Would you believe this was for school? I had part of it written before I was told to write a short-story, and I decided to continue it from there. I had to set it in MLA format, damn it! Doing that is so hard for me, I was trying to find away around the maximum! 10 god damned double-spaced pages... this thing isn't over yet. No- no anthros in it just yet, but I'd closely compare it to Decay. So, once I get back to it, I will add some to a degree. For now, you may as well read.
*sorry about it having tabs half way down, I forgot to tab until then... Will fix later.
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I go on a vacation, and what happens? Everyone in the whole of New York City vanishes. Gone. Gone so suddenly, the coffee was still in the maker.
I used to work at a small independent coffee shop down in the suburban section of N.Y., and I got some good business running it. Of course, the bigwigs of business were right on my damned doorstep, but I still got some success. After a year’s worth of saving up, I managed to save up the cash to buy a vacation to Florida. I had cash, I had people I knew down there, and I had a good car. I was set. So I went.
The vacation had been good fun, out on the beach. I was young(ish) and half the time in swim trunks, so some of the guys were cooing over me, trying to get my attention. Hah- you can’t get me!
The drive back was when it started to get weirder. I kept on finding reports of missing people- everywhere. The radio kept on breaking the song to announce another missing person. I thought they were normal occurrences at first- elderly with mental handicaps, annoyed teenagers, the like. But I paid some more attention, and realized that these disappearances weren’t just that. There were perfectly normal people in there, some you would never expect to just vanish. One was a father with three children and a wife- he just didn’t return home one day. Another was a multi-millionaire CEO of a big computer company; he vanished just like the rest. Never returned home.
These reports started becoming more and more frequent, until one of the stations had to be rigged to broadcast the names of the missing persons. The president called a national emergency, and yet still none were found. It became to where there was one every few minutes…
It took me a second, but I realized that all the locations that these people were vanishing from were near the New York City area.
On the last few hours of my drive back home, they stopped broadcasting the reports. Too many were vanishing for them to keep track of it. Oh yeah, the highways were becoming less packed with traffic, and more abandoned cars were popping up on the shoulder of the road. Worrisome.
I was traveling back to the city on the last stretch of highway. This highway was always packed, sometimes to the point of there being an average speed of 3 MPH. I saw a few people going the other way, but I was the only one going towards the massive city. One flagged me down.
‘Hey, don’t you know what’s been happening?’ The lady in the minivan shouted. She had three children in the back.
‘Just lots of weird disappearances, why?’ I responded.
‘ People are changing in there, don’t go, for your sake!’ She shouted.
‘Can we go now?’ One of the children in her van said.
‘I’m scared…’ Another whimpered.
‘Hush now, honey bunches. We’ll be home soon.’ She responded, running back to her seat. ‘I really suggest you turn around now, this place is going to hell! People are talking about monsters in there!’ She shouted, and she drove off. That can’t be true… I continued driving. I had friends in there, I had to find them.

The suburban area was absolutely empty. Only a few cars, that’s it… And those were battered and un-usable.
I parked my old pickup truck in front of my shop, The Beanery. The glass front was fine- why would anyone want to ransack a coffee shop, anyhow? It was completely empty, much akin to the streets.
‘Philip, Rebecca, anyone here?’ I asked the air. Nothing.
The coffee maker of ours had been in the process of making coffee, and there was a pot of it under the contraption, full. It was cold, of course.
I tried a sip, and then spat it out. Brewed way to long.
I entered the back room- our small bookshop and lounge, all mixed into one. It was empty.
CRUNCH!
I dashed out to the front room again. That was my truck getting smashed by something. It was flattened, and covered in claw marks! Smoking too… I ran out- but whatever it was, it totaled my car and made it away without me even seeing it. Something’s happening here. I’ve always been one for mysteries since I was a little girl, so why not try to solve this? But I’ll have to walk.

The suburbs weren’t ever the best place, even before every vanishing. The Beanery had been robbed before, but they never took much. Mostly it was the loss of a few tins of our cheapest grind and our front window. We always survived. But now? I don’t know…
There was a general store on the left side of the street- it had the front window smashed in with what I think was a brick, then a boot. The door was unlocked, though… I entered through that, seeing if there were any foodstuffs. I was hungry, and the travel food inside my truck had kind of been flattened with the back.
I was microwaving a burrito when I heard a scuttle sound, like there was a person-sized bug outside. I ran and ducked behind the register. I didn’t see the thing outside, but it was there. That lady was right- there were monsters in New York, and they were hungry. And there was a double-barrel under the register…
My father- god rest his soul- had taken me out on a few trips to the local firing range, effectively teaching me how to shoot some guns with some hard kick. A double-barrel will have to do.
I then realized the burrito was still in the microwave, and the timer was about to go off. I readied my shotgun- the cashier kept it loaded with a small box of shells.
DING!
The front wall was smashed apart when the creature jumped in, at the damned burrito. I blasted it out of the air, with a solid hit to the chest.
‘Good clay dove you make, dumbass.’ I said over the mutated corpse. It was human once, but now it looked like a mix between a fish, a lizard, and a frog. The feet- it was on all fours- were much like a frog’s. Webbed and long, but most frogs don’t have claws. The body was much like a lizard’s, but the back legs were much longer. Stronger, capable of leaping, and obviously human once.
It had a short thick tail that ended in two massive fins and some spikes. It looked as if it could smash a football player into a wall from ten paces. The head was the most startling. The snout was stubby and round, and the mouth was full of claws. The eyes were the size of softballs, but the head didn’t change in size. They were bright blue and slitted as well. The mouth was full of sharp teeth, and no nose could be seen. There was a short fin on its head, and another on its back. It had a general green color. Same type of green as dead moss.
I looked at it for about three seconds, like I’d seen it before. Monsters, huh. She was right.
I then turned to the burrito. That damned thing of beans and cheese mixed into a cheap tortilla nearly got me killed. Oh well.
I pulled the thing out of the microwave and started munching on it as I went down the street, looking for some signs of human life. There seemed to be none in this desolate wasteland.
When people had started vanishing- or now, as I know it, changing- riots started. From what I could tell, these riots were powerful and made of anger and rage. The only windows not smashed were some of the ones fifty feet up, and some of those were smashed as well. The ground was pot-marked with scratches from the creatures’ large claws- so were the walls too. The odd thing was- there were no bodies, no blood stains, not even any cars. Nothing. Either everyone changed, bloodlessly, or everyone fled. If that, then were’d the beasts come from? And why the hell are there no cars? Everyone of them is missing- only a few tire marks to even make someone think that they were here. But why? And how...?
My question was answered when I entered the empty Times Square and found a massive pile of various car chassis, all broken like massive egg shells. Something had removed all the inner workings of the things, leaving most of each chassis laying about. they were piled up for some reason. But what could make use of the insides of nearly 6 dozen cars without the chassis?
CRUNCH!
Whatever that was, it was taking a step. I needed to hide.
I dashed towards the pile of chassis and hid under the front end of a busted taxi. Good enough.
CRUNCH!
Some chunks of concrete went flying around the corner with that step. I moved a blue car door in front of me, just to make sure I wasn’t spotted. with any luck, whatever this thing was, it won’t see me.
CRUNCH!
A large metallic foot smashed the ground around the corner. It was seemingly made of two engines and flesh- Human flesh! Oh god, it seemed merged to the machinery! The clothes were still on in shreds, caught in the flesh when it was merged...
CRUNCH!
The whole creature emerged, in 30 feet of machine and flesh. It was in a vaguely humanoid shape, but the fact that it was made out of nearly two hundred bodies made a difference. The legs were bolted together with parts of the cars, and the engines kept it moving. The torso was nude, but lacking anything worth covering up. Several much larger engines were bolted to the chest- obviously from larger things- busses, diesel trucks, the like. One of the arms was very human,with the usual armor made from metal merged on. Each of the fingers was made of two arms, and ended in two separate hands. The other arm wasn’t an arm, but a tank turret merged to the torso, blood flecked. I don’t wan’t to know what it shot....
The head was the worst. It was somewhat cigar-shaped with a tooth-filled mouth. these teeth were jagged broken femurs. The eyes were massive and red, and position of them gave it a crazed look. The head was armored with the yellow checker board of a taxi chassis, ravaged skin where it wasn’t.
'Was this what happened to everyone?...’ I whispered silently to myself. I watched the Beast pick up a bus chassis with its real arm, and take a bite off of it! A few moments later, the front bumper of the bus emerged on the thing’s left flank. It was absorbing the metal...
Then the thing found the gas tank on the bus, opened it up, and drank the fuel. A creature made of car chassis and flesh that’s gas powered... My world has been flipped over four times and batted out of the park today. Thankfully, it hasn’t seen me.
I watched a few of the reptilian mutated come out from a nearby apartment, hissing in what I could only assume was happiness. They had blood dripping from their jaws. Stuck in between the massive and the mutated. Under a damn taxi. Lovely.
I pushed myself up into the actual taxi, and opened the glove box. A few bucks and a pistol. Better than nothing, I’ll have to use that for longer range.
The giant Beast roared as it threw a pickup truck into a glass skyscraper, shattering the massive amount of windows. The glass rained down on the pile I was in like a storm of ice, cutting into anything not metal. Including my leg. That little 'Ack!’ was enough.
I blasted a Lizard in the face, flinging it across the street with the recoil. the others pounced at me, but missed. I was running fast, directly away from the Beast. The Beast obviously had no intention of absorbing me because it was loading the tank turret. I don’t think it cared about killing the Lizards either.
I rolled into a broken and beaten fast-food place just in time, because a tank missile exploded next to it. The shell took out the Lizards, and not to mention the windows of the shop. I dashed out of it, running directly in front of the Beast and into an alley way. Hopefully, it can’t follow me down here.
The Beast that was following me tried to ram down the building to open up space, but just showed off the bright head armor it had.
'Can’t get me, Taxi-head!’ I shouted at it, blasting at one of its eyes. The eye fell off in a bloody mess. Taxi-head roared with good reason.
I dashed down the alley way, but a pack of Lizards appeared. Again, stuck between a rock and an absorbing place.
'Damn it!’ I cried. I looked around. A dumpster, a couple of boxes, and a door. A door!
I booted it open and ran inside, entering an employee lounge. I jumped the table and ran out another door, coming into a well-lit lobby. Nothing in here but two elevators and a desk. I ran to the left elevator and called it- thankfully, it was on this floor, and so I dashed in. It closed on the Lizard’s faces.
I looked at the levels in the elevator. 32 floors and the roof. I hit the roof. Muzak started playing in the wooden-paneled elevator, making a sort of a break in the action. I loaded my shotgun and my pistol, realizing that the pistol had just the one cartridge. Oh well, it’s something. The elevator lights flicked as it shook like an earthquake, knocking me down. The flickered back on, but I heard alarms. Something was burning- thankfully the elevator didn’t stop. Ding!
I dashed out, shotgun ready. I looked down from the roof. Taxi-head was throttling a larger building, trying the break it down.
CRACK! CRUNCH!
He was trying to knock all the buildings over like dominoes!
I turned around to face the other elevator- the Lizards took it! Smart buggers. They’ll get my shotgun in their face. Stock or shell, doesn’t matter. Both can break a skull.
CCCRRREEEAAAKKKKK...
I braced myself as the building fell in my direction, about to smash into my building’s side.
Ding!
CRUNCH!
I stood up from my position in the roof. The elevators had snapped, effectively dropping the Lizards to their scaly deaths. But the building was tilting...
I ran to the fallen building. It was leaning against mine at an alarming angle. About 45 degrees, I’d say. Plenty enough to slide. Well, only way to escape being squashed. So I jumped.
I used my jacket as a barrier between me and the metal surface, protecting my ass from debris sticking out. Taxi-head was climbing up the side of it, waiting for me. I shifted, letting off a few shells from my shotgun. One blasted off a door from the head-chassis on the Beast, making it reel. Just enough time for me to slide under its massive fist, and avoid a tank shell. This ride reminded me of those giant slides usually at fairs- but this was a lot longer and a lot less safe.
I just dodged a window, which shattered in response from a bullet. Taxi-head must have absorbed more military items, because he had two machine guns on his shoulders!
Good thing I turned around, because my slide was coming to an end.
THUNK!

I woke up inside of a shipping container, hurting. I had landed hard, but thankfully the roof was gone and the bottom was full of clothes. My vacation wear wasn’t going to help in the hard time to come, so I best find something thick. I tossed aside all the clothes, looking for qa nice coat. I did notice I left a slight dent in the thin metal of the wall, though...
I picked up a nice trench coat, and threw it on. I had also switched out my shirt from my old flannel to a nicer T-shirt with the logo “Comin’ To Get Ya!”. I laughed when I read that. Funny how you find things like that. I also got on some jeans didn’t have a dozen holes.
I was digging for some head-gear, perhaps a helmet, when I touched something wooden. Another double-barreled shotgun? Who the hell leaves this under a pile of random clothes?
I was answered when I accidentally stuck my hand inside the chest cavity of the dead man that carried the gun. He had been ripped open by something, and hidden under all these clothes. Some of these were blood-stained, and not from the dead man. The Lizards could have killed the man, but these clothes? None of them still wore any cloth of any type. Not even any shreds. Either everyone was nude when changed, or they removed the clothes themselves. did they discard them here? So... there’s something left of their minds! Thank god, there’s hope.
I found a riot helmet and shield under some of the clothes in a corner, away from the dead man. I didn’t need the shield, but I did grab the helmet.
CCCRRREEEAAAKKKK...
Taxi-head was picking up the container! Time to go, eh? I loaded my dual shotguns and fired them both at the locked door, flinging them wide open and spilling clothing 15 feet down. I reloaded, and jumped.
Taxi-head roared at me, and I started running. whatever happened here, I’m going to have to figure it out. Looks like it’s up to me now.