​     The "X" turned into a green arrow.

     The arrow pointed to where Tindriss stood ​just beyond the safe room.

     Katy aimed the reality shredder in the direction the green arrow pointed and pulled the trigger.  ​

     What emerged from this particular weapon was not a beam or a ray, but something more like a cloud, a swirling, graying cyclonic cloud, and within this cloud there was chaos, and that chaos was reality coming apart at the seams. The sound of it struck Katy as a cross between a lion's roar and a child's scream. It ripped apart the front of the structure that had protected Katy and Gramps until that moment. It disintegrated into pieces no bigger than a fingernail before disappearing into the core of the swirling cyclone. What parts of the ground, what parts of the air, the ray touched disintegrated and became a part of the cyclone.

     The cloud reached Tindriss even as Tindriss flew directly at Katy. 

     Tindriss howled as it sucked her up and sent her spinning. 

     It didn't shred her, though. The cyclone did not shred Tindriss the way it did everything else. 

     Damn.  

​     Tindriss disappeared within the gray, cyclonic cloud, but Katy didn't take her finger off the trigger. The shredder trembled on Katy's shoulder.

     "Gramps, what do I do now?" Katy yelled to make herself heard over the shrieking shredder. He stood right behind her. For the moment, he was unaffected by the whipping 'clone. 

​     "Keep it up!" was all he could think of to yell back.

​     To Katy, it was like reality had split itself in half. The universe in front of her, where she had the shredder aimed, had now become this whirling vortex filled with bits of everything it touched. Behind her, where Gramps stood, where half the structure they'd been standing in still stood, along with the weapons wall and the door leading to the hot tub, was Reality, the reality Katy had been born into and had spent her entire life living in. Then,

     No. No, it couldn't be. 

CONTINUE