The moment I opened my eyes again. Nothing…
The road, the presence. There was nothing left…
Only my room.
And me…
Standing in the middle of the place, unmoving, merely contemplating, thinking. Remembering. The guilt remained… but I had accepted it; the weight of my actions should not be avoided, it should be accepted.
Now all that remained was sadness and regret.
I opened my bedroom door to enter the bathroom hole. But the apartment was no longer the same… it was completely empty. No furniture, no decorations. Only walls. The bathroom hole no longer existed.
Only the mark of a small bloody hand remained…
I explored the rest of the apartment… The front door was unobstructed. The locks, the barricades, there was nothing left. In the hallway outside the apartment, nothing.
I went down the stairs to leave the complex. But I ended up arriving in an enormous room. A room full of seats, doors, and a huge sign in the middle.
"General Hospital of S-…"
Part of the name was illegible, but it was clear that I was now in a hospital.
—Serena…
No matter how much my surroundings changed, my thoughts couldn't forget her. My memories were resurfacing, except for one…
When I turned around, the stairs I had come down were gone.
—I need to remember…
As if my words had been heard, the doors leading directly to the emergency wing opened. The sound of fluids being crushed beneath each step echoed through the hallway.
Masses of flesh pushed through cracks in the walls, spreading throughout the corridor. Making way for fluids that spilled onto the floor.
With every step, the echo of the end overflowed.
The doubts grew stronger, but in the end there was only one answer. I needed to find her.
When I reached the end of the corridor… there was only one double door, the one leading into the emergency wing. Covered in putrid fluids that produced a terrible stench.
Inside the wing… there were only gurneys.
Disordered, as though the entire place had descended into complete chaos. Some were overturned, others destroyed. That was when the radio began transmitting a signal. In the center of the area. Several… doctors? Were surrounding something.
—What is it?
I approached and tried to push my way through the doctors without looking at them, focusing only on the center of the circle they had formed. A gurney… A body.
A woman covered with a sheet. Some limbs protruded, revealing a crushed body, blackened due to the necrosis that had already begun devouring the tissue.
!
I tried to back away, but the doctors stopped me. That was when my eyes focused on the nauseating appearance of those people.
At first glance they were doctors. But their faces were frozen in the same expression. Panic, horror, hatred…
A grotesque combination. Their clothes, now stained with blood, only emphasized the grayish tone of their skin, and on their backs they seemed to be carrying some kind of mass of flesh. It appeared to move uncontrollably.
They were no longer human. All I could do was use all my strength to free myself and escape this place.
—Let me go!
However, my efforts were in vain. The creatures dragged me to the gurney they had been surrounding moments earlier, leaving me only inches away, preventing any escape.
The radio interference kept increasing.
—Zzzz
—Zz
Only intensifying with the revelation of the body on the gurney. A completely mangled woman, now unrecognizable. Crushed, bruised, and consumed by the passage of time in a corpse
Not even her face was recognizable. It was completely deformed behind the wounds. But it wasn't the doctors who revealed her.
She did it herself.
She rose with erratic, senseless movements. As if her joints no longer responded properly.
As soon as my body reacted, I fired with the intention of killing her.
But the creature didn't flinch. Instead, it simply climbed off the gurney and staggered forward. Its bones creaked as it approached, beginning to bleed profusely. While the doctors surrounded us.
Suddenly, stretching the putrid skin that had previously been joined by fluids, it formed a mouth.
—Fi…
—Find…
—Ou…r…
—B…
The creature collapsed to the floor, without warning, without attacking. Simply yielding to gravity before dragging itself across the ground toward a door on the other side of the area. Passing through it, leaving behind a trail of blood mixed with pieces of necrotic skin.
The other creatures followed its example, but stopped before crossing the doorway, merely collapsing one after another, forming a macabre path. The fleshy masses on their backs began bursting one by one, revealing deformed fetuses inside, very small ones…
—…
I couldn't even express myself anymore; the image before me was impossible to… it was simply horrible…
That was all I could say. These beasts hadn't attacked me; they had only marked the path I needed to follow…
I had no other choice.
Before crossing that door, I looked at the doctors' bodies. All the fetuses had dissolved; apparently it happened at the same time. Only a few pieces of…
…
With nothing to say, I crossed.
I needed answers, and this world was guiding me toward them.
—Another hallway…
Covered in masses of flesh, just like the previous one. But this time the flesh was more abundant.
When I reached the door at the end, the sign told me clearly…
"Maternity Wing"
—My…
Something told me I would find the answer in this place.
When I entered, it was a single long hallway that seemed to branch into several paths to the right and left. Repeating the same pattern every five meters.
—SERENA!
I shouted, hoping she would help me, guide me… but… I had to find the answer on my own.
I continued onward, listening to screams of pain passing through the walls. The same screams repeated throughout the corridor. At one intersection, I looked to the right, watching a creature emerge from an oval-shaped fleshy hole, like a vertical mouth.
…
It wasn't a mouth…
It had lips, it pulsed…
It wasn't a mouth…
—Shit…
I turned to the other side and saw the same thing.
There was no path left but straight ahead. The creatures were torsos with scythe-like limbs, entirely made of flesh. And between their legs, the amorphous, deformed head of a baby spoke directly to me.
—Da… d… dy…
—Mommy… wai…
I didn't stay to be devoured by the creatures. I ran away as fast as I could, while a voice echoed from the walls.
—It's a miracle she survived, but we need to operate immediately. Let's hope both of them survive.
What?
Intersection after intersection, the same holes and more creatures. The path seemed endless.
—Mo… mmy… yo…
As more time passed, the voice multiplied and echoed in unison, the creatures drew closer. But the exit was already visible. Just a few meters from the final door, I could faintly hear behind me.
—Hel… p… da…
Before crossing the exit, I glanced quickly behind me, seeing hundreds of dead creatures collapsed on the floor.
Their legs spread apart, their limbs exposing the heads of babies…
…
—Ugh…
—I've reached the end…
That final image burned itself into my memory….
—Agh!
An intense discomfort gnawed at me; my head wouldn't stop throbbing.
—I need to find…
The cold stopped my thoughts and eased the pain.
—Cold…
I was in another hallway full of flesh, but this time the cold dominated everything. The fluids now lay frozen. Coagulated blood, cold flesh, bloodstained ice, pieces of skin.
The sign on the final door indicated my destination.
"Morgue"
Everything leads to this place.
—Honey…
I opened the door only to find a cold room filled with compartments where bodies were stored.
There it was, the place where a corpse should have been kept, but it was open.
That was when something began twisting inside, slowly emerging, destroying the few bones that remained, breaking them and moving erratically, as if in spasms.
It was the same female figure from the emergency wing. Her sudden appearance knocked me off balance, leaving me on the floor as the creature approached me.
At that moment, I understood.
—Serena…
At that instant, the beast stopped dragging itself and collapsed at my feet. Allowing me to see her face, deformed by wounds, but behind the pain, behind the suffering, I could see the face of my beloved. The world had been guiding me. I already knew what I had to do now.
…
I climbed into the icy coffin beside my beloved, allowing the door to close. Leaving only me, my beloved, and the cold…
Little by little my body began to feel lighter. The cold was reaching my bones. But her body remained warm…
Maybe it's simply because I was ending myself, but sleep was drowning me. And finally I couldn't stay awake, yielding to the weight of my eyelids…
Together forever…
…
…
…
A final dream came to me before I fell asleep forever. A disturbingly vivid dream.
A maternity room filled with blood, placentas scattered across the floor, and disgusting fetuses accompanying the wrappings of life. A trail of blood led into the hallway.
I went out looking for answers, but I was greeted only by a corridor of lives lost and others struggling to survive.
Babies' cries of pain…
A woman's screams…
At the end of the hallway, she was waiting for me.
Reddish skin, bruises everywhere, crushed and mangled body parts. Alongside an abdomen almost untouched that overlapped a completely destroyed one, as though two images were being shown at the same time.
She wore a patient's gown. And blood… pouring from between her legs...
She…
Attacked me, and I had the gun ready to fire, but I didn't.
—In this world I've realized that all I've done is avoid the truth. Now I realize I should have faced it from the very beginning…
Letting my weapon fall with that final sigh, because I had decided to stop avoiding it…
The last thing I saw was the face of my beloved…
…
…