"I feel like I don't belong in this world. I run and run, only to be tormented by a monster wearing my face."
Lead dust was the first thing I felt when I woke up.
It always was.
The metallic taste came before I opened my eyes, that familiar sensation of having slept with my mouth open in a room full of rust that never went away no matter how much I tried to swallow or spit.
This was the world humanity had brought upon itself.
I dragged myself out of bed, and the mattress nearly gave out, its old springs protesting as if even they were tired of putting up with me. I weighed almost nothing myself: my hipbones jutted against my skin when I lay on my side, my ribs showed when I raised my arms. Honestly, I was already closer to death than I cared to admit.
Sleep had been brief, perhaps two hours interrupted by noises from outside. Footsteps in the alley that could have been someone passing through or someone checking how easy it would be to break into my house. Beyond that, in the middle of the night I'd heard the sound of something being dragged across the road. It could have been furniture. It could have been another body ready to be discarded.
In the corner of the room, hanging crooked on the wall, was a mirror I avoided most days. Unfortunately, today I needed to assess the damage I suffered these past days.
I picked up an old glove from the floor and wiped a clear strip across the glass, the motion raising a cloud of particles that floated in the air before settling somewhere else.
The face that stared back at me was technically mine, but the woman in the mirror looked at least forty when I had just turned twenty-seven. Radiation did that: it stole years from your life and stamped them on your face well before their time. The dark circles were deep and purple at the edges, the skin so thin I could see the veins pulsing at my temples. It was a sign that several small tumors were piling up in my body, just waiting for the right moment to kill me.
The average life expectancy where I lived was thirty-three years. I was on schedule, with a comfortable margin of six years to die of cancer, starvation, thirst, or any of the creative ways this world had invented to eliminate people like me.
The thirst was stronger than usual today, strong enough to make my throat scratch when I swallowed the saliva that barely existed in my dry mouth.
It had been four days without water. The edge of comfortable. After five, my mind started doing strange things: projecting thoughts that weren't mine, voices whispering when I closed my eyes. After six, the body stopped cooperating. I'd never reached seven, and I had no intention of finding out what happened then.
I sat on the living room couch, and the furniture protested with a groan. I closed my eyes and tried to daydream about something good.
I wanted to see my other life, a life where I existed as a person and not as an animal.
I tried to visualize a house with running water, a blue sky, real food on the table, but the only thing my mind produced were images of my thefts.
One of them had scarred my soul in a way I couldn't erase.
The victim had been a seven-year-old child, carrying a bottle of murky water that must have been reused dozens of times. I put my knife to her throat before she could run, and she looked at me with those enormous eyes full of a terror I knew well.
The water was for her mother, the child told me between sobs. Her mother was dying of dehydration.
I took the bottle anyway.
I grabbed my knife from under the couch, wrapped in a piece of cloth that had once been a shirt.
The blade was large enough to frighten any sensible person, the kind of knife butchers used to cut meat from large animals. I'd found it under a bridge a few years ago, alongside the body of someone who had chosen to stop living. The scene still appeared in my nightmares sometimes: the body sprawled on the ground, the knife buried in their own chest, dried blood forming a dark pool around them.
The same blade that had brought death to that person was the only thing that guaranteed my survival.
I fastened the knife at my waist with a strip of torn fabric and put on my gas mask, adjusting the straps until I felt the rubber seal against my skin. The mask was my only relief: not just because it filtered the poison I breathed every day, but because it hid my face. No one could recognize me with the mask on, no one could say for certain that I was "the Vampire" from the rumors.
I hated that nickname. I didn't consider myself a killer, at least not on purpose. "Vampire" was an exaggeration to describe someone who sometimes made cuts on unconscious people to avoid dying of thirst.
But people liked stories with scary monsters. It was easier to turn me into a monster than to admit that any of them would do the same in my place.
In this city, I was the most harmless of monsters.
I left the house, moving the door slowly so as not to break the hinges.
The outside air hit me even through the mask's filters: hot, heavy, laden with metal particles and radiation that I felt entering through my pores. Vomit rose in my throat on the first breath. I swallowed it back down, the burn spreading through my chest. That automatic reaction never got used to the poison that passed for air in this city.
The sky was that sickly yellow color I knew all too well, a dirty yellow that seemed more like the shade of an infection than natural light. My alley was near where a great cathedral had once stood, in the center of a metropolis that was now more silence than noise, more ruin than city.
Abandoned buildings stared at me from all sides like giant skulls, the holes of windows like empty eyes. Rusted cars occupied the streets in random positions, some with doors open as if their owners had run away and never returned. But what marked that neighborhood most was the silence: a heavy silence that didn't suit a city that had once been the largest in South America.
I began walking toward the alleys I knew best.
It was more than fifteen minutes of walking before I spotted what I was looking for.
A silhouette moving slowly about fifty meters ahead, with that hunched posture of someone carrying something heavy. From the way they walked, I knew it was someone weaker than me, someone who wouldn't be able to run fast or fight properly.
I felt the change happen in my body before I consciously decided to act. My heart raced, my muscles tensed, my vision focused on the target, ignoring everything else. That's how the hunt worked: you didn't think, you became something else for a few minutes. Something beyond guilt, beyond hesitation.
The person entered an alley between two abandoned skyscrapers.
It could be a trap. Gangs used bait to lure people like me into dead-end alleys; the police ran operations to clean the streets of "undesirable elements." It was strange to see such a delicate figure walking the streets at that hour, without any escort.
But the thirst was too strong to go back empty-handed.
When she disappeared between the buildings, I followed right behind, taking advantage of dust waves blowing from north to south.
The corridor was less than five feet wide, the walls of the buildings rising on both sides like concrete barriers that blocked what little light remained. Rusted pipes ran across the surfaces in patterns that made no sense, some dripping liquids that I preferred to believe were just condensation.
The smell there was different from the street's: more concentrated, a mixture of decomposing garbage and urine and something deeper that I couldn't identify but that made my head spin.
I heard footsteps ahead speeding up. The person I was following had started running, frightened by something that wasn't me. Something further ahead. The box she was carrying also seemed quite valuable; she was probably going to trade whatever was inside for water.
The alley opened into a courtyard between the buildings.
Bloodstains covered the ground in every direction, the dark red cracking at the edges where it had dried. There were dozens of broken bones scattered across the concrete, some still with pieces of flesh, others clean as if they had been gnawed with patience. Those mortal remains didn't look human, but they didn't look like any animal I knew either.
The smell hit me a second after the sight: old blood, rotting flesh, and something chemical that reminded me of formaldehyde. My skin tightened, every hair on my arms standing up at once.
I pressed forward because there was no point standing still trying to understand that scene.
When I passed through a couple of grates and advanced through more alleys, I felt the scenery becoming increasingly complicated to navigate: more darkness, more silence, more of that sensation that something was watching me without me being able to see what.
Until I reached a gate more than twenty feet tall, covered in iron bars, with several layers of barbed wire in spirals at the top that gleamed with droplets of moisture. The gate was ajar, the structure slightly twisted on its hinges as if someone had passed through in a hurry and with force.
At the base of the structure, a red sign with white letters made my legs stop:
"Our world is divided between paradise and hell. The gates of heaven open for those to the North. For those to the South, only hell remains."
Every sensible part of my brain screamed at me to turn around. There were too many signs that something horrible awaited beyond that door.
Even so, I pushed the gate and entered.
The air changed the instant I crossed to the other side.
The temperature dropped several degrees at once, the heat of the metropolis replaced by a damp cold that seeped into my clothes and settled in my bones. And the light vanished. Not gradually, but all at once, as if someone had turned off the entire sky.
I stood still waiting for my eyes to adjust, but the adaptation didn't come. The darkness there was different. It wasn't the absence of light, it was the presence of something else. Something that swallowed any brightness before it could reach me.
The ground became soft beneath my feet as I advanced, yielding as if I were stepping on something that shouldn't exist, a substance that produced a wet sound every time I lifted my foot. On the walls, white forms pulsed slowly in a rhythm that resembled breathing: thick, fibrous webs stretched from one side to the other like tendons of something I didn't want to imagine.
I didn't look up as I walked. I was afraid of what might be hanging from the ceiling, watching me pass.
The moans guided me to a circular chamber at the end of the corridor.
The person I had been following was on the ground, her body torn in places that made no sense, her mouth still moving in a plea for help that wouldn't arrive in time. Her eyes found mine for a second: terror, supplication, recognition that I wasn't going to save her. Then they went empty.
She died while I watched, and I felt nothing but frustration at having lost my prey.
Before I could decide what to do, a voice came from somewhere behind me:
"The scent of your blood is different."
I turned with the knife already in my hand.
The woman was standing where I had come from, just materialized from the air. She wore clothes that resembled a nun's habit, but torn and stained with old blood that had hardened in layers. Her face was beautiful in a wrong way: symmetrical, perfect, without any of the imperfections that made human faces look human.
Her eyes were red. Not the red of irritation or exhaustion, but a red that glowed in the dark with its own light.
The aura of death swirled around that thing. It was one of those things I heard a lot about but never believed:
The monsters that walk in this hell I live.
"You have hope," she said, and her voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, vibrating in the walls, in the floor beneath my feet, inside my own head. "That is rare. That is... Exciting."
She advanced toward me, pulling out a massive scythe, and I retreated as far as I could, preparing myself for the next move.
The scythe came all at once and cut through the air, aiming at my neck. I quickly understood that all I could do was retreat and try to dodge that avalanche of steel. When she finally drove the scythe into the ground in a vertical strike, I charged forward with everything I had.
All I needed was to hit her at some point that seemed weaker, and the only one I could think of was her heart, which was completely black and exposed on her skin.
But seeing my intention, she dodged effortlessly, her body moving in ways that didn't match human anatomy.
I tried again, aiming at her shoulder, and this time she let the blade enter. Simply let it, looking down at the metal sinking into her own flesh with amused curiosity.
She didn't bleed. She showed no pain.
Her hand closed on my wrist before I could pull the knife back, her fingers squeezing with a force that made my bones creak and a scream escape my throat.
"No," she said, almost gentle, almost maternal. "It's not your time yet. You need to suffer much more than this if you truly want to escape this hell... In fact, I think you never will..."
She threw me against the wall as if I weighed nothing. The impact drove the air from my lungs and made my vision burst into white spots. I felt my ribs cracking, felt warm blood rising through my throat, felt my body being broken from the inside and outside.
The Nun approached slowly, each step making the ground tremble.
"I'm going to let you live a little longer," she said, crouching until her face was level with mine. Her red eyes filled my entire field of vision, glowing with a hunger that I recognized because it was the same hunger I felt when the thirst became too strong. "I want to see how long that hope of yours lasts before it breaks."
She smiled faintly and covered herself with the veil.
Then vanished into thin air.
I lay on the ground for a time I couldn't measure; the pain in my ribs felt like it would take me to death if I didn't do something.
When I finally managed to move, every breath was a stab in the chest. I staggered toward a corridor I didn't remember seeing before, following the intuition that anywhere was better than there.
It was in the midst of all these thoughts that I saw something.
A box.
It was lying in a corner, half-hidden behind debris. A metal box the size of a shoebox, with a technology company's logo engraved on the lid and scratch marks on the surface. Beside it, a body: a man in a suit who seemed to have died trying to protect the box, or just had stolen it and bled to death.
I don't know why I took it. Maybe because it could be worth something, maybe because I was in shock and my mind wasn't working right. Just grabbing things without thinking. I tucked the box under my arm and kept walking until I found an exit back to my house.
I need to find a way to treat my wounds. I thought.
I arrived home when the sky was already that rotten orange shade that passed for sunset. I locked the door and collapsed on the couch with the box in my lap, with no energy for anything else.
For a while I just stared at it, trying to process what had happened. The woman with red eyes, the torn body on the ground. Nothing made sense. Nothing ever made sense in this world.
I opened the box.
Inside was a device I didn't recognize: a kind of thin metal arc the right size to fit on a head, with two stems that descended toward the temples. On the back, a small plate with several words that seemed to be from something called "Instruction Manual."
I wanted to scream when I took everything out of the box. It couldn't be possible that I had risked so much only for electronic equipment that didn't seem to have any value.
Why had both that first person and the second one died near this box, as if it were the most precious thing in the world?
It wasn't water. It wasn't food. It wasn't anything useful...
But maybe this thing had another use.
I was just... tired. Tired of surviving, tired of hurting, tired of waking up every day to the same dust and the same thirst and the same fear. If that device was going to kill me when I put it on my head, at least it would be a different way to die.
I put the device on my head.
My house vanished.
It wasn't exactly like fainting; I didn't lose consciousness, I didn't see darkness. One second I was on my couch looking at the moldy walls; the next second I was somewhere else.
I was lying on my back on the ground.
The first thing I felt was the smell. Flowers, grass, clean air entering my lungs without burning, without scratching, without leaving a metallic taste. For the first time I could remember, the pain of breathing didn't come.
I opened my eyes, and the sky was blue.
Not yellow, not gray, not covered in dust. It was truly blue, a blue I only saw in very old photographs. The sun shone with a light that didn't hurt my eyes, that warmed without hurting.
I sat up slowly, my ribs still aching, but less than before. The pain had been partially left behind along with the rest of the world. I was in what seemed to be a garden that stretched in every direction as far as my eyes could see.
There was green, soft grass, flowers of colors I didn't know existed, butterflies flying among the bushes, even the sound of the wind was different. There was peace in everything I could look at.
And in the center of the garden, gleaming under the impossible sun, I saw a fountain of crystalline water.
My body moved before my mind could stop it.
I dragged myself to the fountain, ignoring everything that wasn't that water, that clean and transparent liquid that flowed from the white stone without any dirt, without any strange color, without any chemical smell. I plunged my hands in, and the sensation of the cold against my skin was almost painfully good.
I drank in desperate gulps that ran down my chin and soaked my blood-stained clothes. I drank until my stomach ached, I drank until the thirst finally began to subside for the first time in I don't know how long.
My blood was infecting the fountain, and I looked around to see if it would attract anyone's attention. For some reason, I knew that soon someone would hurt me in this place.
But nobody came.
When I finally finished, I felt my ribs tearing me apart from the inside, probably from the movement of drinking water. I had injured something that shouldn't have been injured.
I tried to stand up, and my legs gave way, throwing me back to the ground.
The impact sent a wave of pain through my entire body. My vision darkened at the edges, and I had to close my eyes and breathe slowly so as not to faint right there.
I dragged myself away from the fountain, leaving a trail of blood on the green grass that seemed almost an offense to that place.
The garden was too large to make sense. I walked, I crawled, I staggered, and the horizon remained full of flowers and grass and trees that looked painted by someone who had never seen the destruction of the real world.
That's when I heard voices.
Children's laughter, coming from somewhere ahead, mixed with a female voice speaking in a tone too soft for me to understand the words. The sound made me stop in place, my heart racing in my chest: voices meant people, and people meant danger.
But I had no choice. I was going to die if I didn't find help.
I dragged myself toward the sound, using the trees for support, leaving bloodstains on every trunk I touched. The pain was no longer something separate from me; it had become part of my body like bones and muscles.
The garden opened into a clearing.
In the center, surrounded by flowerbeds that seemed cultivated with care, was a woman sitting on a bench of white stone. She wore clothes that resembled those of a queen from fairy tales: a long dress of fabric that shone under the sun, golden embroidery on the sleeves and neckline, a delicate crown of intertwined flowers in her blonde hair.
Four children played around her, running between the flowerbeds and laughing at something I couldn't see. The woman watched them with a smile on her face, her eyes following every movement with an attention I didn't understand.
The expression on her face didn't make sense to me. It was too soft, too calm, too gentle. No one looked at other people that way, not in the world I came from.
One of the children saw me first.
The boy stopped running mid-step, his eyes widening when they found my figure staggering at the edge of the clearing. He shouted something I couldn't parse. Northern, sharp-edged. Then he jabbed a finger at me, and the other children stopped too, their faces transforming into masks of fear.
That I recognized. Fear. That made more sense.
The woman rose from the bench in one fluid motion.
Her eyes found mine, and I waited to see the change: the suspicion, the hostility, the cold calculation of someone assessing a threat. It's what any sensible person would do upon seeing a stranger covered in blood invading their garden.
But the change didn't come.
What I saw on her face was something else, something I couldn't name because I had never seen it directed at me. She said something to the children in a calm tone, and they ran off in the opposite direction without looking back.
Then she began walking toward me.
I wanted to run, wanted to defend myself, wanted to do anything other than stand still waiting for what would come. But my body had reached its limit; my legs trembled so much they could barely hold me up, and my vision was darkening at the edges again.
The woman stopped a few steps away.
Up close, she was even more beautiful, the kind of beauty that seemed unreal. But it wasn't her beauty that confused me. It was the expression: her eyes were... worried? Worried about me?
"You're hurt, what happened to you?" she said, and her voice was soft but had a weight beneath it, an authority that didn't need to shout to be heard.
The words were Northern. My brain translated them anyway. A dull warmth buzzed at my temples where that metal arc pressed into my skin.
I opened my mouth to respond, to apologize for invading her garden, to explain that I didn't want to cause problems and that I would leave as soon as I could.
But the words didn't come.
The ground began to spin beneath my feet, the blue sky mixing with the flowers and the woman's face in a spiral of colors that made no sense.
My legs finally gave way.
The ground came to meet me, but I didn't feel the impact. The last thing I saw before the darkness swallowed me was the woman's face leaning over me, her eyes wide, her mouth moving in words I couldn't hear.
Kindness had never survived in my world.
But she said something I would carry through every death that came after:
"I will take care of you, don't worry."