I heard Elena take a deep breath beside me.
"What do we do now?" she asked, placing blind, terrified trust in me.
I looked at the red-stained corridor. My repertoire of heroic responses was conspicuously absent. For years I had cultivated the fantasy that, under extreme pressure, my mind would devise brilliant survival tactics.
Harsh reality struck me with an undeniable fact: I had no solutions. My range was reduced exclusively to desperate options.
"Evacuate. We’re going down the stairs," I ordered. "We have to get out to the street before these things infest the entire building."
"I barely know you, Gabriel. What guarantees do I have to trust you?"
A perfectly logical objection for the end of the world.
"None. None at all," I admitted frankly. "But I’m carrying a solid steel bar, and it suits me to keep us both alive to cover each other’s backs."
Silence hung in the hallway for a couple of eternities. The metallic click of the deadbolt broke the tension. The door creaked, opening a narrow crack. A trembling hand appeared, followed by the pale, distraught face of a young woman with disheveled blonde hair.
"I’m Elena," she said, her voice barely a whisper. "Elena Marsh."
"Gabriel," I replied. "We already established that."
She let out a choked laugh that was almost a sob.
"Sorry. I’m not... I’m not thinking clearly."
I was completely unaware of her identity or background, but her eyes projected something infinitely more terrifying than the claws of the beast in my apartment: the desperate hope of someone who believes you have devised a master plan. An expectation I was completely incapable of fulfilling.
"Let’s move," I told her with a firm jerk of my chin.
Elena nodded, abandoning the illusory safety of her apartment to step into the massacre of the hallway. She was barefoot. Her left arm had a crude bandage made from a torn bedsheet, stained with dried blood.
"You’re bleeding," I said.
"It’s not deep," she replied. "I think."
We had barely taken three steps toward the emergency exit when a colossal detonation shook the foundations of the entire structure.
BOOM!
Plaster rained from the ceilings, and the walls threatened to crack. Elena dug her fingers into my uninjured arm, seeking an anchor.
"What the hell was that?!" she shrieked.
"Pure destruction," I answered through gritted teeth. "And I’m praying it’s a damn missile and not the bigger brother of what’s in there."
We ran toward the stairwell. The elevator remained stuck between floors, exhaling the screech of taut cables—a veritable death trap we avoided without hesitation.
We descended the flights, leaping down the steps. Seventh, sixth, fifth. The deathly stillness of the lower floors was suffocating, lacking the cries and screams one would expect from an infested building. A terrible omen.
On the fourth floor, we found the first body.
A man, maybe forty, sprawled face-down on the landing. His back had been opened like a book, ribs splayed outward in a grotesque flower of bone and meat. The blood had pooled around him in a dark halo, already congealing.
Elena stopped dead. I grabbed her arm and pulled her forward.
"Don’t look," I said. "Keep moving."
She didn’t argue.
We burst into the ground-floor lobby. The large double entrance doors lay blown open, scattering a carpet of shattered glass across the floor. We advanced to the threshold.
When I raised my eyes to the street, my feet froze to the concrete. Elena stifled a scream, raising her hands to her face.
"Holy God..." she murmured.
I kept my jaw clenched, speechless before the magnificence of the apocalypse.
The modern metropolis I used to inhabit had been transformed into a canvas of chaos and devastation. Vehicles formed barricades of twisted scrap metal, blocking the main avenues while enormous columns of black smoke rose from burning car bodies. A swarm of survivors fled in terror in all directions, stumbling, shoving one another, driven by blind panic. Lurking among the tumult, aberrant figures tore everything in their path to pieces.
Dozens of twisted, alien forms clawed their way through, massacring the defenseless crowd in a bloodthirsty frenzy. I saw a woman tackled from behind, her spine snapped backward with a wet crack that I heard even from a distance. I saw a man try to crawl away with his intestines trailing behind him like wet ropes. I saw a child—no more than eight—standing motionless in the middle of the carnage, screaming for a mother who would never come.
My eyes were drawn to the celestial vault. An immense phosphorescent fissure cut through the darkness of the night, spreading above the urban horizon. A dimensional scar that spilled a sickly violet light, as if a cosmic entity had slashed the atmosphere with an incandescent scalpel.
The holographic panel intercepted my line of sight, displaying an emergency box.
[PHENOMENON DETECTED.]
[CLASSIFICATION: RUPTURE ZONE.]
[INFORMATION ANALYSIS INSUFFICIENT.]
I frowned, reading the last line repeatedly.
"Insufficient information?" I stammered.
The System’s supposed omniscience had just revealed its first blind spot, injecting me with an additional dose of cold terror.
Elena shook my shoulder desperately.
"What are you looking at up there?" she asked.
"The end of times," I murmured, dodging the truth. Explaining to a terrified woman that my retinas were projecting translucent warning windows was completely out of the question.
The menu blinked, replacing the error notice with an existential directive.
[MAIN MISSION UPDATED.]
Objective: Survive the wave for the next 24 hours.
Reward: Initial class evolution.
Failure: Death.
A scarlet text underlined the conditions of the unleashed hell:
[WARNING: Rupture Zone activity is experiencing critical growth.]
I focused my gaze again on the stellar fissure. Its luminous edges pulsed. A rhythmic, dense heartbeat, charged with oppressive energy. Then a guttural shriek cut through the air.
"SCATTER! RUN!" shouted an anonymous voice from the crowd.
The tide of people at the intersection broke, recoiling in a massive stampede toward us. A titanic silhouette emerged from the smoke of the burning cars.
A colossal claw crushed the roof of a public bus. It was followed by a muscular torso covered in chitinous plates, and finally a skull crowned with spines. It was a monumental colossus that tripled the size of the parasite confined on my seventh floor.
The terrified mass fled beneath its legs like mere insects. The titan straightened its spine, scanning the urban chaos. Its head rotated, sweeping the horizon, until it stopped abruptly.
Its fiery pupils made visual contact with me, crossing the distance of entire blocks with unnatural precision.
I knew, with absolute certainty, that it had marked me as its prey.
The status panel lit up in front of me.
[Analyzing higher-level target...]
The cursor blinked, processing the threat. One second. Two. Three. The final notification delivered a chilling verdict.
[SYSTEM ANALYSIS FAILED. THREAT EXCEEDS CURRENT RANK.]
I swallowed a rough, dry knot of panic.
"I definitely hate when you do that," I said.
Elena, who had been paralyzed beside me, let out a sharp moan and took off running in the opposite direction, swept up by the stampede of survivors coming from the main avenue.
"Elena! Wait!" I shouted, but my voice was lost among the screams.
I tried to push through the crowd, but the human tide shoved me with brutal force. I saw her blonde head disappear among the bodies. I saw her stumble. I saw her fall.
And then I saw one of the skeletal creatures leap from an awning and land on her back.
Her shriek cut off abruptly. The creature’s claws dug into her shoulders, pinning her to the asphalt. She tried to crawl. It didn’t let her. It lowered its head toward her neck and—
I lost sight of her in the mass of bodies.
I lost my breath. Guilt struck me harder than any claw. I had known her for less than ten minutes. I had promised to keep her alive.
But I couldn’t stop. The titan fixed its fiery pupils on me, and its sadistic smile widened.
"Shit," I whispered, pressing the bar against my chest.
The holographic panel blinked with a new alert.
[WARNING.]
[High-level hostile entity detected.]
[System recommendation: ABSOLUTE EVASION.]
"For once in your damn life, I agree with you," I replied, and I took off running alone into the dark streets.