1: Enter Tony Empton

Doom-1. A judgment; sentence 2. Fate 3. Ruin or death

Dooms Day-the time of God's final judgment of all people

The day that would take eternities to end for those who would be lucky enoughor unlucky enough depending on your point of viewto survive it began with a spout of violence. Hundreds were dead before the sun even breached the horizon. Thousands shortly after.

A young man named Tony Empton saw the very beginning of everything. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes as he pulled his blinds up. There was a roaring fire next door. "Whoa!" Tony gasped, only half awake. He could hear the distant banshee screams of a fire truck's sirens as it sped like a bat out of Hell to the inferno that was his neighbor's house. The sun was not yet peaking over the edge of the horizon.

Sandy, the pudgy thirteen year old daughter of the renter's of the flaming house and Tony's little sister's friend, was standing outside, howling fear, frustration, and whatever other emotion was running through her body out into the early morning air. Tony looked on sympathetically. There wasn't much else he could do. The firemen were on their way and a couple of people were running out to comfort her.

She was the only one to have emerged from the flames. Tony didn't even begin to doubt that situation was about to change. The three-story house was all but completely engulfed in the fire. He stared on with a calmness that only the half-conscious can experience.A sinking feeling formulated in the pit of his stomach as the reality of the situation began to settle into his mind. "Oh, Jesus fucking Christ," he croaked and turned away from his window. He walked through his nice and orderly bedroom and out into the hall. He traced his hand across the wallpaper which displayed vertical vines with interchanging red and white flowers as he walked down the hall.

The sirens were just outside and he could hear the spray of water. Tony stomped down the blue carpeted stairs leading to the first floor of his house, which he shared with his parents, sister, and brother, paying a monthly rent to his parents so as not to be a freeloader. He could hear the muffled sound of moving bedsprings which could only mean that the rest of the household was waking up.

Tony trudged through the living room and dining room to the front door facing the street. He was in blue boxers and a white T-shirt. Not the warmest thing to wear when going outside, but he needed to be out there as soon as possible. He didn't understand why he wanted to be out there so badly, but he needed to see what was going on without it being filtered by glass.
So he stepped out into the cold air and looked onward at the mayhem. Flames licking the air as they began to die off, their murderer being the fire hose. Sandy was screaming still, screaming for someone to save her parents from the fire. Firemen were inside doing her bidding. Tony could see their outlines in the windows against the yellows, reds, and oranges of the fire as they searched.

With the firemen tearing the house apart in search of the parents it looked good that they would find them, alive or dead. Considering the fire hadn't been raging for an extreme amount of time, chances were that they would be alive. Everything was looking bright.

It all went straight to Hell when the firemen began to scream. Perhaps it would be more sufficient to say that Hell went straight to it instead of the other way around.

A second floor window shattered and the screaming, fireproofed body of a fireman tumbled out and hit the lawn headfirst. His screaming stopped. Tony's mind began to race.

The fire was suddenly rejuvenated and raged against the water, throwing themselves higher into the air than they had a right to be. Another house caught fire and its residents, safe outside, began to shout their disapproval. The fire hose began to fight that fire instead, to keep the flames from spreading. It failed again and the entire house was soon consumed.

Possibly the only surviving fireman to enter the house came running out of the door, screaming like it was the end of the world. Then a small, brown creature leapt out on top of his back, forcing him to the ground. One of its two heads tore the back of the fireman's head apart while the other looked at the onlookers with a strange grin on its face. It looked like it had been rotting in flames for an eternity, its skin crinkled like the skin of a cooked turkey. Its eyestwo on each headglowed a fierce orange.
Aside from seven or eight individuals, no one moved as its left head devoured what the dead man's skull contained ardently. Then it lunged forth and tackled Sandy in a single motion that appeared faster than lightening. Her dying screams couldn't be heard above everyone else's as they ran. Tony slammed the door shut and found he was screaming himself. So was his teenage little brother who had snuck up behind him.

"What the fuck was that?" Jay shrieked in that high voice he always used when in pain, angry, or scared.

"I don't know!" Tony yelled back. They were both staring at the door. Fast movement and voices could be heard upstairs.

"No, seriously," Jay continued shrieking. "What… the… fuck… was that?" "Jay?" their mother called down the stairs, worried. Tony wondered what the fuck they could possibly say to explain the situation to her.

"Tony?"

"Get dressed!" Tony shouted in reply. "Wake everyone up and get ready!"

"What? Why?" Their mother began to descend the stairs rapidly, trying to see what all the fuss was about.

"Just fucking do it!" Jay shrieked at her before she appeared near the bottom. "Fucking do it!" Hesitation. Their mother ascended the stairs just as quickly as she had descended them. They could hear her run about upstairs.

"I'm really freaking out here, Tony," Jay calmly explained in his normal, deep voice as he slowly shook his head. "What the fuck was that thing? I'm really… I'm really not thinking good right now, Tony."

"Same here, man, same here." There was more screaming outside. The fire was still raging… spreading, in fact.

Isabelle was running down the stairs, her light footsteps pounding against Tony's head, giving him a headache. Or was that the screaming that was doing that? Or the screeching of car tires? Or the roaring of something strange? Something inhuman?

"What's going on?" Isabelle wondered, rubbing her eyes. She was still in her pajamas, which were vivid, red silk. She was thirteen years old and dwarfed in size by fifteen year old Jay.

"Don't know," Tony replied curtly. "Go get dressed." Isabelle did nothing but stand there and look at them as though they were intruding into some private little world of hers. "Go!"

"Okay!" Isabelle snorted, offended. She turned around, her brown hair flying about. "I'm going, I'm going." She headed back up the stairs, taking her good old time about it.

She went halfway up the stairs before stopping. Her voice drifted back down, worried and honestly puzzled. "Is that screaming?"

"Yes! Hurry!" Jay shouted at her, his high voice back.

Isabelle hurried the rest of the way up the stairs. The screaming outside was intensifying. Both Tony and Jay understood that there was more than one of those creatures outside at that point. Many more than one.

Tony began to think about the creature. Obviously he had been having some sort of hallucination while half asleep. Nothing like that actually existed, of course. Pish-posh and lunacy was all that shit was. That screaming, though. That screaming wasn't fake. And Jay had seen it, too. He had screamed at the sight of it tearing Sandy apart. Oh, poor Sandy!

"We need a-a-a weapon or something," Jay began to rant moving his hands around as he spoke. "Dad doesn't have a, uh… a gun. I'll get the knives. And there's a hammer or something downstairs, right? I'll get that, too."

"Hurry up, Jay." Tony walked towards the door as Jay ran off. He didn't mind the coldness of the early morning anymore, his mind a billion miles away. He looked out the window and stared in disbelief.

Three houses were torches, now, with a fourth joining their ranks to light up the grizzly scene. The fire truck was partially on their lawn with the driver hanging half in and half out of the windshield, blood pooling around his caved in head. There weren't many people running; most had been run down by either one of the two-headed creatures or one of the taller, brown monsters. Tony stared at one such monster as it playfully disemboweled a middle-aged woman. Its leathery, brown skin stretched tight over large muscles. It had four red eyes and claws on each hand. It sliced through the skin of the woman as she writhed and squirmed and screamed underneath its weight. Tony could see the skin of the woman shriveling and blackening in heat. But Tony didn't know where the heat was coming from.

Moments later he got his answer. One of the four-eyed demons chucked a bright, orange ball at an escaping victim. Upon contact with the running man, the orange ball consumed him with flames. He dropped to the ground and rolled about, screaming in pain and agony. The heat was coming directly from the creatures' hands. This was all impossible. It was a dream of some sort. One of those super nightmares, of course. The ones where everything doesn't just seem real to your mind but is real to your mind.

There were running footsteps clambering down the stairs. His mother and father were fully dressed, his mother in a black dress and his father in a Led Zeppelin T-shirt with blue jeans. Judging from the aghast looks on their faces they had already looked out the window.

"Let's go, Tony," his mother ordered, grabbing his shirt.

"Where's your sister?" his father inquired, looking around. "Where's your brother? Go put some clothes on, Tony!"

"Isabelle's upstairs," Tony began, "Jay's collecting stuff in the kitchen, and I-I-I'll go do that, yeah." He walked quickly to the stairs and began to ascend them. He never ran unless it was absolutely necessary.

He entered his room and threw on a heavy, black shirt and a pair of jeans. Isabelle slammed her door and was running past his door to the stairs. Tony followed her.

Downstairs they grouped together like an intervention. Tony took an offered butcher knife from Jay. Everyone else had a knife except for Jay himself, who clutched a hammer in his small hands.

"What're we gonna do?" Tony asked his mother and father, feeling like he was under their legal guidance again. A child who has lost their direction.

"We're going to get to the cars, Tony," his father stated matter-of-factly.

"We don't know if it'll be safe to leave the house, though," his mother said, looking from face to face with her dark green eyes.

"What kind of thing is that to say?" Jay snorted with an upraised eyebrow. "Of course it isn't safe to leave the house! But it isn't safe to stay in the house either now is it?"

"I'll get the van," Victor, their father, sighed. He pulled out his key chain and spun it on his finger. "I'll pull it up to the front door and you all need to pile in the moment I get there, got it?" They all nodded and Victor headed towards the back door. Best to avoid unwanted attention. Isabelle looked about to have a heart attack. Her hazel eyes darted about looking at everything there was to look at. Her hands were white as they tightly compressed the handle of the knife. She was breathing rapidly and her red hair was becoming a mat on her head due to perspiration.

His mother seemed much more composed. The focus of her attention was constant, the sounds of chaos outside. Only one of her hands held the knife she had been supplied and it wasn't a vice grip she was giving it. She was sweating a lot, but her breathing was normal.

Jay seemed to be losing his mind even more than Isabelle as he paced back and forth while he muttered to himself under his breath. Tony found he was cursing under his breath as well. He also realized that his attention span was decreasing. Isabelle became a blur as his eyes began to spin around. This all had to be some sort of nightmare. It was too unjust to be real.
He was very hungry all of a sudden and he wanted to shed himself of his clothing because it was far too warm. The thought of how cool the outside would be kept him from doing so. The thought of outside with all of its fire. All of its strange creatures that seemed to have been spawned straight from the pits of Hell.

He shook his head harshly and began to giggle. He shook his head again, further disorienting himself as his brain seemed to bounce about inside his head.

A hand fell on his shoulder and he stopped, embarrassed. "Are you all right?" his mother whispered into his ear.

Tony sighed, feeling his face burning as his face flushed. He had been acting so strangely and he could see behind her eyes that she was forming an opinion of some sort as though he was some kind of fucking mental case. Jay was still pacing behind him, muttering strange things to himself.

"Yeah, yeah. I'm fine."

"Are you sure?" she asked, above a whisper and worried. He looked into her eyes and saw that they seemed distant. Perhaps she was thinking about whether Victor was still living and breathing at that point.

"Yes," Tony replied slowly. He heard a car in the driveway. Gloria, his mother, snapped her head to the side to look in the direction of the noise.

She ran to the door and pulled it open. Victor pulled up in front of it moments later. Tony saw him yelling something with a crazed look in his eyes, but he couldn't hear what it was he was yelling.

"Go!" Gloria nudged Tony forth. Isabelle and Jay were already prying open the sliding door. Isabelle was in first. Tony ran up behind Jay and Gloria got into the passenger seat. Isabelle was standing bent over, staring out the window.
Jay boarded the van and looked out the window, too.

"Oh shit!" he shrieked in that high voice again. He lunged forth and grabbed his sister by the arm. He tried to pull her away. Unfortunately he was too late. One of the two-headed creatures smashed through the window and grabbed her with blackened claws. Isabelle was screaming. Everyone was screaming.

Jay brought his hammer down on one of the thing's heads, succeeding in making one hell of a pounding sound. It sent him sprawling backwards into the seat unconscious with a well-placed roundhouse. Imagine that, a roundhouse.
Tony jumped into the van with his knife raised, ready to plunge it into one of its glowing, orange eyes. It saw him coming and retreated outside… with Isabelle still in its arms.

"No!" Tony screamed and climbed out of the window after it. He landed awkwardly and shouted in pain, the handle of his knife driven into his side with the blade stuck in the ground. He managed to get himself into a sitting position to see where Isabelle and the creature were.

Isabelle was nowhere to be seen… but they could hear her screaming in pain as she was torn apart by something that could not possibly exist. And Tony found himself screaming again as he cried. Isabelle's screaming ended abruptly and Gloria was shrieking somewhere.

Tony found his legs and stumbled around to the sliding door and stepped up into the vehicle. He was crying uncontrollably, saliva dripping down his chin. He collapsed onto the front row of the backseats. Jay sat silently in the back, blissfully unaware of his sister's death as he dreamt.

Gloria was outside, running somewhere. Victor sat in shock, unwilling to force himself to drive the car or go get his wife. Tony sat up and looked out the shattered window. Most of the creatures had moved on and left behind were the dead bodies of many people. Men, women… children. A dead body for every single category of human beings that lived in the area, each one cast in an orange light by the six flaming houses. A seventh and an eighth were catching fire. Sirens were splitting his skull apart. Isabelle and Sandy were among the bodies. He couldn't see them but he knew they were there.

Jay's face was swollen from the punch that had been delivered by the fiend. Tony could only see Gloria's outline near the side of the house in the early sunlight. Victor stumbled out of his seat and shouted for Gloria to come back to the van. He was crying.

"Isabelle!" Gloria shrieked. She turned to Victor, and then came back to the van. She got into the passenger seat and Victor got into the driver seat. "We need to go get her," she stated adamantly, her body shaking and her cheeks sleek with tears mixed with sweat. Victor sat motionless in his seat. "We need to go get her," Gloria reiterated, her voice shaking just as much as her body. "We need to go get her now."

"Glor" Victor tried, his voice cracking.

"Now!" she exclaimed. Victor rubbed tears from his eyes and looked into Gloria's.

"G"

"Don't you dare," she warned him, shaking her head. "Don't you fucking"

"She's gone, Gloria!" Victor cried, overpowering her voice. "Isabelle's fucking gone!"

"Fuck you!" Gloria shouted back. The power of her voice was dwindling and she was crying harder than before. "She's not dead, she's not dead, she's not dead." Victor began to drive forward. "SHE'S NOT FUCKING DEAD!" Gloria roared and grabbed the steering wheel. Victor spiked the brakes mere moments before they collided with the front of the vibrant red fire engine. He pushed her away from the steering wheel roughly.

"Fuck off!" He pushed her back again and her head hit the window hard. She let out a brisk yell of pain. Victor kept going with the flow of his anger, rage, and grief.

"She's gone, Gloria. We can't do anything about it. Not one fucking thing and she… is… gone." Gloria didn't reply, she just sat back in her seat and cried, trying to deny it over and over again in her head. Tony was crying as well. He was back in kindergarten again, his teacher holding a conversation with his parents over his extreme problem with crying.

"She's gone," Victor reiterated, drawing back from his wife. He seemed to finally be understanding this fact himself. "She's gone," he almost whispered.

There was a very brief silence. The crackling of the flames was almost soothing, as were the flashing lights of the fire truck. The screaming and sirens were ever present, but distant, well away from all that was this van of misery.

"VICTOR!" Gloria suddenly shrieked, her eyes alight with fear. Suddenly the world was tipping over and everything was loud. Glass was obliterated and flew inwards, littering the van's inhabitants. Tony felt a sharp pain in the tip of his index finger upon landing on the van's ceiling, which was now its floor. Blood freely flowed from the glass shard-induced wound. He brought his finger into his mouth and began to suck it vigorously. Moments later he spit out the glass shard that had cut his skin, then resumed sucking.

Jay was shrieking his pain, wondering what the fuck was going on. Apparently he had awoken from his unconscious state. Tony moved himself into a sitting position, his body sore. Gloria and Victor were right beside him, both groaning as they painfully moved about. The side of Jay's face had been flayed by the sudden explosion of his window. Whatever had hit them had come from that direction.

Despite Jay's shrieking everything seemed silent again. Despite the slow but certain footsteps of something outside circling their van everything seemed calm.

Tony could see the burnt skin of four feet as they passed the openings that used to be possessed by full sheets of glass. This was the two-headed beast from before. The one with his little sister's blood on its claws. His… little…sister's… blood.

"Fucker!" Tony shouted as rage flashed through him alongside adrenaline. His arms darted out and he grabbed the creature by its front legs and pulled it towards him. It pulled against him and suddenly it was obvious he had misjudged his strength. Moments later found himself out on the cool grass with the creature's weight pressing down on his stomach. Gloria and Victor were screaming their displeasure somewhere well away from him. Maybe they were on the moon.

Death was certain. It was grinning at him with two mouths and staring at him with four orange eyes.

Victor was atop death suddenly with a knife plunged into one of its heads. The other retaliated less than a second later by tearing most the flesh on his forearm off with its razor sharp, fire blackened teeth. Suddenly it occurred to Tony that this was some sort of demon.

Victor clutched his arm as it sprayed blood. He toppled off the beast and its left head drooped downwards, dead with the knife buried deep into its skull. The remaining head nudged the dead one lightly, making a low grunting sound. When no response was received it looked at Victor with odium before it leapt on top of him. It was no longer so speedy.

"Hey!" Tony called after the demon. It didn't do a damn thing to signal that it had heard him as it bit his father several times. Tony wasn't about to lose his father, too. There had been enough killing for this day. He did what Victor had done for him: he leapt on its back.

Unfortunately he didn't have a knife to thrust into the remaining head, so he needed to settle for just getting its attention. It started trying to bite him, twisting its neck at impossible angles to take a stab at him with what seemed like a million tiny knives. He dodged easily enough, but understood he couldn't keep it up for more than another few seconds. So he quickly grabbed the knife embedded in the other head and tore it out (which took quite a lot of effort to do, by the way) and stabbed the living head. The demon collapsed almost immediately after the head's death. Tony began to repeatedly stab it. The world was nothing but a series of split-second clips that was doing nothing but disorienting him and infuriating him. He was so into the moment that he didn't even care that Victor was dead.

Gloria was beside his body, screaming her grief to the Earth… to the stars above. To everything that no longer gave a rat's ass.
Then something happened. Something clicked inside his head and Tony stopped stabbing the demon. He wept on top of its body and hoped it was once again roasting in Hell. The fire had spread to a tenth house and the sun was lighting everything up. The birds were singing in the sky. The people were screaming. And suddenly Tony wanted to do nothing but sleep. Sleep the rest of his life away at that.

Unfortunately he couldn't do that. There was a long time between when then and when he would finally get to sleep… that is, depending on if he died or not. It just didn't seem fair. He needed the rejuvenation that it seemed only sleep was capable of offering. The miles seemed so very, very long… the road to sleep unending.

So he was crying once again. So what? So he was a little child again. Who cares?

Jay was limping away from them as quickly as he could, throwing panicked glances behind him… behind Tony and behind Gloria. And he was screaming. His greasy, brown hair bouncing as he tried to break into a full-fledged run and his back arched slightly like an old man.

That's when Tony heard whatever it was that was somewhere behind them. He didn't want to look, but he heard his mother's sharp intake of breath as she looked at what it was. She wasn't screaming; she was hyperventilating. He heard her scrambling backwards and looked over his shoulder to see her backing away like a crab that had evolved enough to walk directly backwards and forwards instead of side to side.

Tony heard something mechanical out of his field of vision. Hydraulics. So he turned on his back, rolling off the dead body of the demon he had killed, and looked.

He violently wiped away the tears in his eyes to get a better look… to see if the horrible thing down by the street coming towards them at a slow rate would prove to be an apparition and disappear. It didn't. It kept coming.

Eight mechanical legs hissed and hissed as they moved forward, bringing the beast atop the platform they carried closer and closer. Tony could not accept what he was seeing. The death of his loved ones, the fire-throwing demon, the two-headed demon, and even the fact that his life was about to be expunged were all more acceptable. This thing couldn't… it just could not exist. But it did. And highlighted in flame and the early morning light it was drifting towards him.

A pulsing brain the size of a child's bike sat atop the six foot mechanical legs, secured to their platform. Two small, glaring black eyes seemed to be burned into the front of the brain. A large mouth beneath them agape with a few buck-knife sized fangs exposed within with a gentle line of drool sliding outwards smoothly.

It just couldn't be, but it was. Suddenly when Gloria began to run it stopped coming forth and two gun barrels became alive with gunfire. Two streams of bullets grotesquely obliterated Gloria mid-run. Tony, luckily, failed to see this as he ran back to the house. He did see that the streams of bullets were slowly but surely turning to tear him apart.

After all of that he was back at square one moments later. Standing in his house with the door locked and looking outside with dread. Except this time he was four family members, a butcher knife, and an automobile to escape with short. God he felt sick and so very, very tired.

He hit the ground and curled up into a ball when the bullets sprayed in through the windows and the wall. The door blew apart like cheap wood.

That's when the Brain ceased fire. It was only a brief moment of peace; it was coming to investigate, moving much faster than before by the sounds of it. Tony was up and moving again. Running through the living room to the dining room and through the dining room to the kitchen and through the kitchen to the back door. Tony hit it with his shoulders, trying to break it open like on the movies, and sprawled backwards, his limbs spread out in a shape similar to a swastika. He held his shoulder and groaned in pain. At least he wasn't tired anymore.

When a sound came to his ears from the front of the house that made him at first think the roof was falling down on his head he was on his feet. He carefully opened the door and didn't bother to close it behind him. It was the first time ever that he didn't shut that door behind him upon leaving and not doing so left a strange feeling in his stomach.

Their yard was fenced in on two sides (left and right of the house), but the third side that would've normally been fenced was not. It was a steep hill that lead up to the cemetery. It wasn't too hard to climb, but it would be a pretty bad fall if he lost his grip. Not to mention that he'd be easy picking for a certain psychotic, giant brain with two gatling guns while hanging off the side. So how would he escape? Not through the driveway because that's one of the two routes the Brain would be using to get back at him. The more probable route, actually.

He could jump the fences. Unfortunately he wasn't good at that and the last time he had tried he had wound up with a broken collarbone and a small crack in his skull merely two years ago. He hadn't improved in athletic ability or size since then.
He took another look at the hill in front of him, the house behind him, and he took a running leap at the fence. For a moment it was going well, then his second leg got caught and he landed hard on his back with blood soaking into his shoe. He vaguely enjoyed how warm it felt on his sock-lacking feet.

For a minute or so he laid there motionless, drifting dangerously close to passing out. The sound of mechanical legs hissing as they lifting themselves up to pound the ground in a different spot could've been a lifetime away from him at that moment. Distant, but completely and totally inevitable. The Brain was in his backyard looking around and he couldn't stop laughing suddenly, eliminating any time at all he might've had to sneak away while the Brain was checking out other possible escape routes.

Understanding this had happened, Tony began to sit up. Then he laid right back down once the planks of wood that made up the fence began to splinter and bullets began to fly through.

He thought that maybe the bullets would stop flying soon, any moment, but they didn't. They kept tearing apart the fence… and the fence across the yard, and the fence across the next yard moving to and fro across the yard. The gunfire was deafening. He couldn't hear a damn thing. So he began to roll on the wet grass towards his deceased neighbor's driveway. He reached the cover that was the garage and stood up immediately. He screamed at the unexpected pain in his ankle. He almost slapped himself for not expecting that sort of thing from a gash. Almost puking at the squishing sound of blood in his shoes he began to painfully walk away from the backyard.

When the gunfire finally stopped (causing his ears to ring like they were small rooms packed from floor to ceiling with a billion telephones) Tony glanced back over his shoulder. Apparently the Brain had been using the gunfire to cover the noise its legs created when the walked. It was now standing half in and half out of his neighbor's backyard atop several demolished planks of wood, looking around for him. Ignoring the objections of his injured foot he tore through the air with five running steps to get out of any line of sight it could have from its position.

The Brain was smart enough to understand where he was, so it followed. By the time it reached the front lawn Tony was half way down the street, incapable of being aimed at properly. The Brain didn't give chase. Instead it turned around, back the way it had come, and went towards the nearest screams to cause more damage.

Tony went as quickly and painlessly as he could through the world with fifteen flaming houses lighting his way more than the early rising sun could, painting him in orange, yellow, and red as he fled.