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The sound of a nearby beeping monitor, the soft mattress under my body, the unmistakable refrigerated breeze coming out of the air conditioning, the dense, stale artificial silence, and the muffled shouts of pain emitting from his body.

'A hospital?'

That was all Elgan could think as he gazed at the room's pristine white ceiling. The warm white sheets, the monitors standing at his side, taking care of his vitals, the tubes connected to his left arm. It was in fact the closest thing to a hospital he could have wished for. It felt strange to be here, sitting, calmly, undisturbed. Especially after all the things he had lived through in those few...

'What.'

A few droplets of sweat rolled down Elgan's forehead, his calm demeanor broke for a few seconds, as his internal temperature spiked.

Strange. Elgan felt something important had come to mind, but the fog inside his mind wouldn't let him discern exactly what it was. Only a faint trace of emotions was left by the memory, it smelled foreign... The piercing scent of violence, hatred, perhaps guilt entered Elgan's nostrils.

'That was... a nightmare.'

Those words would immediately come to mind as he tried recalling the memories. Again and again escaping his grasp, slipping down his fingertips. It was when Elgan gave up on pursuing those feelings that he found it. Staring down at his soul, surrounded by a violent storm of terror and confusion, the kid had found what he searched for.

'What- wasn't- a dream at all, was...'

Elgan's heart raced inside his chest as his hands approached his face, his fingers running across the bumpy, irregular landscape the right side of his face had become.

'My eye.'

His fingers dug onto his skin in an attempt to find his missing eye. Buried below his own skin and flesh, Elgan was one-eyed.

'I...'

The question, Why? Was already answered, the reason he was intubated in a hospital bed, on the verge of disability, maybe even death.

His jade-colored iris reflected his right arm, or what remained of it. Just like he imagined his face to be, his arm had become a lump of pale skin and bones extending down from his shoulder, very vaguely resembling the shape of what a healthy limb should look like.

As his eyes descended down the numb appendage, the sight became increasingly deformed, there were no hands to speak off nor fingers. His attempts to move the limb ended at the height of his elbow, his sense of touch reduced to a sorry approximation of what it once was.

That wasn't the worse either. Those memories...

Emerging from the fog, the pitiful state of his body revived the last memories his mind recorded. Memories of persecution, a race for life, anxiety, agony, insanity. All of those emotions threatened to leak back, it was his job to contain them.

Not alone.

His voice raged inside Elgan's skull.

...

'When?'

The meaning is clear now. The kid's body shakes as he manages to feel a presence close to him, his paralyzed body instinctively contorts to put distance between them but the wall behind him prevents it. The young man's eye immediately darts towards the other human standing across the room.

Sitting on a seemingly comfortable white chair, a man with a pale complexion dressed in a doctor's suit, his face completely covered with a convex white mask, only his short black hair visible. His fingers locked dancing over a hologram keyboard emitting out of his wrist. A steaming cup of coffee is on a small table next to him.

"Hhhm, It seems you are already awake... And I expected to be here for another hour at least..."

The doc said without lifting his gaze from the holographic screen. The medic's tone was weirdly off, monotonous, saddened, depressed perhaps. Elgan lowers his guard slightly as they stare at each other, not minding the awkward silence between them.

"Well, I guess we both aren't really in the mood to talk right now. So I'll just say what I have to say."

His shoulders raised in a subtle annoyance as he taps the hologram screen a couple of times, flickering his fingers, the image displayed by the bracelet grows in size, occupying half of the room's size. For some reason, my mouth slightly hangs open, and my teeth grit. This image, is not just any image...

My eye narrows as it gazes in the doctor's direction.

'What is that?'

I was almost said aloud before hesitating at the last moment.

|Tssk|

Careful, I had to be very careful with what I said or did. After all, these people were dangerous.

"Judging by your expression... Huhmm, I guess you do faintly remember anomaly W208."

With a swipe of his hand, the light coming out his wrist dims out, the hologram fades. His fingers lock onto each other, the masked doctor's face raised to meet Elgan's eyes, who attempted to analyze the de situation. Acquiring understanding and awareness, it was only now that Elgan began to grasp the adequate meaning of danger. It wasn't the physical danger that he felt emanating from this individual, in fact, it was a radically different concept of menace.

'Knowledge.'

Staring down at Elgan from the top of a cliff, the man standing before him knew far too much, Elgan knew too little.

'Problematic.'

The doctor prepares to say something else, however, to his surprise a question interrupts him.

"Anomaly, is that its name?"

He wasn't in an advantageous position, better fix that. A curious expression crawls on top of Elgan's face.

Questions, then silence...

A bit of a smirk draws behind the doctor's mask, his body leans forwards and readies to spew. Or at least, that was what it seemed. To Elgan's surprise, the man in a medical gown doesn't answer the question directly.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Guess I should start by that..."

His index finger raised in the air.

"June, year 2069. Known by most as The Decimation."

He paused, letting suspense build in the air before he continued like some kind of tale narrator.

"The nature of the event is not yet fully understood, but approximately at midnight of the first day of the month, a cataclysm like no other occurred."

Snapping his fingers, a new hologram popped up as the room's light shut off. A three-dimensional model of the terrestrial glove slowly spun around its axis, a red dot appearing somewhere east of Malaysia.

"The epicenter is understood to have appeared in Southeast Asia. By midnight leading to the first day of the month, humanity had already lost contact with most countries in an area of several hundred miles around the epicenter. Humanity remained ignorant of what was about to come."

The dribbling excitement in his voice sent shudders down Elgan's body.

"In mere days, the area affected by The Decimation had already swallowed most of China's territory, almost halfway through devouring India and Australia, nearing Russia's frontiers, and nearing old US waters. Invisible, undetectable, silent, everything the dome consumed submitted to silence. Nothing answered back passed the veil."

As if following the man's thoughts, the expansion of the ruby-colored area continued unstoppable, in seconds, the red area had shallowed the planet whole.

He paused.

"In a mere month's worth of time, the entire world had entered a new dark age. We, humans, became prey, anomalies are now hunters."

Before I could say anything, the red layer disappeared, receding to color hundreds of spots around the world in crimson color. Each of them is accompanied by its name, Elgan's eyes shifted from location to location, stuck in neverending disbelief.

New York.

Sydney.

Paris.

London.

Delhi.

Madrid.

Tokyo.

Shangai.

Sao Paulo.

Cairo.

Dhaka.

Beijing.

Osaka.

Bloemfontein.

Butwal.

Milan.

Rome.

Pretoria.

Minsk.

Moscú.

Sofía.

Zagreb.

Prague.

Copenhaguen.

Helsinki.

Washington D.C.

Las Vegas.

Tallinn.

Lisbon.

Shiraz.

Bangalore.

Kunming.

Mexico City.

Seoul.

Pyongyang.

Harare.

Lusaka.

Accra.

Banjul.

Bern.

Budapest.

Tirana.

Vienna.

Dublin.

Hyderabad.

...

The list continued on.

Elgan's mouth was now open agape, his skin felt colder than before on the verge of an unhealthy pale. Elgan had never been one to believe everything people said or showed on the get-go, and yet somehow he ended up accepting it all as fact. It wasn't the magnitude of the events that convinced him, but the images that accompanied them. Famous landscapes are shown one after another, all lurked by monsters brought forwards to that reality, born from the worst of nightmares. Their shapes, forms, their aspects were all different from each other. Their chilling stares recorded in second-long videos and caught on camera were more than enough to reap unsuspecting souls.

A colossal mix-breed between a worm and a serpent coiled around the empire state, its mouth hung open like a devilish flower, as if readying to swallow the building in a single gulp. The surrounding landscape was devastated and collapsed, earth splitting under the tunnels the beast had opened through the earth. The serpent threw out a pile of bile and acid, piles of human bones mounting up along the building's base.

A swarm of blood-hungry humanoids running four-legged across the roads of San Francisco. Their slender faces were blank, without eyes, without noses, only their thin mouths dribbled with saliva, armed with long teeth and tongues, squirming in excitement as they hunted after a bloodied little girl, her steps turning slower, she turned a corner in a last-ditch attempt to evade them, never to be seen again.

A tall humanoid figure several feet in height sat uncaringly on a jade throne elevated several feet from the ground. Covered in a black and white exoskeleton, its three pairs of insectoid eyes gazed bellow authoritatively, feasting on the beauty of the scene at his feet, walls covered in precious gemstones. Hundreds of humans submitted to the entity's might like dogs, dressed in untouched black suits all of them kneeled before the anomaly.

Images, recordings, audio, video tapes. Yet, Elgan found it impossible to believe something like that, an outrageous montage, a lie. Nothing more, nothing else.

Even if faintly... You should feel it too, the difference between dream and reality.

Elgan gulped heavily. The hologram disappears as the lights turn back on.

"HeHehemph..."

The man laughs softly, he backs away a little bit grabbing a smoke from his gown's pocket. The cigar faintly touched his lips before he remembered it wasn't allowed to smoke in here.

"Tell me kid, for someone like you. Does it feel like the world has ended?"

His hands extended lazily to the sides, inviting me to take a look around.

'True...'

Even after that, it seemed the world didn't end. The room Elgan stood in was proof that Humanity kept on advancing, letting the past go to forge itself better and harder. Even in the face of unrecognized adversity, in the harshest of environments, when everything is stacked against you...

Elgan's working hand covered his mouth, for some reason a wide smile parted his lips away. Some people inevitably fall and die. But some individuals, special humans, survive. No. Surviving was not the word...

People, thrive.

"I'll have to see that for myself."

Elgan answered, forcing a frown to draw behind the man's mask. He continued talking, ignoring the kid's answer.

"Humanity isn't gone, there are very few of us. But we do manag-."

The hospital staff was about to finish his sentence when someone suddenly interrupted. The words entered Elgan's head, despite him not hearing anything out of the norm.

- Patrick, need you on medical bay A now. Another strike by Sand Surfers, two of them barely hanging. -

Although the white mask remained hanging above his face, the scowl behind the piece of plastic didn't go unnoticed.

He stood up from his comfortable seat making sure his uniform was nice and tidy. His fingers tap his shinning ear lobe until the device turns off. He was about to open the door to the outside but refrained to do so at the last second, he grabbed for something in his pocket.

"Humm, I have matters to take care of, so, see ya kid."

The metal door opened, he halted his steps before exiting the room, his face turning back to Elgan slightly.

"Also... Those two should be here soon, good luck with that."

With a thumbs up Patrick left the room. He was gone before the youth could even attempt to open his mouth.

'What a fast lad.'

Even though he was now alone, Elgan didn't dare to walk around the room on his own, much less slide to the hallway outside. Neither did he know if he would be able to, his knee was in a similar state to his arm, and he doubted he could walk on his own. Not to mention Patrick had said it himself, someone would arrive soon. Therefore, he limited himself to look around the place noticing things he didn't before. For starters, there was a scanner near the door, probably to prevent patients like him from making a fuzz outside, speaking of outside, there weren't any windows nor fresh air, only an opening to the ventilation system hanging in the ceiling. Plus there was another door to his right too, which Elgan could only guess was a bathroom. Other than that-

| Sshrt |

The entry to the room opens swiftly without almost making a noise. Elgan's gaze instantly set across the hall.

- Bet that fucker of Patrick set a false alarm again- see, he is still in com-a- -

The cold mocking makes its way to Elgan's head, both soldiers seem to freeze in place. One foot already set inside the room, the pair hesitates briefly from entering the room. Both of their stares set on the young bedridden man, specifically at his face, Elgan's expression had turned instinctively hostile.

'These people... This isn't good.'

People? Not people, these aren't people... Monsters. Elgan gulps down as the door slides closed behind the two armed powerhouses, they all remain quiet for what seemed like ages.

Just like the last time they met, both of their faces are almost completely covered.

The taller one wore a purplish reflective helmet, the rest of her suit was made of a thick layer of white synthetic material revealing her considerably toned and curvy body. A thick light grey scarf wrapped around her neck, a silver-colored handgun hanging from her waist. Far from admiring the sight, her firm, menacing stance forces Elgan's gaze away from her.

I scan the other shorter girl. Her eyes were protected by a simple opaque visor preventing me from distinguishing her facial features, her lower face was covered in a rather large white robe, while her hair remained hidden under a hood. Even her hands were covered in long sleeves, hiding away her mouth.

Elgan couldn't discern which one, but equally the words entered his mind.

- He did wake up. -