( The Tower Beckons 2 )

"Shit, shit, shit, shit, SHIT," Elijah thinks to himself as the orc starts to pull and bring its hand down toward him.

Time seemed to have come to a crawl as the hand came closer and closer to squashing him like a bug. As the hand approached him, his life started flashing before his eyes. The time he spent with his brother and friends, the moment the towers collided with the earth and he watched it on the news, the moment he got his acceptance letter to the college and days later military men walked to knock on his door, the moment that he saw his house burn and his parents disappear into the smoke, the moment he met Cecil, and now.

He closes his eyes in fear, then... he opens his eyes and sees a man beside him. As his eyes become more in focus, he sees beside him a darker-skinned fellow with long flowing hair tied up in a ponytail and a rolled-up piece of thin paper with some kind of substance inside of it laying in his mouth, eyes a pitch black , with a tribal tattoo on his hand that looks like a boomerang on top of a circle.

"Holy shit, Makoa?" Elijah says.

"Yo man, seems like you were in a bit of a pickle there, get it, pickle because it's green."

Looking at each other, the silence tells everything that needed to be said.

...

"Now is not the time to be cracking one-liners, Spider-Man! We need to...," Elijah says.

He is cut off by the blood-curdling scream of the orc, angered by its prey snatched from him.

"KRAHHHHHHHUUUU."

"Run."

Turning the corner while running at full speed through the destruction and burning barracks with Makoa running beside him. Behind them, two orks run towards them on all fours like rabbit dogs. Running through all the debris and bodies, Elijah trips over a body and falls to the ground.

"Ach, fuck!" Elijah says. He looks down to see what he tripped over; he sees the sergeant who had given the speech earlier with a picture in his hand, of a kid and a woman before the first Towers.

"What are you, a horror movie protagonist? Get up," Makoa.

Grabbing him by the hand, Makoa helps him up, and they start running again. While running, he looks back at the man and sees him get consumed by the overwhelming orks. He looks beside him to see Makoa with his hand over his face trying to light a joint while running.

"I don't know if you know, but right now is not the time to be lighting up, dude!" Elijah said angrily.

"Hey if I'm going to die, I might as well get one last one before then," Makoa yelled.

"Tee up, and just run."

Though they ran as fast as they could, the orks started to catch up with them at a staggering rate. After a while of running, they started to get fatigued. They turn a corner of a small one-story building and are pulled into the dark building, hands put over their mouths as they wait for the orks to pass by. The orks start to pass, crying out in pursuit.

"KRAAAAAUUUUU."

Waiting until the smoke passed, they stayed silent and did not dare to move. After a minute or two, the monsters could no longer be heard. The figures in the dark start to slowly pull back their hands from the faces of Elijah and Makoa. Elijah jumps back from the masked figure to see their identity.

"Who are you?!" Elijah asks while reaching for his knife.

"Hey, you shouldn't scream unless you want to attract them again," said the masked man.

The two people start to walk out of the darkness. Looking at their faces, a sense of relief washes over Elijah as he sees Luke and Lola (two other members of his squad) come out from the shadows. Luke has blonde hair with green eyes and wears the same military attire except for an American flag bandana that is wrapped around his neck.

Lola has darker skin with a family picture plastered on her vest as well as a very noticeable scar along her face that looks like a continuation of her mouth on the right side of her face. Very reminiscent of the slit-mouth woman.

"Gracias a los dioses! (Thank the gods)," Lola says while going toward her teammates and hugging them.

"Lola, Luke, how ya doing on this... a fine evening we're having," Makoa says as he starts to strike his lighter.

"Oh, we do just fine and dandy, mister Hart. Also, I don't think a thank you would hurt much," Luke said sarcastically.

Makoa, while still trying to light his joint, puts up his left hand and quickly flashes his middle finger at Luke.

"Oh, you're fucking asking for it," Luke said as he started to approach Makoa, cracking his knuckles. While Luke was approaching Makoa, leaning on the wall while still trying to get his lighter to work, Lola gets in between them, holding Luke back.

"Right guys, I get this is a stressful situation, but we are all friends here, so let's just calm down and try not to kill each other before the monsters do," Lola says.

Luke hears Lola's advice and bucks at Makoa one more time before turning around and walking back to his side of the room.

"Wait, where's Cecil?" Elijah says with concern.

... Silence fills the room as everyone in the room has a look of guilt.

"Well, we were hanging out at the barracks, and Cecil told us not to eat your food, so we asked her if she could get us some more before we left, and she said yeah, and then..." Luke states before Lola cuts him off.

"The monsters came," Lola says.

"Then what the hell are we doing here? We have to go look for her!" Elijah yells.

"There's no way in hell we can go out there with all those orks looking for us," Luke says.

While Luke says this, Makoa still tries to light his blunt while they argue in the background.

"You have to calm down, Elijah, and think logically for a second. If you go out there, you'll die," Lola said calmly.

"I KNOW THAT BUT! ... but," Elijah says.

"Fucking finally," Makoa says after he was able to get his lighter to work after a while.

As he says this, a looming sense of fear and death wafts in the air of the room. The smell of blood suddenly becomes more potent, and the bloodlust becomes so strong that it feels like needles were pricked into every pore in their body. Everyone froze, and as Makoa looked back towards the door, the orc looked directly at them, eyes as red as the devil.

"KREEEEAUUUHHH" the orc screams.

Slobber from its mouth sprays over the group as one drop of saliva hits Makoa's newly lit cig.