Liam was running.
His legs felt like rubber, his heart was pounding somewhere in his throat, burning away the last bits of oxygen in this cursed air. He had no idea how much time had passed since he ended up here. Time meant nothing in this chaos — there was no "yesterday" or "tomorrow," only an endless, exhausting now.
"Fuck… there's no time, goddammit! I'm so fucking sick of this…"
"Huff... Huff..."
He was nearly collapsing from exhaustion. His vision blurred; black dots danced before his eyes. Another few seconds — and he'd just drop where he stood, easy prey for whatever found him first.
"I need to rest. Just a minute."
He slumped beneath the ruins of what looked like a garage, leaning his back against the cold concrete, trying to steady his trembling hands and gather his scattered thoughts.
"Okay... how do I get out of here?" That question drilled into his skull like a nail. "There should be... some kind of base here. The army's base. The people fighting those things."
Scraps of knowledge from the book, mixed with fragments of someone else's memories, formed a blurry, fragile picture in his head. Yes — there had to be an army. But where?
"But where the fuck is it? I don't know shit!"
He clutched his head, trying to squeeze out any clue from his fractured memory. A map — he needed a map. But where the hell could he find one in this wasteland? His pockets held nothing but dust and the crushing sense of being utterly, completely lost.
"God... there was no map. Fuck."
Despair hit him again, bitter and suffocating. And with it came the most terrifying, existential question of all — one that hurt worse than any monster's claws.
"Who am I, even?"
He looked down at his hands — hands that weren't his. Strong, veined, but foreign.
"A twenty-one-year-old guy from Moscow who was just rushing to catch the subway? Or a seventeen-year-old kid whose memories of his first kiss and school screw-ups are now somehow mine?"
"Fuck... Jesus fucking Christ..."
The curses slipped out in a hoarse whisper — the only relief in this nightmare. His old life, his plans, all his "later" and "someday" — all of it was gone, washed away like chalk drawings in the rain.
"What the hell am I supposed to do now?"
The question hung in the oppressive silence of the ruins. There was no answer. No soundtrack, no friendly voice to guide him, no comforting advice from a parent. Only the gray sky, the cold wind, the crowbar in his hand — and raw, animal fear.
He closed his eyes, searching for something solid inside himself. A core — whatever was left of two broken lives.
"Survive," he whispered, tightening his grip on the crowbar until his knuckles turned white. "Just... survive. One step. Then another. Find water. Find food. Find those... soldiers."
He took a deep breath, forcing this new, young body to obey. The fear didn't go away. But something else joined it — stubbornness, fury, the raw will to live one more day, just to spite the world.
He rose to his feet. His legs still trembled, but he was standing. He was alive. And while he was alive — there was still a chance.
"All right," he muttered, shaking off the sticky threads of despair. "Time to move."
"It's been a year, and we still haven't found him."
Arman stood by the thick, armored window of his office, staring toward the Dead Sector — that vast ocean of ruins which had once been a thriving city. His reflection in the glass looked older, worn. A year of fruitless searches, a year of empty reports, a year of guilt slowly corroding his soul.
"Tomorrow's his birthday. Eighteen."
He pictured Liam's face — not the frightened boy he'd last seen, but a grown young man. At that age, he should've been preparing for officer academy entrance exams, like Arman and Daniel once dreamed of. Instead, he was somewhere out there, in hell... or had become part of it.
"Damn it," Arman exhaled sharply, pushing himself away from the window.
He threw on his heavy overcoat and left the office. He needed movement — something to silence the crushing thoughts. He headed toward the hangar, where soldiers were busy preparing for a new reconnaissance mission. Maybe this time...
A year.
He stood at the edge of an overgrown cliff, looking down at the valley below. The wind whipped through his long black hair — tangled, filthy. His rough beard had long ceased to bother him. His lean body, wrapped in a faded black jumpsuit patched together from scraps, was covered in scars — mute witnesses of every fight he'd survived. His brown eyes, once bright and curious like that guy from the subway, now held only the wary, animal focus of a survivor.
"Damn... It's been a year since I got here," he said, his voice low and hoarse, echoing through the empty silence.
A year. A year of scavenging through ruins for cans of food and drops of clean water. Hunting rats. Running, hiding, pouring homemade alcohol into his wounds. He had searched for more than just food — he'd searched for weapons. And he'd found them. Along with his trusted crowbar, he now carried a handmade spear, its tip sharpened from rebar.
He trained every day. Remembering fragments from movies and books, he taught himself to move quietly, strike faster, aim for weak points — the ones he'd once read about in Nightingale. He'd killed monsters — weak ones, strays he could trap or bludgeon from hiding. Each victory cost him blood and pain, but it made him tougher. Harder.
"Fuhh…" he exhaled — not just a sigh, but the sound of a man who'd lived through hell.
Then he turned his head — and saw it.
A structure. No — an entire compound, ringed with tall walls of steel and barbed wire. Guard towers rose above it; beyond the walls he could see hangar domes, antenna masts, and even faint glimmers of green — hydroponic gardens, maybe. The place radiated power, order... safety.
A base.
His heart, trained for a year to beat slow and steady, suddenly roared to life. Adrenaline, that old friend, surged through his veins.
"I finally found it…"
But euphoria quickly gave way to something colder — the hard-earned caution of a survivor. He crouched behind a pile of rubble, eyes narrowing as he studied every inch of the approach.
"But what kind of base is it?" he murmured. "Military? The one from the book? Or... something else? Bandits? Some kind of mad scientists?"
A year of surviving alone had stripped him of any naïve belief in happy endings. Any light in the dark could be salvation — or another trap.
"No one knows," he thought grimly.
He stayed in the shadows, motionless, observing the patrol patterns on the walls, every detail that might matter. He had come too far to die at the gates of salvation.Or at the threshold of a new nightmare.