The man had a gun. Their father didn't realize it as he tried to take him down. The area was lively, then silent, then screaming, then running, then silent. Gabriel and Michael didn't know what to do. Their father had just been killed in front of them. The man ran away, hearing the police sirens getting louder, he got spooked. The crazy bastard did it for no reason, seemingly choosing them at random to take out his anger.
Gabriel, a tall blonde boy, sobbed into his father's chest the blood staining his hands and face. The sirens grew louder as the police rushed toward the site of the murder.
Michael was a tall boy as well, his head was shaved, he looked like a bully. His eyes were glazed over as he stared at their father lying dead on the floor.
A police car rushed down the street, stopping beside the boys. Its' black and white lustre contrasted the blinding red and blue lights on its roof. The police officer pulled Gabriel away from his father, he pulled and pulled, trying to get back to help his father.
Their life went on. Gabriel lived in regret, regret for not saving his father that night.
When the twins were 17, something happened. The monolith, a towering black megalith, with a singular red eye in its center and black vein-like tubes running throughout, seen through the gaps in its ebony armor, appeared, it had seemingly grown from the ground overnight, 5 miles from their home in Kalona, Iowa,
Nobody knew what it was, they were curious. Tens of thousands of people flocked to Kalona to see it. Their church began to get more visitors too, people were scared, they thought the end had come, and they wanted to be absolved from their sins, to find egress from eternal damnation.
The world had already been shaken by the appearance of the first towering black monolith, but what followed in the next seven days was something no one was prepared for. Smaller, crimson nodes had spread like a growing infection, rooting themselves across the earth. Scientists, world leaders, and religious figures scrambled to make sense of the phenomenon.
Some believed it was aliens others saw it as a sign from God... or something far worse, some thought that it was the original inhabitants of Earth, before any animal ever existed. Those people were called heretics by religions all over the world.
Inside the Pentagon's underground command center, a group of military officials and scientists sat around a massive digital map of the world, red dots marking where monoliths had sprouted. The tension was suffocating.
"Are we sure these are spreading and not just appearing randomly?" asked General Johnson, his sharp gaze fixed on the glowing map.
"They are spreading," replied Dr Elaine Hargrove, a lead researcher from NASA. She tapped a stylus against her tablet. "The growth pattern is organic, like the root system of a plant."
"They're not plants," interjected CIA Director John Matcliffe "We lost three entire recon teams. No distress signals, no warning shots, just... gone. It must be some sort of creature or animal"
A technician seated at the control panel hesitated before speaking. "Sir… we, uh… recovered a feed from one of the drone cameras before it cut out."
The room fell silent as the technician pulled up the footage. The grainy video displayed a soldier's body cam, showing a tunnel inside one of the red monolith nodes. The walls pulsed, dark and wet, shifting as if alive. A faint, rhythmic sound filled the air.
A voice whispered in the background. "It's breathing."
Then static.
The room was dead silent.
"Shut it off," Mercer ordered.
"Sir, we have to do something about this" Elaine stared blankly at the footage.
"We will just give me some time to think," said Mercer
Despite government attempts to contain information, the footage leaked online within hours. People panicked. Social media exploded with theories:
"It's a government cover-up!"
"The monoliths are alive!"
"Aliens are among us!"
"This is Judgment Day."
Press conferences were held, each more chaotic than the last.
"The footage is fabricated," White House Press Secretary Linda Croft insisted. "The monoliths pose no immediate danger to the public."
Yet across the world, people reported strange occurrences. Birds gathered in eerie, unmoving circles above the structures. Wildlife refused to eat. Some claimed to hear whispers when standing near the nodes.
Dr Hargrove received a private call from the European Space Agency. "Elaine, we picked up something strange on the satellites. Tidal shifts are behaving… erratically."
"How erratically?" she asked.
"Like something is pulling the ocean in directions that don't make sense."
The army sent out three fighter jets to deal with the Monolith. Their plan is to shoot missiles directly at it.
By day three, hospitals overflowed with cases of people suffering from sudden psychotic breaks.
A doctor in Berlin reported a surge in patients claiming they could see the sky turning inside out.
A woman in Argentina clawed her own eyes out, screaming, "I see it now! It sees me!"
Gabriel, still in Kansas with his family, heard reports on the radio. Mary sat at the kitchen table, twisting her hands around each other.
"It's starting, Gabriel," she whispered.
"Mom, it's just hysteria," he tried to reassure her, though he didn't believe his own words.
Michael smirked from the doorway. "Or maybe it's God showing us what we are. A failed species."
Gabriel ignored him. But that night, he dreamed of the monolith.
It spoke to him.
Come inside…
By day four, The government of the United States decided to take action, something had to be done before the monolith posed a real threat to humanity.
They sent out fighter jets, state-of-the-art, secret government jets.
As they flew towards the monolith, it began to pulse slowly, as if giving off a warning signal to the jets.
The bombs they launched at the monolith did nothing in the end, the unknown material it was made of was far too strong to be damaged by mere missiles. But, the missiles did seem to agitate it, it struck back, using flesh-like tendrils to whip and grab at the jets, bringing them down one by one.
From then on, the monolith seemed angry, it started to act more erratically, killing any farm animal that went near it.
The government didn't want to resort to nuclear bombs, they tried to take it down without using them.
In a Moscow news studio, anchor-woman Ilya Petrova struggled to maintain composure as she delivered the breaking news.
"The city of Kholmsk, population 8,000… has disappeared."
She swallowed. "Satellite imagery confirms that the entire town, its people, buildings, and vehicles… are gone. All that remains are monolith nodes, pulsating in their place."
Her co-anchor replied, his lips quivering with sheer terror. "They just… vanished?"
People rioted. The Vatican declared a state of emergency. Religious extremists set fire to synagogues, mosques, and churches, convinced the world was ending.
Gabriel and his family sat in the dark, listening to the radio reports.
"What if it happens here? What if they burn our church? Burn our town?" Mary whispered.
Gabriel didn't have an answer.
By the fifth day, chaos ruled.
A new movement emerged, the Monolith Faithful. They gathered around the structures, chanting in unknown tongues. Some walked into the red nodes willingly and never returned.
"Maybe they're being taken somewhere better," one follower said in an interview. "Maybe they're being chosen."
Governments worldwide declared martial law. Military forces were ordered to shoot on sight if anyone tried to enter the monoliths.
But it was too late.
The monoliths pulsed brighter. As if they were… responding.
Onboard the International Space Station, astronaut Cameron Simon stared at the Earth in horror. He looked through a telescope down at the surface.
"Mission Control," he said shakily, "I'm seeing… anomalies in the ocean. Shadows are moving beneath the surface, hundreds of miles long."
The radio crackled. "Could it be a glitch?"
"No," Simon whispered. "It's… alive."
At the same time, underground sensors in the Pacific registered an impossible reading.
A heartbeat.
Beneath the ocean. Beneath the crust. Beneath everything.
Something ancient had awakened.
The final day arrived in silence. The world held its breath.
Then came the first crack.
An earthquake unlike any recorded before. 9.5 magnitude. Then another. Then a hundred more.
The sky darkened.
Yellowstone, Long Valley, Valles Calder, all of them erupted with a deafening roar, sending clouds of fire and death across the United States.
Tsunamis taller than skyscrapers rose from the ocean, swallowing entire cities.
The wind screamed as superstorms formed without warning.
Volcanoes erupted in places that were long thought extinct.
The world was rejecting humanity.
Gabriel and his family watched from their farmhouse as the horizon turned red. The monolith stood untouched, the only unmoving thing in the chaos.
Then… the screams faded.
The disasters stopped.
The sky remained gray.
But the world was now dead.