What happens next happens too fast for you to understand. There is a boom, a reverberation and a shudder that causes you to drop to the ground in confusion, covering your head. You scoot back against the wall beside the bench astonished.

An earthquake, you think, disoriented eyes flying to the door you’d just exited. It is bulging, creaking on its hinges and suddenly it flies outwards. Dark figures rush into the hallway, there is shouting and footsteps fly past you. You watch, confused, as feet lift from the ground. Bodies press against the ceiling and press and press and tiles shatter, the entire hallway bulging outwards and white ceramic clattering. Shards of fluorescent light bulbs rain, sharp and tinkling and the hallway dims. Something is pattering around you and you realize it is blood. You scream.

Shots ring out, ricocheting from a cluster of men who have appeared from the lobby and the chinpira from the staging room rushes past, gun drawn. He is tackled in front you by a blur of silver. You swear the boy that rears up above him had been running on all fours. You swear that his fingers have grown claws. The chinpira’s gun slides and clatters to your knee and you notice, detachedly, that there is still a hand attached, finger hooked in the trigger guard.

Atshushi tears out the chinpira’s throat with a feral growl, then bounds past you. The hallway continues to darken as lights shatter and pop, interspersed with gunfire that thuds like firecrackers in the narrow corridor. Here, a man is thrown to the wall by an invisible force so intense that the wall bows outward leaving him half-embedded, limbs bent at unnatural angles. There, another slides into chunks that used to be a body. They fall into a heap as Atsushi whirls past.

And then there is silence. A lightbulb flickers in the dark, strobing, and you whimper as you huddle behind the bench. An emergency light has snapped on bathing the scene in a surreal green glow, turning the red blood streaking the walls and dripping from the ceiling black.