Through empty, worn-down corridors, stained with blood and littered with bodies and scattered entrails—almost as if forming a grotesque Picasso—Abner led the soldiers and the survivors out of the hospital building.
It was around 11 in the morning. The sunlight, like a sudden flash, momentarily blinded the girl. She squeezed her eyes shut tightly, raising her hands to shield herself, palms facing outward toward the sun. It almost felt like her face was burning, the intense heat striking her skin, making it prickle and sting like countless tiny needles piercing her in rapid succession.
Waiting outside, parked in a very rough, makeshift manner, were two large armored vehicles belonging to the ZED. They were pitch black—so dark they almost seemed to absorb the light—and their engines roared aggressively, releasing thick smoke from the large exhaust pipes mounted on the sides. The pipes were so hot that their metal surfaces had developed bluish and purplish stains, as if the metal itself were beginning to melt.
"Abner, about time!"
A man—one of the lieutenant's superiors—approached at a slow jog. His skin was rough, his beard whitish, unkempt, and pointed. He spoke with a strong Sicilian accent and came across as crude in both appearance and mannerisms. Despite seeming well past middle age, he couldn't have been older than thirty-five.
"We recovered a wounded man. He needs to be taken to the bunkers immediately."
"Then go back inside and treat him, right? That's a hospital!"
The man let out a short chuckle, stretching into a wide grin that revealed a blackened, decayed tooth in his jaw.
Abner almost ignored him, casting him a brief, displeased glance before pushing past in a hurry, intent on getting the soldier and Victor into the vehicle. Other soldiers stepped in to help.
They immediately opened the large metal doors at the rear of the vehicle. The right door was yanked open so violently that it slammed against its hinges before swinging slightly back, producing a harsh metallic screech that quickly died down. The same mistake wasn't made with the second door, which was instead guided carefully as it opened.
Inside, the environment was dark and dusty. The only illumination came from faint blue lights, some of them burnt out and worn, visible from the black halos on the LED panels lining the walls, surrounded by brownish stains that blended into the darker center and faded outward, forming warped, almost soft-looking shapes. In the dim light, dust particles floated visibly in the air.
The lighting was dull and oppressive, almost irritating to the eyes, creating a heavy pressure in the head—between the nasal bridge and the forehead—and in Toria's eyes as well, especially after the abrupt transition from light to darkness.
Victor was laid across nearly all the side seats, stretched out and assisted by two soldiers, who checked his pulse and breathing despite the lack of proper equipment, using only their fingers.
"He's stable!" Toria said instinctively, drawing the soldiers' attention, though they were initially reluctant and told her not to interfere. "His pulse is very weak, but he's alive! He needs surgery immediately!"
"He'll get it, doctor," one of the soldiers replied, her voice female. "Don't worry. Focus on the fact that he's safe now."
After those words were spoken, nothing happened.
Toria remained silent. Her gaze was struck by a void so deep it felt like she could fall into it. She stared blankly, almost dazed. She looked at Victor with an intensity she had never felt before. She could see the faint movement of his nostrils opening and closing, slowly and weakly, along with his chest rising and falling at the same rhythm. All of this was intermittently interrupted by the fleeting movements of soldiers passing in front of her, briefly blocking her view—especially as the female soldier in the Kariudo was brought aboard and placed at the back of the vehicle, her back against the wall, limp and lifeless like a rag doll. Her head tilted slightly backward and to the left, the mask still on her face, pumping oxygen.
Toria didn't believe they were safe. She had never believed it.
At that moment, any one of them—any of them—whether a soldier, a driver, Victor, the female soldier, Abner, or even herself, could die in an instant, unknowingly becoming one of those "Nightmare Fuels," one of the many names used to describe the Ijo—the most dangerous creatures ever faced and "survived" on planet Earth.
Even as the vehicles were already in motion, heading toward the bunkers, the girl felt a constant fear of being followed by something that didn't merely observe, nor simply study or analyze.
It was something that wanted to unsettle her.
And the reason was simply… because it could.
It felt as though her fear wasn't just an emotion, or a biological response. She felt as if a cold, biting leash was tied around her neck, pulled tight to its limit, permanently fixed there—held by a hand belonging to something with no face, no body.
Her greatest fear wasn't fear itself, but the idea that her fear was being controlled by something… or someone… that wasn't inside her.
An Insurrector. A mental invader.
She had never conceived such a thing before.
The truth was, despite the horrors of the world she had grown used to—the Cyberhumans she repaired every day, hearing their screams as machines dripping with blood and oil were attached to their broken, mutilated bodies; the Ijo attacks that wiped out entire platoons, spreading like parasites among people, killing them in the most atrocious ways the human mind could conceive—she couldn't say she had ever truly felt fear.
She had been scared. Terrified. Horrified. Disgusted.
But she had never felt fear.
Not until that day.
Not until she understood the true helplessness and fragility of a young girl thrown, by sheer misfortune, into a world where demons swarmed like flies or mosquitoes. Not until she understood the difference between a living being and something that had transcended the very concept of death. Not until she realized that the war that had raged across Earth for sixteen years—the war against those anomalies and aberrations, which had driven humanity not only to the brink of extinction but to the destruction of its very hope and concept of life and peace, fueling sin upon sin of every kind and degree, even among those who first committed them—
was not merely doomed from the start.
It was the most pointless war humanity could ever fight.