Beau’s truck rolled slowly over the crumpled sand, through the threshold of the rift into the darkened world of Dome 4455.

  Wheels crunched across the brittle debris from what had once been an edge of the dome. It wasn’t like Dome 101 with its orderly ramps and sterilized seals containing the breach. Dome 4455’s perimeter felt raw and ruptured like a wound blasted open. The outer wall of the dome in that section was peeled back into curled tongues of sheeting. The air had a strange weight to it—stale and sour like an old city.

  Besides the drained ocean and the dark horizon, the first thing that caught Beau’s attention was the blood splattered on the sand. Dark stains marred the sand. It pooled in claw marked divots. It seemed to Beau that something big got in and tore people apart. There were no bodies that he could see, but there were scraps of bloody pant legs and blouses. There were husks of giant green insect parts, twisted and snapped off. He couldn’t tell what the creature may have been, he just prayed it wasn’t still there with him as he continued his search for food.

  As he kept driving across the sand, he spotted bigger remains of giant insects. There were green thoraxes hacked open. Beau squinted at one as he drove by it. The unease tightened inside his gut. It reminded him of something he’d seen before. But the body was so mangled that he couldn’t put a name to it.

  Please don’t let those things show up, he thought.

  He kept driving.

  A new smell assaulted his nostrils, an incredibly horrid tinge of fish rot.

  Bitter and greasy, that smell wasn’t the kind that just coated the air. It slithered in Beau’s sinuses, settled in his throat, and stayed there. It was incredibly strange that all of the ocean water had evaporated, likely draining from the opened rift and evaporating.

  He kept driving and soon found the darkened edge of a concrete pier. A darkened skyline of towers stretched beyond it. As he drove across the remaining stretch of beach, he crunched over splintered shells and the skeletal ruins of marine life. Fish bones blanketed the sand.

  He drove up a sandy hill and onto a parking lot filled with abandoned cars, all empty, when he spotted something skittering past his truck in his rearview mirror. It was too fast to paint in any great detail. It made him drive even faster, turning onto the main road that ran parallel to the beach. When he did that, more creatures tailed him.

  Oh, no.

  The identity of the creatures became more apparent. There were three giant roaches tailing him.

  Beau had spent considerable time in the Dome 101 crunching regular sized roaches under his boots. But those were manageable. The roaches who chased him were each the size of a twin mattress; they were matte black and their shells rippled with greasy light as they gave chase. Intent on killing them, Beau pulled sharp on the steering wheel in a u-turn and wanted to smash them with his bumper. But when he shined the headlights on his targets, the roaches scattered in all directions and fled him at an incredible speed. A single giant roach remained behind, pausing briefly to raise its head at him, then it vanished in an alley between two towers.

  Beau swerved back around and accelerated. He wasn’t going to waste any more time. He still had a mission to find food for Dome 101. He couldn’t return empty handed. So he sped down the streets of what seemed to be a replica of New York City and searched for a sign of an obvious food store.

  As he drove, something ahead of him, in the middle of the road, blocked Beau’s path so he stopped the truck. The object was completely out of the ordinary, not a normal traffic sign. Someone placed a white board in the middle of the street, the kind you would find in a school room.

  He aimed his headlights at the sign. The message on it was hand written. Beau squinted and read the sign.

  “IF YOU’RE FROM DOME 101, WE VOTED NOT TO INTERACT WITH YOU. WE HOPE IT WAS THE RIGHT DECISION.”

  The words smacked him. Where would they have gone? Had they found a way to escape the facility? Was that even possible?

  Not finding the answer in the middle of the silent road, he drove around the sign and continued on.

  The entire dome was modeled as a replica of Manhattan’s Atlantic stretch and the skyline beyond it which loomed like dead titans. There wasn’t a soul around him. The only discernible movement, besides the skittering of giant roaches who moved from building to building, were the scurrying of rats. And there were a great number of them, which he soon discovered why.

  He saw the shapes scattered along the road and the sidewalk before he understood what he was looking at. There were hundreds of rotting corpses of people being eaten by rats. Some of the bodies were contorted, jaws locked mid-scream. Others curled around weapons—broken knives, crowbars, and even shapes that resembled military style rifles. Some of the bodies were torn open, likely by whatever broke into the dome. The rats feasted on them, and so did giant roaches. They ignored Beau who drove by in his truck, for now.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  He pressed a fist into his mouth. It wasn’t so much the deaths that bothered him, but the stench of the bodies.

  Still, there were definitely guns laying amongst the corpses. However, he decided to keep moving and try to find one that wasn’t so close to the giant roaches else he risked being attacked and torn apart himself.

  The road ahead glittered. There was something metallic reflecting his headlights. He pulled up beside it and opened his door. He took the object in his hand and got really excited because it was an actual carbine rifle. There were magazines nearby which he quickly collected. He ejected the magazine in the rifle, which was empty, and inserted a new one. It clicked.

  The weapon whirred to life in his hands. It wasn’t any ordinary gunpowder rifle, that was clear by the humming sound it made.

  A digital blue message on the side of the rifle read “30” as in thirty rounds. The tiny display on the back of the rifle displayed a number for the battery percentage. It was eighty-seven percent charged. Through the window of his truck, he aimed the rifle down the road and squeezed the trigger. The recoil slapped against his shoulder with a surprising amount of force. A slug shot out from the tip of the barrel and thudded into an abandoned car hundreds of meters down the dark street.

  For half a heartbeat, Beau smiled. It felt good having something so powerful in his hands when the time since the ant attack he had felt so defenseless.

  Then he heard a terrible skittering sound.

  The giant roaches were back.

  First there were two roaches. Then there were five of them. Then he spotted more skittering down the street. Their eyes were black like tar pits. They clattered toward him in a swarm of skittering limbs, twitching with hunger.

  Beau exited his truck so he could properly aim. He dropped to one knee, steadied his aim, let out his breath, and fired at one of the roaches.

  His rifle sang.

  One slug punched clean through the cockroach’s thorax.

  Another slug blew out a leg joint.

  He fired again. And again. His aim sharpened with every shot. The roaches screamed—an awful, wet chittering—and splintered apart as each slug struck home. But they didn’t stop.

  Click. Click. Click.

  He was out of ammunition.

  He climbed back into his truck and sped back toward the rift. If he stayed, he would have been swarmed by roaches. He knew he had failed his mission, to some degree, because he hadn’t collected any food. But still, he found technology they could use to defend themselves. His priority was returning to Dr. Lorne so she could reverse engineer it. He also had to return alive to inform them about Dome 4455 and how they escaped. Maybe there were others, like them, out there in the bigger world. That bit of information changed everything about the game of survival they all played with the outside world. That, in itself, was a small victory.

  ###

  More roaches blocked his exit out of Dome 4455. They skittered across the road ahead of him, which he swerved around. His truck bumped over a roach and crushed it. He sped forward and soon found himself driving down the hill and back across the sand toward the rift.

  After gaining some distance from the city, he turned the truck and stopped it momentarily to fire his rifle at the pursuing cockroaches. The first slugs tore through the roaches. The sound of electric gunfire echoed off towers in the skyline. Two roaches dropped and fell face first into the sand. The others who chased him were bigger and bolder. They weren’t afraid. They accelerated toward him. Beau’s breathing went ragged.

  “I’m done!” he yelled, turning the wheel and hitting the accelerator. He peeled into a tight turn.

  But then, his truck powered off.

  He slammed his fist against the dashboard and yelled out in frustration. The dashboard flashed with red blinking lights..

  And then a memory came into his mind.

  “You lose your mind in battle, boy, you lose more than the fight. You lose your people.” It was something Rufus used to say to him. “Control is survival. Rage is a luxury for the dead.”

  Beau breathed in and let it out slowly.

  His hands trembled as he clenched the steering wheel. He said a short prayer and pressed the truck’s power button. The truck burst to life. He found the gear shift and jammed the truck into drive. The truck groaned. The steering felt off. But the wheels moved. The battery pack glowed amber on the display—damaged, but not dead.

  That was good enough.

  As he sped down the road, he realized in his rearview mirror that the roaches weren’t done with him just yet.

  Two more roaches were ahead of him. He set the truck’s cruise control and maintained speed across the beach. Carefully, Beau leaned out the driver’s side and fired three clean bursts at the cockroaches pursuing him. Slugs smashed into their thoraxes. They collapsed mid-charge, shells splitting like melons.

  As he drove, his gun clicked, out of ammunition. He ejected the rifle’s magazine. He searched for a fresh one, but all of the ones in the passenger seat were out of ammunition.

  Smeared in ichor, bruised to the bone and barely alive, the remaining swarm of roaches in his rearview mirror hesitated. They followed him for a little longer across the sand, slower than before, then they turned and scattered and ended their pursuit.

  He lodged the fancy new rifle down into the floorboard. He gripped the steering wheel again and drove. The breach leading out of Dome 4455 looked like the gate to freedom. As he sped through it, he didn’t look back. He didn’t blink. He punched through the threshold, wheels skidding, bones rattling, and drove back through the corridor toward Dome 101.