The concept of "light duty" turned out to be one of the army's grimmer jokes. There was nothing light about it. The work was grueling, back-breaking, and steeped in the grim reality of their new world. For ten, sometimes twelve hours a day, Alex and Chen joined the ranks of the walking wounded, their shovels and crowbars becoming extensions of their own aching limbs. They were not just clearing rubble; they were performing the funeral rites for a world that no longer existed.
Every pile of shattered concrete they moved was once part of a barracks, an office, a life. They unearthed twisted metal frames that had been beds, half-melted computer terminals, and occasionally, personal effects that hit with a sickening thud of intimacy—a framed photo of a smiling family, now coated in gray dust; a child's worn teddy bear, one button eye staring blankly at the smoke-choked sky.
Alex worked with a silent, focused fury. Each swing of his pickaxe, each shovelful of debris heaved into the back of a rumbling transport truck, was a blow against the helplessness that had gnawed at him in the hospital. He pushed his body to its limits, welcoming the exhaustion that left no room for nightmares. The physical pain was a clean, honest thing he could understand, a welcome distraction from the psychological wounds that festered just beneath the surface.
Chen, despite his arm being bound in a sling, found a way to contribute, directing the heavy machinery with a surprising aptitude and an unflagging stream of sarcasm. "A little to the left, Johnson!" he'd yell over the roar of a front-end loader. "We're excavating a former latrine, not performing brain surgery. Though with your handling, I'm not sure there's a difference." His humor, dark and sharp, was a necessary medicine in this place of ghosts.
Their primary assignment was the perimeter of the impact crater. Fort Valor was gone, replaced by a gaping, unnatural wound in the earth nearly a mile wide. It wasn't like any crater Alex had ever seen in training films. The edges didn't just slope downwards; they fractured in bizarre, geometric patterns, as if the very laws of physics had been momentarily warped. The ground around it was littered with strange, unidentifiable debris. It was a mixture of vaporized military hardware and something else, something alien. Twisted shards of a dark, obsidian-like material that seemed to drink the light, and strange, semi-organic husks that looked like the shed carapaces of some monstrous insect.
This was the new gold rush. Scientists and engineers, protected by heavily armed guards, swarmed the area, their faces a mixture of terror and avaricious excitement. They were scavengers, picking through the bones of the apocalypse for anything that could give them an edge. The whispers Alex had heard in the hospital were now tangible reality. He watched as technicians in hazmat suits carefully cataloged and removed pieces of Xeno debris, their Geiger counters and other, more exotic sensors clicking and whirring erratically.
The rumor mill churned with stories of what was happening in the hidden labs. They said the alien metals were impossibly strong yet lighter than aluminum. They spoke of energy sources that could power a city contained in crystalline fragments no bigger than a fist. They whispered that the Xenos' biology itself was a weapon, and that DARPA was trying to reverse-engineer it, to turn the monsters' own power against them.
One sweltering afternoon, Alex's detail was tasked with clearing a collapsed supply bunker perilously close to the crater's edge. The air here was different. It had a strange, metallic taste, and a low-level hum seemed to vibrate up through the soles of his boots, a faint echo of the cataclysm.
"Smells like ozone and bad decisions," Chen remarked from his supervisory perch on a pile of concrete slabs. "You getting that?"
Alex grunted in agreement, wiping a sleeve across his sweat-beaded forehead. He felt it too. A strange energy that made the hairs on his arms stand up. It was a place of deep, fundamental wrongness.
He drove his crowbar into a fissure between two massive blocks of concrete, putting his weight into it. The concrete groaned, shifted, and then with a final, dusty sigh, it gave way, revealing a dark, cavernous space within the ruined bunker. And something else.
A glint of purple.
Curiosity overriding caution, Alex knelt, peering into the gloom. Nestled within a web of twisted rebar was a shard of alien material unlike any he had seen before. It was about the size of his forearm, a jagged piece of what looked like crystalline amethyst. But as his eyes adjusted, he saw it wasn't solid. Veins of faint, pulsating light moved within its depths, like a captured thunderstorm. It was beautiful and deeply unsettling.
Before he could call out to one of the science teams, a piercing shriek ripped through the air.
"Contact! West side!" a soldier screamed from a nearby guard post.
The world erupted into chaos. The distant, familiar rattle of gunfire was suddenly terrifyingly close. From over the lip of the crater, a swarm of creatures emerged. They weren't the hulking Brutes or towering Juggernauts. These were smaller, leaner, like emaciated wolves made of chitin and blades. Scavengers, drawn to the crater's lingering energy. The Scythers.
They moved with a fluid, terrifying speed, their four legs carrying them over the broken terrain while their two upper, scythe-like arms sliced through the air. Gunfire erupted from the perimeter guards, disciplined bursts of automatic fire that cut down the first wave. But there were too many.
"Get back! To the line!" an officer bellowed.
Alex's squad scrambled for cover, their shovels and pickaxes useless against the alien onslaught. Alex shoved Chen behind a large slab of concrete, his own mind racing. He was unarmed, exposed. His blood pounded in his ears, a frantic drumbeat of adrenaline. He wasn't helpless in a hospital bed anymore. He was here. He could do something.
A Scyther broke from the main pack, its multi-faceted eyes locking onto them. It was twenty yards away, a blur of speed and murderous intent. A guard tried to intercept it, but the creature was too fast. It ducked under the soldier's fire, and one of its bladed arms lashed out in a silvery arc. The soldier went down with a scream.
The Scyther was closing the distance. Ten yards. Five. There was no time. Alex's mind went into overdrive, his ingrained training and a reckless spark of defiance taking over. He wasn't thinking, just acting. He grabbed the only thing within reach—a long, thick piece of rebar, bent into a crude spear.
As the Scyther lunged, its maw gaping to reveal rows of needle-like teeth, Alex moved. He sidestepped the initial attack, the wind from its bladed arm whistling past his ear. He pivoted, using the creature's own momentum against it, and drove the rebar forward with every ounce of strength he possessed.
He felt a sickening crunch as the metal rod punched through the alien's chitinous exoskeleton, just below its head. A spray of viscous, foul-smelling ichor erupted from the wound, spattering across his face and chest. The creature let out a gurgling shriek and collapsed, its limbs twitching in their death throes.
Alex stood panting, his heart hammering against his ribs. He had done it. He had killed one. A savage, triumphant grin flashed across his face before being wiped away by a sudden, searing pain in his left leg. He looked down. In the chaos of the fight, the Scyther's thrashing leg had caught him, its claw-like tip tearing a deep gash through his fatigues and into the flesh of his calf.
And as he stumbled back, his leg giving way, his hand shot out to brace himself against the rubble of the bunker. His palm landed directly on the sharp, fractured edge of the purple, crystalline shard he had uncovered moments before. The pain was electric, a white-hot shock that dwarfed the gash in his leg. It felt like a live wire had been pressed into his skin. He cried out, snatching his hand back as if burned.
The remaining Scythers were cut down by a reinforced fireteam that had arrived on the scene. The brief, violent skirmish was over as quickly as it had begun.
"You're hit!" Chen yelled, scrambling to his side.
"I'm fine," Alex grunted, though his leg throbbed and his hand felt strangely numb, a pins-and-needles sensation spreading up his arm. A medic rushed over, cutting away the torn fabric of his pants to get at the gash.
"It's deep," the medic said, his voice all business as he began applying a field dressing. "You're lucky. An inch to the right and it would've hit your artery. What about your hand?"
Alex looked at his palm. A clean, deep cut ran across his lifeline, but strangely, it had already stopped bleeding. The skin around it was cold to the touch. "It's nothing. Just a scratch from the rock."
As the medic helped him to his feet, a wave of dizziness washed over Alex. The world seemed to tilt on its axis for a moment, and the low hum from the crater intensified in his ears, coalescing into a single, high-pitched tone before fading back into the background. He shook his head, blaming the disorientation on blood loss and the adrenaline crash.
Later that night, back in the relative quiet of their makeshift barracks, Alex sat on his cot, examining his injuries. The gash on his leg was stitched and bandaged, a dull, throbbing reminder of the day's events. But it was his hand that fascinated him. The deep cut on his palm was nearly gone. All that remained was a thin, pink line, as if the wound were already days, not hours, old.
He felt… different. It was a subtle, almost imperceptible shift. The dim light of the barracks seemed a little brighter. He could hear the quiet, even breaths of the sleeping soldiers around him with startling clarity. The lingering ache in his ribs from the initial invasion felt distant, almost forgotten. He felt a current of energy humming beneath his skin, a vitality that had nothing to do with a good night's rest.
He closed his eyes, and for a fleeting instant, he felt something else. A presence. It wasn't a thought or a voice, but a feeling, a flicker of another consciousness brushing against his own, as faint and ephemeral as a forgotten dream. It was a silent, questioning echo in the vast, empty space of his own mind.
Alex's eyes snapped open. He was alone. The barracks were quiet. He told himself it was just his imagination, a phantom of the trauma he'd endured. But as he lay back on his cot and stared into the darkness, he couldn't shake the unnerving feeling that he wasn't truly alone at all. Something had come back with him from the edge of that crater. Something had found its way inside.