Chapter 235: The Silent Witness.
The sun was brutal outside, burning through the small window of the room I’d taken shelter in, a white-hot blade slicing across the dusty floor. Cobwebs thick in every corner swayed lazily in the dead air, the room itself feeling like something that had stopped moving days ago—stale, suffocating, heavy with the smell of old rot and dried blood.
Sweat had long since dried to a crust on my skin, leaving salt tracks that burned like acid. Even the infected couldn’t hold themselves upright in it. I watched them through the cracked glass, staggering, slowing, skin blistering under the relentless heat, the sun doing what I hadn’t been able to do myself.
I was in a small town where everyone had turned. Every single person. Houses stood silent with doors hanging open, bodies—some still moving—littering the streets like discarded puppets.
"You’re going to make it," I said to myself, the words coming out cracked and dry, throat raw like I’d swallowed sand. "I’ll die trying. I’ll die tryin—"
The word dissolved. Something broke open in my chest, quiet and sudden, the specific grief of a person who has run out of everything except the will to keep going and is no longer certain even that will hold.
I was crying. Tears should have come, but my body had none left to give. One single, stubborn drop welled up anyway, tracing a slow, burning path down my cheek before evaporating midway, leaving only a ghost of moisture on my fevered skin.
"Why was I born into this?" The words came out of me like air from something punctured, ragged and desperate. "What was the point of any of it. GOD WHY."
The clothes on my back were torn, stiff with dried sweat and dirt, clinging uncomfortably to my skin. My hair full of cobwebs now from the room, sticky strands brushing my forehead and neck. My mother was ash and memory now—gone, like everyone else in this godforsaken town where the infection had swallowed every last soul. No one left to shield me. No one left worth shielding.
Why do I keep fighting.
I collapsed against the wall, letting the webs claim me completely. My eyelids grew heavy as lead. Two days of relentless flight, two days of those looping propaganda speakers droning across the plains, two days of lying to myself that survival was possible. The bill had come due.
"Hungry?"
A voice, warm and impossible, and suddenly I was sitting at a round table, a whole buffet laid out in front of me—glistening drumsticks, fresh bread, fruits I hadn’t seen in my life, steam rising in lazy curls. The smell hit me like a physical force.
"Yee..." My hand drifted forward, trembling, fingers brushing the edge of paradise.
"Abram." My mother’s voice sliced through the illusion, sharp as a blade. "Open your eyes. Open them now."
I forced them open with a gasp.
Hallucination. Again. My sight swimming at the edges, the room uncertain, walls tilting like they were breathing. I was losing myself in pieces and I could count each one going—memories fraying, strength bleeding out.
Outside, the groaning had changed, turning wetter, more frantic. I pulled myself up using the wall, palms scraping against rough plaster, fell once—knee slamming into the floor with a dull crack—got up again on shaking legs. Through the window, I saw them
The infected, clustered in a frenzy around one of their own, tearing into it with savage, ripping sounds. Flesh parted like wet paper. Blood sprayed in dark arcs across the parched ground.
The speakers crackled to life again, their tinny voices carrying over the wasteland like false salvation:
If you possess an ability and are outside the protected zones, make yourself known. Help is available.
I’d heard it for two days. It wasn’t for me. Never for someone like me.
If the gates open, there might be a chance. Even without an ability. Even for someone like me.
I just wanted to live. That was all. The sum of my existence.
"Now," my mother’s voice again, close and certain, right beside my ear. "Run, Abram."
"Get up," I told myself, watching my legs find their steadiness through sheer force of will, muscles burning. "NOW."
I shoved the door open with a splintering crack. Blinding light and scorching wind hit me like a furnace blast.
The infected whipped around at my scent, their milky eyes locking on with predatory focus. Jaws unhinged, drooling black ichor. They surged forward in a lurching wave, hunger overriding the heat that had felled the others.
I ran. The distant walls shimmered on the horizon like a mirage of salvation—massive, fortified barriers against the end of the world. My boots pounded the cracked earth, sending puffs of dust into the air. Behind me, the horde closed in, their collective moans rising into a deafening chorus of death.
And then I saw him.
A figure moving through the infected like they weren’t there. Passing between them with an ease that had no business existing on the plain. There and then not there, real in a way my hallucinations had never been real.
I knew now, reliving it, that I should stop. That I should turn around and look properly. That this moment mattered in ways I hadn’t understood when I first lived it. My heart hammered harder in my chest, sweat stinging my eyes.
But my legs kept running. The memory wouldn’t bend. My body from that day remembered only one thing—the walls, the walls, get to the walls—and no amount of knowing better now could make it turn around.
I felt Venna’s fingers in mine, tight and real in the dark room, and tried to stop myself, tried to look back, tried to hold the moment long enough to see the face, to understand.
The memory ran on without me, relentless.
The walls loomed larger, promising refuge I barely reached. My boots hitting the ground in desperate rhythm. The figure behind me, watching me go, and I couldn’t see who it was because I never looked back and the memory was exactly as it happened and nothing I carried now could change what I didn’t do then.
Who were you? The question burned hotter than the sun. Who was watching me the whole time?