Walking back through the shopping center, Alexis watched as more and more stores closed, their doors locking to keep out the meandering customers until the power came back on. The crowds were starting to thin as they neared the exit as the patrons realized the shops would not be opening up again soon and left.

They were maybe 50 feet away from the doors when Alexis began to hear a steady thumping sound, so faint at first that she thought she might be imagining it. But it grew louder as they approached the doors, until she realized it was coming from outside – and it sounded like it was on the move.

Alexis half-turned to her family and opened her mouth, about to ask if anyone else was hearing it, but stopped mid-motion when a middle-aged man in a suit carrying a briefcase came barreling through the doors, a look of terror on his face. He tore through the crowd in front of the doors and she had a second to wonder why he was running – it looked like he was running from something – before his briefcase sideswiped her in his haste to get past the crowd.

"Hey!" she yelled after him as he kept on running. "Jerk," she muttered to herself, rubbing her arm where the briefcase had made contact.

"Are you all right?" Rachel asked, worried eyes darting from her niece to the fleeing man and back to her niece again. He hadn't stopped or even slowed down, either unaware or unconcerned that he'd just hit her.

Alexis didn't have a chance to reply as a single tone pierced the air around them; it lasted several seconds and sounded almost musical, but at the same time it unsettled her on a visceral level. It came from outside and reminded Alexis of a horn, but it was too loud for that and she didn't recognize it as any instrument she knew. At the sound, the conversations around them died and more people moved towards the doors, trying figure out where the sound had come from. The crowd started really packing in as more and more people crammed around the doors, and Alexis was just beginning to feel claustrophobic when the people ahead of them started screaming and the tide of people was suddenly pushing back towards them into the mall.

"Aunt Rachel?" The fear in Sara's high-pitched voice was all too plain and Alexis turned away from trying to see outside past the crowd to see Sara clinging to their aunt's arm, her little eyes wide. "Why is everybody shouting? What's that noise?"

"What the hell?" she heard Corey mutter as their aunt raised her voice to be heard over the ever-increasingly noise of the crowd, "OK, kids? Let's just stay inside for now. I'm not sure–"

Alexis caught a glimpse of what she could only describe as a giant metal foot landing on the street outside, accompanied by the loudest thump yet – and then the whole world was exploding in front of them. She heard herself join in with the screaming around her, which rose to a fever pitch, and instinctively pulled her hands up over her face and head. She felt debris hit her and the other people in the crowd jostling her as she and the rest of the crowd half fell and half ducked to get out of the way of what had to have been an explosion.

After a second or two, she uncovered her head and turned back to the doors – or at least what used to be the doors. Where the entire wall had been just a few seconds ago was now a gaping, smoking hole. Far worse than that, though, was the creature standing in the middle of it all – two or three times as tall as a person, easily, and made entirely of metal. She barely had time to register the arm that looked like a huge gun before it opened fire, shooting some kind of laser into the crowd. She watched in paralyzing horror as the people it targeted began dropping like flies, one after another.

"Alex! ALEX!"

She heard her name being called, but it felt distant and unimportant compared to the metal giant killing people right in front of her. She watched it as if in slow motion: the machine set its sights on someone in the crowd, trained its blue lasers on the person, and then, at the very last second, the lasers turned orange. It fired a single shot and its target went down – dead or stunned, she couldn't tell which.

Suddenly a hand grabbed hers and started pulling her through the crowd. "Come on!" she heard Corey say, his voice right beside her now. Mentally shaking herself, she struggled to keep up with her brother and not get separated; everyone was trying to get away from the giant machine firing continuously into the crowd, but they were all moving in different directions and she had to put all of her effort into just maintaining the connection between his hand and hers.

As they got farther away from the mall entrance, Alexis realized there weren't as many people running alongside them and the sound of the robot wasn't keeping pace with them. "Wait!" she said, tugging on Corey's arm and stopping abruptly. She turned back to the massacre taking place behind them, which she instantly regretted, the urge to run almost too strong to resist washing over her as soon as she caught sight of the horrific scene. She tried to identify faces, but they were just too far away. Turning back to Corey, she asked, almost afraid of the answer, "Where's Sara and Aunt Rachel?"

"They're ahead of us, now come on!" he said, tugging her along again as she breathed a sigh of relief that only lasted a second. "We can't stay here; it's coming this way!"

She stole one last fearful glance back and saw that he was right; the thing was closer than it had been just a few seconds before. It wasn't after them in particular; it was just making its way down the corridor, shooting people as it came upon them, cold and methodical and fucking terrifying.

Turning back around, she finally found her feet and began running in earnest, feeling a little stupid that her brother had been practically dragging her along up to now. Only a handful of people were still running, down from the crowd of over 50 at the doors a few moments ago. It terrified her to think that most of them might be dead.

After a minute or so they rounded a corner and entered a food court. She mentally shivered as they passed people who stood there and just watched the group pass, various expressions of surprise, curiosity, and even amusement on their faces. Alexis caught a glimpse of one man paused comically in the middle of taking a bite of pizza, slice half in, half out of his mouth.

"Run, you idiots!" she screamed at them as they ran past, not caring how crazy she looked or sounded and knowing she had to seem a bit of both. "It's coming!"

At that very moment the thing rounded the corner and let out another blast of that horn-like tone. She cringed as the people dining joined in the screaming and the running, and she hoped beyond hope that it didn't catch them.

"In here!" Corey yelled, yanking her abruptly to the left through the open archway of some eatery. It got darker and darker with each footfall as they passed a salad bar, then a darkened refrigerator – and then they burst through a pair of metal doors into what might have been the kitchen, but the small amount of light that came through the doors behind them as they entered abruptly disappeared as the doors swung shut behind them, leaving them in near-pitch-black darkness.

"Stop!" Alexis yelled as his hand pulled her to the right. "I can't see where we're going!" She just knew she was going to collide face-first into a wall, the way he was booking blindly through the unlit area.

"Shut up!" Corey hissed back as he squatted, dragging her down beside him.

"What the hell are you doing?" she whispered to him, trying to find his face in the dark to glare at it. "We need to find Aunt Rachel and Sara! They could still be out there with that thing!"

She made a move to get up, but Corey pushed a hand down on her shoulder, forcing her to stay low, just as she heard the door swing open. As light spilled into the room, she saw that they were crouched down between two metal tables, the kind you saw in restaurant kitchens on TV, reinforcing Alexis' assumption about where they were. She opened her mouth, about to call out to whoever had just entered the room, but Corey swiftly placed a hand over her mouth, wrapping his other hand around her head to keep the first hand in place. She had almost decided which part of his body she was going to hit when she heard a timid female voice say, "Hello?"

She opened her eyes wide and pointed them in the direction of the voice, trying to tell Corey that they should say something and not just sit there ignoring her. It wasn't Rachel or Sara, but she didn't care; she'd take help from anyone right now.

He shook his head vigorously at her and she thought he might have mouthed 'no', but the light was fading as the door closed behind the woman, and then it was dark once again.

"Hello?" the voice came again, this time closer to them, and it was all Alexis could do not to jump up and talk to the person. She was frustrated and frightened and just wanted to figure out what the hell was going on, and maybe this person could help. "I saw some people come in here…are you okay?" The wavering voice paused as it came closer to them, and Alexis wondered again why the hell they were hiding from someone who clearly wanted to help them. "Are you hurt?"

Suddenly she heard the door fly open and hit the wall; at the same time there came this terrible animalistic sound, but like no animal she had ever heard before. She heard the woman scream and yell, "Oh, my God!" and there was more screaming, a couple of bangs, and more of that unidentifiable animal noise all jumbled up together. She listened, paralyzed in fear, until she felt the hand on the back of her head being removed and pressing into her shoulder, carefully but firmly guiding her underneath the closest table. She felt her brother following closely behind her as he removed his hand from her mouth but kept herding her forward until they were under a portion of the tables with some sort of cloth or napkin draped over the sides.

The room fell silent and Alexis froze mid-crawl. She could still hear the distant sound of screaming coming from the food court – or maybe it was beyond the food court – and she could hear the blood rushing in her own ears, but she tried not to make a sound and listened for any clue about what was happening outside the safety net of the cloth-covered prep table. She heard a rhythmic tapping moving slowly around the room and looked back sharply at the vague shadow of her brother. It wasn't exactly footsteps, but she got the impression that there was something walking around the room.

Alexis held her breath as the sounds drew closer until they were right next to the table. Her eyes tracked the sound of the movement beyond the cloth, even though she couldn't see it, and she prayed with every fiber of her being that whatever it was didn't look under the table, that it didn't find them…

…and then it was passing the table, meandering its way to the door. She heard the door open, saw faint light spill onto the floor around the edge of the cloth at her feet, and then the room darkened for the third time in as many minutes as she heard the door fall shut once again.

She let out the breath she'd been holding and sucked in another deep one. Then another. She looked at her brother; her eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness now that she could just make out the look of stunned horror on his face. She was certain there was a similar expression on her own face. After a silent moment Alexis said the only thing that she could think of.

"We are in such deep shit."

A/N: So, this ended up being sort of a continuation of chapter 3, since I had to cut that one off rather abruptly so that it didn't get too long. Unsurprisingly the title comes from the same place chapter 3's did.

I hope you all enjoyed reading this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it! We're finally getting to the good stuff, and I hope you stick around to see where it goes from here. As always, please drop me a line if you have a moment to let me know what you think of the chapter or the story as a whole. Thanks for reading!