb. Now, his phone was a dead piece of glass in his hand. No signal. No bars.
Local workers and site guards had gathered near the rubble. An archaelogiest from a nearby dig was coordinating with the Valley's emergency team, but they were still waiting. The heavy machinery needed to move those stones hadn't arrived yet.
Hassan closed his eyes, his jaw clenched tight.
Then the desert sky tore open.
At first it looked like a heat green mirage of light on the distant horizon. Then the circle widened, rippling outward into a jaundiced yellow and a molten orange. It formed a perfect ring, hanging in the sky.
One of the other teachers staggered to his feet. "What… what is that?"
Hassan had no answer. He could only watch with his breath caught in his chest as shadows began to pour out of the ring.
They were fundamentally wrong.
The first creatures to hit the sand were hunched, emaciated things that moved on all fours with jerky motion. Their grey skin hung loose over jutting ribs, and their faces were eyeless masks stretched over too many teeth.
They wailed in high pitched shrieks that made Hassan's ears ring even from kilometers away.
Dozens of Manes, spilling from the Gate.
*******
On the highway, hours from Cairo
The tour bus rattled along the desert road, its headlights cutting narrow beams into the night. Inside, the surviving students sat in stunned silence, the joy of their trip replaced by a hollow grief for the friend they had left behind.
Megan hugged her bag so tightly to her chest. Leo sat beside her, endlessly trying to refresh the same feed even though the 'No Signal' icon showed in the corner of his phone screen.
"Anything?" Megan asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
"Nada. Complete dead zone," Leo's leg wouldn't stop bouncing nervously. "Pearson would probably climb on the roof, hold his phone up, and get five bars."
Megan flinched at the name, and Leo immediately cursed under his breath, shoving the phone deep into his pocket.
Up front, the driver grumbled in Arabic, slapping the steering wheel. "Road is too empty. Where is everyone?"
Just then, Megan's phone buzzed once, giving a single notification flash before the signal died for good. She fumbled it out with shaking hands, hoping it was from Ryan.
SIMILAR PHENOMENA REPORTED GLOBALLY. COMMUNICATIONS FAILING.
"What the hell does that mean?" she whispered, showing the screen to Leo.
He squinted at it, but before he could answer, the driver swore loudly. Brake screeched, and the bus lurched to a violent stop, throwing students against the seats in front of them. Backpacks spilling into the aisle, and someone yelped in pain.
"What's going on?" a girl near the front screamed.
"Look," the driver whispered in horror, pointing through the windshield, his arm trembling.
There, suspended over the desert horizon, a green circle glowed against the darkening sky. Around it, rings of yellow and molten orange rippled outward.
Every phone on the bus came alive at once as hands scrambled to capture what they were seeing.
"Oh my god…" Megan breathed.
"Holy…" Leo muttered next to her, pressing his face against the window.
The Gate rippled, then something fell through it.
The creature landed in the sand maybe half a kilometer away, small enough that distance should have made it crushed.
But even from inside the bus, even in the failing light, they could see it was wrong. The creature's leathery wings and a body hunched and twisted, resembling somewhere between bat and emaciated child.
When it opened its mouth, rows of needle teeth could be seen.
It screeched and launched itself back toward the Gate.
"What the hell was that?" someone whispered.
The gamer students recognized the creature instantly.
A quasit. And where there was one…
More followed. Then larger shapes that moved on four legs with heads like rotting goats—dretches.
One of them broke from the pack, then shambled directly onto the road ahead of them. Its clawed feet were clicking against the asphalt.
"Shut the curtains!" one of the teachers snapped with panic. "Now! Now now!"
All hands fumbled with the thin fabric, plunging the bus into dim half-dark, lit only by the thin glow of floor strips. The driver killed the engine, and a suffocating silence fell.
Scrape… Scrape…
The sounds of claws on pavement was deafening in the quiet. Something about how the thing dragged his feet on the road suggested its immense weight being dragged forward.
Leo pressed his backpack against his chest, whispering, "We're screwed. Like… screwed-screwed."
Megan clapped a hand over his mouth, her eyes wide with terror.
The scraping stopped right outside the bus, making thirty people hold their breath at once.
Through the thin curtain fabric, Megan could see a massive shadow and hunched, sniffing at the bus's exterior.
Then, after what it felt like an eternity, the claws scraped away into the dunes.
*******
Manhattan, New York.
In Times Square, the world ended in seconds.
The giant screens, once ablaze with ads for Broadway shows and smartphones, all blinked out at once. Phones lost their signal. Then a jaundiced yellow circle split the sky open above the skyscrapers.
Then the crowds that had been taking photos suddenly started screaming.
The first creature through was the size of a grizzly bear, but built like a nightmare. Its body was covered in matted grey fur, its face an eyeless expanse punctuated by a gaping mouth that split its head nearly in half. Drool poured from rows of needle teeth as it crashed into the asphalt and charged.
Then ghouls. But not like the ones from movies, these were feral and impossibly fast. Their paralytic bites drop those screaming tourists in seconds.
Behind them, something worse came along. A hulking monstrosity that walked upright on legs like tree trunks, its body covered in coarse black hair. Its face was a twisted combination of ape and boar. Tusks jutted from its jaw.
Those were dire apes, but twisted by the Gate energy. Their forms corrupted into something ever more savage.
NYPD officers opened fires to those creatures. Their bullets hit uselessly at the creatures' thick hides or punched through without slowing them down.
Barricades were torn apart, and the officers were ripped apart brutally, their bodies mangled here and there on the street.
Times Square turned into a slaughterhouse in under three minutes.