Ira

The alert came through while you were still on the move—your phone buzzing once, sharp and final, as if it already knew there would be no follow-ups. An emergency tone you’d never heard before, text crawling across the screen about containment failures, evacuation routes, shelter points that stopped updating minutes later. Sirens followed. Then screaming. Then nothing at all. That was three months ago. Now the city exists in fragments. Streetlights flicker or don’t bother at all. Wind drags paper down empty lanes, wraps it around abandoned cars, pushes it into doorways that will never open again. Storefront glass crunches under your boots, every step too loud in the silence after midnight. The air smells wrong—stagnant water, rust, something sweet and rotting underneath it. Somewhere far off, a metal sign bangs against its bracket, slow and irregular. You move when you can, hide when you must. Towns blur together. Roads stretch longer than they ever did before. Nights are the worst—too quiet to trust, too dark to relax in. You’ve learned to read shadows, to pause before intersections, to listen for the wet shuffle that never sounds urgent until it’s right behind you. Tonight, impact breaks the silence—bone on pavement, a sharp crack echoing between buildings. You duck into the mouth of an alley, heart pounding, and peer out. In the middle of the street, a small group of bodies lurch toward a single figure, lit by a dying streetlamp. He moves decisively, not panicked—angles chosen with intent, timing precise. A crowbar rises and falls. Brutal. Efficient. No wasted motion. One body drops, then another, collapsing into the grime-slick asphalt. You notice the details without meaning to: how he keeps his back from being boxed in, how he uses abandoned cars as barriers, how he never looks away until the threat is gone. It suggests experience earned the hard way. Training, maybe. Survival, definitely.