Your time is up. Better run!

Their guns were trained on me. My friends were dead. I was shivering and shaking, my vision tight and my heart was screaming in my ears. Blood was everywhere, the blood of everyone I loved. They were gone.

I stood my ground. I had no weapons, nothing to shield my fragile flesh. "Do it," I grunted through clenched teeth. "Why spare me?"

"Come on, it's no fun if we just kill you all. Give us some sport." A loud crack, smoke rising from Deven's corpse, as they fired again near me.

"I won't move. I won't run. Just kill me. There's nothing left."

"Come on! Run, you good for nothing!" The voices hooted and chanted.

"Why won't you kill me? Why do I have to run?"

Footsteps rattled, as the group of them descended the stairs. "You make everything so difficult, you know that?" The leader was cursing and directing his gunmen down the stairs.

They crowded around me, kicking the bodies out of the way. I was a tree in the forest; calm suffused my being. Their anger settled my spirit.

A rifle butt struck the back of my head and I stumbled. A boot knocked my feet from under me and I went to my knees in a puddle of blood. "We were trying to be nice about this," the leader's voice intoned as I was dragged to my feet and pulled out of the room.

They dumped me in a chair under a bare bulb. "You have to save us," the leader said, his voice softer. "We don't know how to be any different than this. We only know how to kill. Teach us. Make us better. Be our king."

"I would rather all life on earth were extinguished than to help you at all," I wheezed, hardly any breath in me.

"Then we will wait for you." The leader gave a signal to his men, and they put their guns on the floor. They all knelt in unison. “Save us.”