While Rick launched himself recklessly into the desert, Sophie painfully stood up from the sand, coughing up the dust that burned her throat.
Shaking her head to clear her dizziness, she rushed inside the base.
The sight of the kitchen made her blood run cold: her mother, Sally, and old Mrs.
Bones lay on the floor, unconscious.
Panicked, Sophie threw herself onto the radio to urgently contact Eden’s group.
Her hands were shaking so hard she almost dropped the device.
“Eden!
David!
Can you hear me?!” she screamed, her voice cracking with sobs.
“Katy went crazy!
She knocked everyone out and kidnapped Tony!”
At the other end of the line, the connection crackled violently.
Hearing her daughter’s cry of distress, Sally’s eyelashes began to flutter.
Sophie shook her with all her strength.
As she fully regained consciousness, the mother instantly understood the gravity of the situation.
She grabbed the microphone and screamed her husband’s name through the channel:
“David!
Tony is in danger!
Catch them!”
At that same moment, miles away, a wild chase was cutting the dunes in half.
Driving at full speed, Katy steered nervously, casting anxious glances backward where Tony—his body burning with fever and half-fainted—was tightly tied down.
Behind her, a cloud of dust grew larger by the second.
It was Rick.
Rick’s engine screamed at high RPMs.
He managed to pull up alongside her, his face whipped by the wind and pure rage.
“Wait, Katy!” he shouted to drown out the roar of the cylinders.
“Are you out of your mind?!
Have you lost it?!
What the hell are you doing?!”
Katy turned a face twisted by a mixture of madness and despair toward him, a forced smile on her lips:
“My wolf… You figured it out!
And you followed me… You really are too good!”
“Come on, stop this nonsense! You are reading on g.com, the official source.
Drop the kid right now and we won’t talk about it anymore!” Rick negotiated, trying to keep his composure despite the adrenaline.
“No, no, and no!” she replied, tears finally spurting from her eyes.
“It’s his fault all of this is happening!
It’s because of him that we’re stuck here!
So, if we cross one of those cursed Calamities, we’ll hand the kid over, use him as a distraction, and escape from here together!”
“Seriously, Katy, you’re gonna make me mad…” Rick growled, his gaze growing darker and darker.
“Give me the kid, nice and slow.
Don’t make a mistake.”
The reproach in Rick’s voice broke the young woman’s heart.
Her borderline jealousy, contained for far too long, burst into the open:
“So that’s how it is, my wolf…?
You only have eyes for this kid!
You don’t even look at me anymore, you don’t even touch me anymore… Do I disgust you that much?!
Since that’s how it is… here, take your kid!”
In a gesture of pure rage, Katy abruptly untied Tony’s restraints and hurled the limp, burning body of the little boy straight toward Rick’s motorcycle.
Displaying superhuman reflexes, Rick let go of the handlebar with one hand, caught the boy mid-air, and slammed on the brakes, stabilizing his machine in a perfect slide.
Tony painfully opened his eyes, shivering under the effects of the contamination.
Rick gently set him on the ground and pointed firmly in the direction of the base, visible in the distance.
“Run, kid.
Go home,” he ordered in a sharp tone that brooked no argument.
Tony, terrified and in tears, began to run with all his might into the hot sand.
His little legs buckled, but one thought looped endlessly in his mind: “I mustn’t cry… Sophie told me not to go out of the house.
I have to hurry, I have to go back…”
Rick, however, didn’t even take the time to watch the boy run away.
He hit the gas again, making his engine roar to catch up with Katy, who was continuing her mad dash toward the red zone of the desert.
He drew close to her motorcycle, reaching out an arm:
“Katy, stop this now!
Let’s go back to the base!”
“In the end, you’ve become just like them…” she cut in, her gaze hollow.
“You talk exactly like those people.”
She slammed the throttle wide open.
Rick, clinging to his trajectory, screamed with all his might to pierce the whistling wind:
“Katy!”
“So, if you’re not like them, prove it to me!
Say it… Say it to me, Rick: Katy, I love you!”
A massive underground Calamity erupted from the depths, its jagged appendages striking Katy’s motorcycle head-on.
The machine was pulverized in a crash of metal.
Katy was thrown into the air, flying in a fatal trajectory.
Reacting out of pure instinct, Rick tilted his own motorcycle, positioned himself right beneath her, and caught her mid-air on his chassis.
Katy, short of breath but madly joyful to be in his arms, hugged him with all her might.
But the respite lasted for half a second.
The creature, enraged, charged again from below, striking the second motorcycle in turn.
The impact was so violent that Rick and Katy found themselves propelled together, floating for a moment in mid-air, suspended over the void as the debris of their lives fell around them.
Rick looked at Katy.
Time seemed to stop.
His dark eyes finally softened, losing all their anger to leave room only for a pure and tragic truth.
He locked his eyes onto hers and whispered:
“– Te amaré más allá de la eternidad, incluso si la muerte intenta separarnos, mi amor.”
Tears of pure happiness streamed down Katy’s cheeks, washing away all her past madness.
“Me too, mi amor…” she replied in a breath.
Beneath them, the gaping maw of the Calamity opened up, lined with rows of razor-sharp teeth, ready to swallow them whole.
Rick flashed one last defiant smile, the smile of a hunter who refuses to lose.
His hands dived to his belt and pulled the pins of a cluster of military grenades.
“If we’re gonna die anyway… this would be the perfect time to tickle death a little bit, mi amor.”
“And how…?” she smiled, closing her eyes against his chest.
The explosion was immediate, brutal, blinding.
A monumental fireball tore through the desert sky, vaporizing Rick, Katy, and the Calamity in a single flash of destructive light.
A heavy silence fell back over the sand dunes.
They were gone together.
Meanwhile, out of strength, little Tony kept running.
His eyes, blurred by the fever, finally perceived the familiar outlines of the fortified base.
Relieved, he stopped for a moment, his chest tight, desperately gasping for air.
But the respite was short-lived.
With a low rumble, the sand in front of him upheaved.
An immense black mouth—that of another underground Calamity—burst from the earth, diving straight in his direction with its jaws wide open.
Tony locked eyes with the beast.
His strength abandoned him all at once, and his eyes shut as he collapsed, unconscious, onto the burning ground