Escape from Earth

The roar of the engines was a visceral thing, a tremor that vibrated through Kash’s very bones, a counterpoint to the frantic thumping of his own heart. He pressed his forehead against the cool, thick glass of the rocket’s viewport, the familiar, yet now alien, blue marble of Earth shrinking into a distant, bruised orb. Below, he imagined the colossal lizard, a titan of scales and sinew, locked in its desperate, lonely battle against the grotesque, twitching horror of the mutant chicken nugget. It was a fight for a world that was no longer theirs, a final, savage requiem for a planet irrevocably scarred by the hubris of man.

He hadn’t seen the lizard up close, not really. Just a colossal, shimmering blur of emerald and gold when it had burst from the alley, a force of nature that had momentarily eclipsed the immediate terror of the nugget. The memory was a jumble of sharp, reptilian teeth, a guttural bellow that had shaken the very foundations of the city, and then… nothing but the desperate, echoing silence of empty streets. Kash had run, his lungs burning, his mind a chaotic storm of disbelief and primal fear. He’d seen the impossible, and now, as he hurtled away from it, the weight of that impossible knowledge pressed down on him. He was a scientist, or had been, before the world had fractured. He’d dabbled in the forbidden, in the audacious reshaping of life, and the consequences were now a terrifying, undeniable reality.

The interior of the rocket was a cacophony of hushed whispers and the low hum of life support systems. Faces, pale and etched with a mixture of terror and grim determination, were turned towards the receding Earth. There were thousands of them, packed into the utilitarian confines of the NASA vessels, the last vestiges of humanity clinging to a desperate hope for a new beginning. Kash felt a dull ache in his chest. He was part of this exodus, a survivor, but also, in a way he couldn’t yet fully articulate, a perpetrator. The lizard, his accidental creation, was now Earth’s final, desperate defender. The thought was a bitter pill, a constant gnawing in the pit of his stomach.