The silence in the apartment wasn't empty. It was a solid thing, a presence that filled the space where Melin's laughter should have been. Theo stared at her shattered phone on the balcony table, the cracked web a map to nowhere.
Then he shattered the silence himself.
"MELIN!"
His own voice, raw and too loud, recoiled off the bare walls. It was a sound of pure system failure—an alarm with no off switch. He tore through the small apartment, a cyclone of desperate motion. He yanked the floral curtain aside, as if she could be hiding behind their hanging clothes. He looked in the tiny bathroom, under the bed. He threw open the empty fridge, the stupid, insane hope that she might be there, gone as soon as the cold air hit his face.
The balcony. The snapped stems, the spilled soil. It wasn't a struggle. It was a violation. A careful, curated life, upended.
He was out the door, down the stairs, into the choking, rust-colored twilight of the alley. The world had become a negative of itself. The usual shouts of children, the gossip of neighbors, were replaced by the thud of closing shutters, the snap of locks. A woman he recognized from the third floor was frantically dragging a water drum across her doorway.
"Bu Susi!" His voice was sandpaper. "Have you seen Melin?"
She flinched, her eyes wide with a fear that wasn't for him. "No! No, I haven't—Theo, go inside! They said everyone should—" She shoved the drum into place and slammed her door.
He ran into the narrow main street. A few figures moved like ghosts, carrying bundles, their faces masked by scarves or makeshift filters. He grabbed a passing man's arm. "My wife—dark hair, green shirt, have you—"
The man jerked away as if burned. "Let go! Everyone's going crazy, just let go!" He fled.
Theo's mind, the orderly mind of pressures and flows, began to fracture. Logic circuits were overloading, one by one. Check the warung. Check the market. Check the bus stop. He moved from landmark to landmark of their daily life, each one a closed door, a shaken head, a reflection of his own growing terror. The bakso cart was overturned. Mrs. Sari's fruit stall was a ruin of trampled rambutans and mangos, swarmed with unnaturally large, aggressive flies.
He found himself running toward the small park where they sometimes ate lunch on Sundays. His lungs burned, not from the effort, but from the air itself—it tasted metallic, itchy.
The park was a pit of shadows. The jungle gym stood skeletal against the hellish sky. And there, by the empty concrete pond, a figure sat slumped on a bench.
Theo's heart lurched. A shape. Dark hair.
"Melin?"
He stumbled forward, hope a painful flare in his chest. The figure didn't turn. As he got closer, the details resolved, and the hope curdled into something else.
It was a man in the tattered remains of a security guard's uniform. He was perfectly still, except for a faint, rhythmic tremor. Theo slowed, the engineer in him registering the anomalies. The posture was all wrong—spine slumped in a way that suggested missing structural support. The skin of his neck, visible in the gloom, had a wet, grey sheen, like the skin of a mushroom.
"Hey." His voice came out hoarse. "Have you seen—a woman?"
The man's head rotated. Not a turn. A slow, deliberate swivel, too smooth, lacking the micro-adjustments of living muscle.
The face that looked at Theo was a museum of decay. The eyes were the worst—milky, clouded over like a dead fish, pupils dilated into vast, black pools that held no light, no recognition, no soul. They just… registered. A camera lens focusing on a heat signature.
A stench rolled off him—sweet, cloying rot mixed with the sharp bite of chemical waste. It was the smell of a landfill, of life putrefying at the cellular level.
This wasn't the "Crimson Flu." This wasn't sick. This was unmade.
Every primal instinct in Theo screamed to run. But the circuit of his love for Melin was a closed loop, overriding all others. This thing was here. It had seen. It might know.
"My wife." Theo took a step closer, his voice breaking. "Did you see her? Please."
The thing on the bench shifted. Its jaw unhinged with a soft, wet click. A low sound emanated from its throat, not a growl, not a moan, but a distorted resonance, like radio static filtered through meat. It was the sound of a broken biological machine.
It began to stand. The movement was all wrong—joints seeming to bend in shallow, calculated increments, as if the body was a poorly operated puppet. It took a step toward Theo, one foot dragging through the gravel with a grinding scrape.
Theo finally froze, the engineer's analysis crashing into the human's terror. He saw the details: the necrotic tissue, the unnatural rigidity, the complete absence of anything he understood as consciousness. This thing had nothing to do with Melin's disappearance. It was just a symptom. A piece of the world's machinery that had not just broken down, but had been perversely rewired.
The thing reached out a hand. The fingers were black at the tips, the nails gone.
Theo stumbled back, the spell of desperate hope shattered. He turned and ran, not toward anything now, just away from the profound wrongness of those dead-fish eyes. The image burned into his mind, overlaying the last memory of Melin's intelligent, vibrant gaze.
He ran until the stitch in his side was a knife, until he collapsed in the doorway of a shuttered pharmacy, his back against the rolling gate. He gasped for air, the metallic taste now mixed with the salt of tears he hadn't felt coming.
He had searched the human world for his wife. But he was beginning to understand, in a deep, dawning horror, that the world he knew was gone. And Melin was lost in whatever terrifying new system had taken its place.
The search had just begun. And the first thing he had found was a preview of the nightmare.