Stumbling, screaming, smoke, a world turned to hell in the space of a smoke break. He was only still alive because he had been outside, one of the lucky few grinding sparks to ash under his shoes and thinking of what he could throw in the microwave for dinner when he got home.

He was only still alive, only just, stumbling away from the inferno that had been work and tedium and just another Monday. The thing, serpentine natural disaster, that had crushed six blocks of ordinary Mondays as it passed was circling back, he could hear it, distant roar swinging around to barrel down on him like a freight train loaded down with the end of the world.

Where was civil defence? He only had time to wonder, stumbling from the curb into the scale-rough trough the monster had carved across the street, before he knew. Before a metal foot the size of a limousine crashed into that concrete trough close enough to kick shards of it at him, and the shadow of something like rescue towered up between him and the blaze.

Taller than the ruins roaring all around, taller, even, than some of the towers still standing. Gaunt humanoid machine stooped against an orange sky, and there was a person in there, he knew from the news, sealed somewhere deep inside its metal heart. He’d seen pictures of them in their suits, sleek as deep-sea divers, and pictures of the ash and rubble toppled by even their most successful missions.

Not rescues. It, they, weren’t there to save him, or anyone else lucky enough to have been a few feet to one side of hell. They were there to stop that thing rampaging through the city, and his life, those lucky, screaming, running lives, didn’t factor into a successful mission.

The roar was in all the world now, smoke and fire and shaking concrete, shaking his bones, so that his joints barely seemed able to keep hold of them. The monster was back, a moving blaze itself encased in scales of something like badly-soldered, flame-dripping steel, noise and end barrelling across the city and straight towards that metal skeleton built on a scale to match it. Civil defence exosuit, apocalyptic frame for the person somewhere inside who told it to brace its titanium heels, raise its hands-

The monster struck it with a sound that would leave all others fainter and ringing in his ears for the rest of his life, if he had one. The exosuit stumbled, catching and stopping the catastrophic momentum of its charge, and he wouldn’t have a life, because one of its unbalanced feet was a shadow plunging straight towards him. He screamed-

His life might have been too dull to flash in front of his eyes. All he saw, with perfect adrenal clarity, was the exosuit’s head swivelling towards him on its owl-flexible neck. The compound cameras of its eyes shining with flame. Its foot turned by a tricky angle, one that would have sprained a human ankle, and shattered concrete close enough to throw him from his feet.

He tumbled like a piece of road shrapnel himself, nothing but a mass of bruises and the scrapes it bit out of him. Nothing but enough pain that he could have been dying after all, but when most of that pain rolled to a stop, he was still there.

Lying in the street, staring up at hell’s sky and the not-man and not-snake thrashing in black silhouette against it. Still alive, because something so much bigger than him had been quick enough and cared just enough to turn its heel.

Was that how a beetle not crushed under a boot would feel? Pathetic gratitude, tears burning the soot from his face, and terror, a bottomless fucking pit of terror, because he was small enough to be killed if something didn’t turn its head in time or just ran out of the pity to spare him.