He was running.

He didn't know where he was running, or, for that matter, who he was running from, but he knew that he couldn't let himself get caught. That if he were to be caught, his fate would be so horrifying even imagination shied away from it. The world flashed by in shades of grey, monochrome, light and darkness and nothing besides, and the utter noiselessness of his flight left a thin film of unreality over everything.

All of existence here seemed to remain in a state of flux. He took one step on a snow-covered mountain pass, the next in a narrow city alley, and a third in a cavern filled with giant crystals, each location heart-wrenchingly familiar, yet outlandish and strange, as though seen through some alien perspective. Doors-that-were-not-doors opened and closed around him in a manner that seemed random and arbitrary – yet the longer he looked the more he could see some twisted pattern behind their motion. Impossible things lay beyond, three-sided circles and Maxwell's demons and time singing purple.

Not even he himself was exempt from this chaos. He was young and he was old, he was tired and he was tireless, he was injured and he was whole, he was himself and everyone and no one at all. Only three things remained the same:

He was running.

He couldn't let himself get caught.

And he was reaching the end of this endless road.

Reality shifted in front of him, like circles spreading across water. The world writhed and wriggled, contracted and expanded and turned into an endless school corridor, as the world was wont to do. Doors-that-were-not-doors slid into existence around him, eldritch beings peering through the cracks, pits of acid bubbled up across the floor, and his spine twisted into a heavy hump. Conversely, his mind cleared, grew sharper.

He couldn't hear the horrors hunting him, not their steps, not their breathing or hisses or howls, but some animal instinct warned him against turning around to look. Though running was pointless, for there was neither safety nor escape, he dared not stop. Despite each thought and theory only bringing him closer to despair and madness, he refused to abandon reason.

Another door-that-was-not-door materialized in front of him – in the place that remained 'front' regardless of where he looked or moved. There was a shape before it, less than a shadow, but more than a thought, vaguely reminiscent of the female form, that made him think of all the things he found delightful and pleasing.

The shape moved – in a way that was more transformation than motion – and raised a hand toward the portal, voicelessly offering refuge, providing salvation and sanctuary from the things hunting him in the dark.

There was only one answer he could give.

"No," he said, and his words were the first sound this grey world had heard. He drew strength from that. "Not happening. I've seen horror films. I know what happens when somebody follows a mute girl into a creepy unlit room."

Defying all instinct and abandoning all common sense, he turned around -

- and smacked his head right into the church's wall.

"Ugh," he shared his thoughts with the world.

The world greeted him with the hustle and bustle of a hundred people crammed into too small a room. A random leg was driving into his sore ribs, several small children were loudly playing something tag-like nearby, and a pungent smell of sweat hung over everything.

After the bizarreness of his dream, something this ordinary was almost welcome.

Leo extricated himself with some difficulty, climbing over the still-sleeping figures to make his way out of the church. The sky was still green, their future still uncertain, but for now philosophy could wait. Urgent bodily functions took precedence, followed by washing the taste of dead rat out of his mouth.

Ten minutes later found him feeling much more human, enough so to reply to greetings with something other than grunts. He even recognized some of the faces. The narrow-faced guy washing the cups and pots was the same one that carried Leonida Ivanovna's stretched yesterday. Vova? Vlad? Vasily?

It was something with a 'v', he was sure.

"Good morning," Leo nodded at the kitchenware. "Busy at work?"

"I need something to keep my hands busy," maybe Vasily admitted. "Helps me center myself."

No, not Vasily, it was something shorter. Viktor?

"You're up early."

"Somebody kicked me awake at five," possibly Viktor replied ruefully. "Well, my watch showed five, but it was still dark outside. Not sure if we shifted time zones during the Snatch."

"The Snatch?" Leo asked, distracted. "Is that what we're calling it?"

Vadim, he remembered suddenly. The name's Vadim.

"It's just something a few guys came up with," definitely Vadim reddened slightly, putting the pot away. "And what about you? Sweet dreams?"

Vadim wiggled his eyebrows, and Leo blinked incomprehensively.

While he had a lot of words for the last night's dream, 'sweet' was not one of them.

"What makes you say that?" he asked, feeling uneasy for some reason.

Vadim shot him a quick grin.

"You were humming all night long."

***

Leo found the first possible excuse to leave the church.

Not that it was really an excuse – with the size of the shelter's population increased by fifty percent overnight, they were running short on all kinds of supplies. The situation was not yet critical, but it could become such if left unaddressed.

It was chilly outside. Another casualty of the Snatch, Leo presumed. Two weeks ago it was the middle of July, but now the cold, the winds and the ever-present clouds hinted at early-to-mid fall, September or October. The days were shorter, too – Leo didn't think the late dawns were caused by the time zone shift. Or, at least, not only by it.

Dawn was a good time to be out and about. Nocturnal predators were settling down after the hunt, and diurnal were not yet up. Monsters or not, crepuscular creatures roamed the twilight for the same reason Leo did, to hide from the predators, and were unlikely to cause trouble unless provoked – with a rare few exceptions, and Leo knew to avoid those. Greenish-grey skies provided just enough natural light to get by, and there was a certain stillness to the crispy morning air, tranquility, creating the impression that he was alone in this city.

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That he could go anywhere and do anything he wanted.

"Ki-i-i-illl me-e-e-e..."

Somehow, his legs carried him back to Kirill.

"What the hell, subconscious?" Leo muttered. "Of all the places, why here?"

He knew the answer, of course. He knew it all along.

There was still something he had to do.

"Ki-illl mm-e-e-e..."

"It's been a while..." Leo started. "Except no, not really, I was here just yesterday, but you know what I mean. I have a confession to make. I've... been avoiding you. Shoker, right?"

Kirill moved toward him in great leaps, still shots scattered across meters of ground, but fell short, skin popping, muscles tearing.

"Ki-i-ill me-e-e!"

Leo closed his eyes, feeling almost physically pained. Though he wouldn't notice it until later, his voice was tinged with a hum, crawling up from the base of his throat to fill in the silences between the words, the nothing between somethings.

"I never understood people coming to the cemeteries to talk at the graves. I mean, it's just dirt and stone and rotting flesh, it can't hear you or reply, so what's the point? If you believe in afterlife, Heaven is unlikely to be closer here than in your apartment... Except, this is not really a grave, is it? It's certainly no resting place. Not for you and not for me."

"Ki-ill me-e-e..."

"Things are changing around here," Leo continued, refusing to open his eyes, to look upon the twisted mockery that remained of his friend. "They were always changing, but this feels more personal, for lack of a better word, more visceral. I finally found out why you were warning me off of large groups. And why you were so vague, too. How do you describe something like that without sounding mad? How can you describe something like that without being mad?"

"Ki-i-illl me-e-e..."

"I'm getting off point, though," Leo shook his head. "You were one of my best friends back in school. We parted ways when I went to Uni and you joined the army, and didn't really cross paths much afterwards, but when the Snatch happened... You were my companion, my mentor, my inspiration, somebody that made me believe we could get through this... somebody I owe an unrepayable debt to."

Leo paused, almost choking. His throat felt sore, raw.

"I suppose, what I wanted to say is... I'm sorry. And... Thank you. Thank you for everything."

He took in a deep breath and palmed a knife he stole from the shelter.

"I'll try to repay you the only way I can."

Breathing out, Leo opened his eyes – and fell back with a startled scream, cadaver's twisted face scant centimeters away from his own.

Kirill snapped one of his heads to the side.

He didn't flicker.

"What..." Leo swallowed, feeling his heart skip a beat, then beat so fast, it would have made a killing on an underground boxer ring. The entire thing was so strange, so bizarre and nonsensical, that for a moment he wondered if he was still dreaming. "How..."

Kirill shifted, his many limbs tilting and flowing around like a forest in the wind.

"Tha-a-an-nk you-ou-ou," he chittered out, the words echoing and duplicating through dozens of heads. "Re-eee-pay yo-ou."

Then he turned around and galloped into the city.

It took Leo several crucial seconds to recover, rushing after the disappearing form with a feeling of intertwined jubilation, unease and almost betrayal. He finally found the courage to do the right thing, and... But his friend was free now, that's what mattered, right? He wasn't cured, wasn't restored, but his friend was free from his endless torment.

It was still his friend, right?

For a misshapen, tortured cadaver, Kirill was surprisingly fast. It took nearly half an hour for Leo to admit that he lost his friend and was pretty much lost himself. The buildings around him were unfamiliar, and the signs, if there were any, were hidden behind dirt and wild plant growth.

Unfamiliar places were dangerous things. There was no way to know what lurked behind the corners or watched you from shadowed openings. Without any witnesses or prior experiences, it was often hard to distinguish what was simply unnatural and what wanted to eat your face off. You had no keys to hide in a nearby apartment. You had no mental map of areas to avoid. You did not know any of the escape routes.

"Hai, Hai. Wir estamos hablando, wir death. Du estas a real barrel of hah, Pietro."

And, speaking of predators, the two-legged sort often tended to be more persistent and dangerous than outright monsters.

Leo dashed behind the nearest stall and held his breath, listening in. His school-level English was nothing to write home about, but it was enough to realize that it wasn't quite the language the unknowns were speaking despite some familiar words.

They rolled out from an adjacent street in the first still-working car Leo saw since the Snatch. Well, 'car' may be a strong word. Its shape closer resembled some kind of futuristic yacht. At least ten meters long and three wide, it floated down the road in a manner that would have been graceful and almost serene – if it wasn't for countless feelers extending from the bottom of the vehicle, prodding and probing everything in their reach. Occasionally, something would catch the feelers' attention, and they would grab the object, bringing it aboard to present to the scientists. And they were scientists, no ifs or buts about it. Though dressed in bizarre and bright-colored clothing, wielding strange devices that were decades, if not centuries ahead of anything Leo even heard of, their mannerisms were so painfully similar to those of the Petrovs when the pair found something interesting, that they couldn't possibly be anything else. The floating car-boat was topped with a gargantuan antenna, at least as tall as the vehicle was long, rising high into the sky like a mast of wire and black steel.

Three people traveled in front of the boat, apparently scouting out the way, and they were the ones Leo heard.

He peeked out over the stall's corner – and found himself looking straight into the woman's eyes.

"Halt!" she ordered her companions imperiously. "No estamos alene."

"Que es?" an Aztec look-alike asked, raising his cudgel. The faces on his face opened their eyes.

"Matte," their third companion said, putting away something looking like a spiked fan and replacing it with a blue sphere that seemed to shift and change before their eyes. He moved it into a different configuration, and all sounds from that area were abruptly cut off.

Leo twitched, spooked by the similarity to his recent experiences.

As the boat came to a stop, the trio moved together, but in a way that still let them cover all angles of approach. The object of their discussion was made obvious by the Aztec's hand gestures.

Seeing no reason to continue hiding, Leo pulled out from behind the stall, observing his surroundings, trying to plot a way to escape. Gloomily he concluded that he had little chance of outrunning the high-tech car-boat in an unfamiliar neighborhood.

Instead, he let his eyes settle on the bizarre trio.

After a week of unwashed, unshaved and disheveled survivors, the trio's appearance cut him with a dissonance so sharp it could be used as a weapon. Each of the three was clean, groomed, fresh – and almost inhumanly beautiful.

No, he realized after a moment's struggle, beautiful was not the right word. They were perfect. It wasn't that something in particular about the trio stood out as attractive or handsome, they simply lacked anything that could be termed ugly, a blemish or imperfection. Flawless. They had no discolorations, no moles or scars or hair sticking from their noses, not even circles under the eyes. Their skin was smooth and healthy, like they just left a spa, their movements languid and confident. It felt as though the trio had just walked out of an airbrushed photo.

The tallest of the three was dressed in some bizarre Native American style, loincloth, cape, feathered headdress and everything. Intricate tattoos danced across his face, squares and triangles and glaring faces. He carried a long spiked club and a shield, though the latter's slight glow suggested that it was made of something more sturdy than just wood.

His male companion went in the opposite direction. An artistically stained dark green jumpsuit covered him neck to toe, overlaid by a utility belt and a silver vest with too many pockets, each holding some widget or doodad, to the point Leo hesitated to say which of the contraptions were actually weapons.

The only woman of the group was older than both of her colleagues, though her flawlessness made it difficult to say if she was thirty or forty or a well-preserved fifty. Her outfit was the easiest on the modern eye, an impeccable pantsuit, divided into equal white and black halves, with right sleeve and left leg deliberately cut short. She wore a delicate blue sapphire in one ear.

Basically, the trio looked like the one dressing them had only the vaguest and most rudimentary idea about human culture and history.

It's aliens, I'm telling you, he remembered Leonida Ivanovna's confident words.

He had a much easier time believing that now.

The wall of soundlessness collapsed, assaulting his ear with sudden and unexpected noises.

The Aztec guy was the one who stepped forward in his direction, the swirls on his face continuing their mesmerizing dance.

"We, are here to help," though the Aztec seemed to speak fluent Russian, the movement of his lips did not match the sound emitted. Some kind of translation technology? "Do not become distressed."

The Aztec grinned. The tech-guy behind him suddenly looked alarmed.

"Take us to your leader."

Leo took in a deep breath. This was it, huh? The Snatchers making their move.

Blood was rushing in his ears, and he sorely missed the maul he left back at the metro station. Well, nothing he could do about it. He also wished he thought of some clever one-liner, witty or inspiring, less cliché than 'you won't take me alive, alien scum!' and more sensible than yelling in fear, but the only thing that left his lips as he charged the Snatchers was silence.

And so in silence he fell.