3

I turned around in fear, expecting to see something that could kill us, tear us apart, but instead, I saw a glimmer of a better outcome, a hope – faint, ephemeral, but hope that allowed me to believe that we could escape this hell. Hope that we would live.

A group of soldiers was heading our way; there were about eight of them, and one person was being carried in their arms.

“Hey!” I suddenly shouted, jumping up and waving my arms. The certainty that the soldiers would help us quickly clouded my mind – who better to know about all this shit than them?!

“Be quiet!” Sam snapped. “They already saw us! Don’t draw any more attention!”

“Sam, it's a miracle, Sam!” I whispered wildly, reaching out with cold fingers to grab his hoodie. “They’re going to get us out! We’ll go home…”

Dort gave me a doubtful look, making an effort to feign resignation. I didn’t notice the despair that flashed across his face; I probably didn’t want to… I just wanted the confusion and fear to clear from my mind. I wished to leave the city, shake off the stench, stop seeing the triumph of chaos and death. Let the nightmare end and fade away – whether not in a day or a month, but someday, erased from my memory.

That fleeting glimmer of hope helped me find my strength. The exhaustion passed, and for a moment, I felt as if I could move mountains, as long as someone explained what was happening.

But hope is deceptive.

Forgetting fear and danger, I pulled Sam forward, walking as fast as I could. My legs, feeling as heavy as lead, could barely carry me. But I didn’t care; I needed to reach the soldiers, to get answers to at least some of my questions.

“What’s going on?” Sam asked nervously and loudly before we had even caught up to the soldiers, and the street echoed his question, carried by a gust of wind; I snapped to awareness and glanced worriedly at Dort. He had never liked people in uniform, despised anything related to weapons and violence. How desperate must he be to be the first to start a conversation…

The man leading the group raised a finger to his lips in warning and spoke only when we were no more than a meter apart.

“Nothing good,” he said, giving us a scrutinizing look. He looked to be around forty to forty-five; short, greasy black hair, touched with gray in places, dark, thick eyebrows, and narrow lips. He held a rifle against his chest. “I assume you spent the night in isolation?” And, without waiting for an answer, he continued. “The Northern Plague has spread through the remaining areas and swept the city overnight. There will be no evacuation. Government forces will not come. A safe place should be sought outside the neighborhood on your own.

But all I could think of was one phrase ringing in my head: "swept the city." I swayed. Swept the city? Everything had been fine yesterday. It had only been one night. Swept the city. Yesterday everything had been relatively normal!

“Are you injured?” asked one of the soldiers who stood a little apart. Sam shook his head.

“No, but it looks like you have injured people,” he began cautiously, “and we know of a more or less safe place; we spent the night in a bookstore…” He added urgently, “We need help and…”

“Lead the way. We’ll discuss everything there,” the man who had started speaking with us interrupted Sam. “But no foolishness.”

Sam nodded unevenly and pulled me back, still eyeing the soldiers impassively. The group was made up of men and two girls, one of whom, injured, was being carried. Her jacket was tied around her waist, and her shirt was soaked with blood – her shoulder was bleeding heavily, but she was alive: she moaned and occasionally twitched, gasping raggedly for air.

The man leading the group fell into step with me and Dort, and his gaze was as watchful and inquisitive as mine. He was a little taller than Sam; he exuded a sense of firmness and confidence on some physical level. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that several weapons were pointed in our direction.

Soldiers like soldiers. Black uniforms, heavy high boots, backpacks, tactical vests, pouches, jackets, knee and elbow pads. On their belts – knives, spare weapons; some had holsters on their chests or legs. A few wore helmets.

“How did you survive these past twenty-four hours?” A man walking next to us asked hoarsely, examining us with a keen gaze. “A bookstore, huh? It's not exactly a place that associates with an impenetrable stronghold.”

“We haven't been outside since yesterday,” I replied more sharply than I intended. “Yesterday, around noon, we locked ourselves in the bookstore with an employee. The basement level. No windows. We can't be seen, and we can't see out. We only decided to venture out today. We were waiting for help, but it never came. We had to rely on ourselves. Honestly, we don't fully understand what's going on… if we understand anything at all.”

“Thank Mother,” he muttered bitterly. “If you had been outside in the evening or at night, you probably wouldn't have survived,” the soldier said, shaking his head thoughtfully as I tried to keep myself from panicking.

“Robert,” one of the group, a tall man with light hair and dark eyes, approached the man walking next to us and whispered something to him.

“Do everything you can,” said the man, whose name was Robert. I gathered that he was the group leader. The second soldier shook his head sadly.

“Too much blood,” he said curtly. Robert grunted and looked at us.

“Is there a pharmacy nearby?”

“Yes,” Sam nodded. “Right by the entrance. The first pavilion on the left.”

“Take Stan and get what you need,” Robert instructed his subordinate. “We'll be in the basement. And, Michael,” the commander held the man for a moment, “do everything you can under the circumstances.”

“Understood,” the man nodded, then turned back to the group. “Taren!”

Two soldiers moved ahead.

Robert continued to ask Sam and me short, monosyllabic questions, mostly regarding whether we had encountered the infected, what we had seen and heard, and where we had been when we faced the consequences of the infection's spread. When I responded that we were journalists here to gather material, the soldier suddenly smirked, studying our faces intently and with interest.

“Where did you come from?”

“Northeast of the Old Frontiers,” Sam said immediately, almost reflexively, and I quickly elbowed him hard in the ribs. Dort winced, either from pain or realization, and looked away. But it was already said. There was no taking it back.

“Frontiers?” Robert asked again, now looking directly into my eyes. “And how did you make it to the north of the Isthmus Region?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?” I tried to respond firmly, although my heart did a somersault and dropped to my heels.

“No, quite straightforward. I'm curious how the customs officials granted you permission to cross the checkpoints and how the reapers let you through. The directives of the last days weren't favorable.”

“Apparently, due to the importance of our investigation, we were allowed to proceed,” I said evasively, holding the soldier's gaze, then turned away, silently praying to the heavens that Robert wouldn’t ask more questions. I wasn’t ready to come up with a lie. The man seemed to understand. He asked the question but not the expected one, and it was even somewhat surprising:

“Military correspondents?”

“No,” I answered quietly and weakly after a brief pause. “Civilian journalists.”

We moved quickly. The sensation was like a coma, an intoxicated daze. The situation itself felt no more real than a staged performance: the soldiers followed strangers into the unknown, while we blindly hoped they could help us. My mind was in chaos. I felt like nothing more than a puppet, with blind faith and a panicked horror. What had I hoped for? What was I afraid of? The uncertainty was grinding me down and exhausting me.

A shattered helicopter. A police car. The blacked-out windows of a store. Doors. Down the stairs. The bookstore. Soldiers moving, communicating with silent gestures. Flickering dots of their sights. The grave silence broken by the hum of flashing lights.

And I kept wondering why there hadn’t been any centralized or large-scale action from "above." If the entire North had descended into this waking nightmare, this chaos; if this plague – an infection, a virus, or madness – was spreading so rapidly and taking everything around it, why wasn’t anyone trying to stop it? Why silence the press? Why sacrifice the health and lives of people?

What kind of disaster was it if surviving a night in the city was considered an impossibly difficult feat?

Again, the eerie grocery store. Again, blood on the floor. Again, the bookstore.

Five days had passed since we left for °22-1-20-21-14. Five days ago, everything was so different. I couldn’t have imagined that I’d end up in such a predicament; that just two days earlier, sunlight had gently filtered through the colorful blinds into the trailer’s cabin as we drove past another checkpoint, celebrating our luck. I remember the euphoria we felt as we set out, the insane happiness of the initial departure – ahead lay a long road, but I was happy about it, thrilled that we had work ahead, looking forward to seeing new lands, and that I’d get a chance, even if briefly, to glimpse the mountain ranges.

I had a feeling this wouldn’t just be an investigation but something much more significant and important. No, it wasn’t just a feeling, I knew for certain – those in power knew the extent of the disaster and had hidden it from their loyal subjects. We were meant to bring light to this dark game, even if it meant we would have to ignite ourselves. They had trusted us. They had trusted me. And the bearer of the surname whose signature had authorized our travel documents had made us another tiny link in an enormous, significant chain.

But did any of it have meaning now?

A couple of days ago, I was contemplating how I would conduct the investigation, talk to doctors and patients; I analyzed the best way to present the material so that the reapers wouldn’t come for our souls right away… Andrew was singing along loudly with the radio, in a cheerful mood. Sam was constantly joking, brushing off work – it was more important for him to look out the window, noticing every change in the landscape, in the architecture, especially as we passed the border of the Frontiers area and a section of the Central Lands, entering the territory of the Isthmus Region, where tall pines reached up to the skies and juniper thickets intertwined with the roads.

Just a few days ago, the trailer was swiftly carrying us from home into the unknown. What were we warming in our hearts? Excitement? Yes, that was overflowing! We wanted to show who we were, what we were capable of. We wanted to bring back material that no one could obtain, material that no one dared to voice or publish. Did we think it was dangerous? Yes, absolutely. But in a different sense. And the fear was muted by the knowledge of the responsibility placed on us, of what was expected from our trip.

And then everything turned into a feverish delirium.

I barely remember the minutes of that night and morning when the world turned upside down. When I tried to return to those moments, I couldn’t summon specific images into my memory – everything blended into a stream of sensations, feelings, chaotic emotions – and maybe that was for the best. My brain blurred out the tiniest details so I wouldn’t go mad from constantly returning to those horrifying scenes – at least this time, it played on my side, for there was already too much stored in my mind, begging to be forgotten, even if I had to break my hands to forget it.

I clearly remember that I closed the door to the bookstore when the last two soldiers returned from the pharmacy. I looked again at the dark hall through the glass and shuddered. Terrifyingly quiet and empty. I went to Sam, who was sitting at a distance, hiding among the shelves; I sank down on the floor next to him while the soldiers tried to save the dying girl.

About ten minutes later, it was over. The girl had died. Robert spoke something over her body, closed her eyes. He cut a strand of her hair for some reason. Took the dog tag off her neck. The rest dispersed in silence, trying not to show how deeply affected they were. The second girl in the group, a short blonde with a pixie cut, embraced the man with a mop of dark curls on his head. And Sam and I… As terrifying as it was to admit, the girl’s death stirred no emotions in me. Inside, there was only emptiness. Detachment. A comatose state. I had seen too many deaths and blood in these past twenty-four hours.

Then Robert came over to us. He squatted on his toes in front of us, clasping his hands together and exhaling heavily.

“Well, I have a little time to talk,” the man said tiredly, looking directly at my face, while my gaze froze on the patch that appeared under his unbuttoned jacket. Silver snakes were woven into the fabric on his T-shirt in the area of his chest… My eyes widened, and I opened my mouth, gasping. “My name is Robert Sbort, and I’m the leader of the group…”

“The Gorgon,” I whispered, raising my eyes to Robert. “You’re the Gorgons, aren’t you?”

***

The lamps buzzed ominously above our heads. I listened intently, trying to catch any sound. My vision was blurred. It felt like if someone spoke half a tone louder now, I would scream out of fear and horror. The girl's body lay on the cash register table. Her hand hung over the edge of the counter. Blood dripped from her fingers onto the floor.

This can’t be happening to me. This isn’t real.

I looked at Robert, who was explaining how his group had ended up in this city, but my gaze kept drifting to the small embroidered head of a Gorgon on his T-shirt.

You might not have cared about politics, the military, or listened to the news and read the newspaper summaries, but you couldn’t not know about The Gorgon.

"The Gorgon." A symbol group. A ghostly, almost mythically legendary group, whose predecessor three hundred and six years ago helped the First Three rise to power. A small, elite organization, directly subordinate to the Three and only the Commander-in-Chief. The names of the participants were always kept in the background; they didn’t exist as individuals – there was only "The Gorgon" and the Gorgons. They devoted their lives to military service, to this group, giving up their past and future. The most difficult operations, the hottest battle zones – the name "Gorgon" was always there. And no one knew whether there was more truth or rumor surrounding these fighters, whose professionalism and faith in their ideology were spoken of almost with reverence.

“…this plague started spreading rapidly in the northern part of the region a couple of weeks ago. The authorities tried to convince everyone that everything was under control. Maybe it was at first, but you can't seal off entire cities and borders, “Robert paused for a moment.” I was working with my team in the "Cold Calm" area; now fighting has flared up again there.”

“Fighting? In the southwest?” I asked, incredulous. “But they said all military operations there had ended. After all the peaceful and pacifist demonstrations?”

“People never get enough blood,” Sam scoffed suddenly, crossing his arms over his chest and looking down at the floor. I shot him a warning glance, which, of course, he didn't see. Robert, however, reacted with extreme calm to Dort's barb.

“I’m not the one who ends the fighting, and neither are my people. Just as we’re not the ones who start it.”

“How did you get here?” I asked immediately, not allowing Sam to start a debate.

“This Tuesday, we were urgently called back. We were supposed to land five hundred kilometers north of here, but the landing site was declared lost. And not just that. The red zone,” the man coughed. “In the end, we were dropped off at the central area airport and transferred into our own vehicles, with the expectation that we would leave the cordoned-off zone by land. But… The final directive from "command" brought us here. The Monarchs had to admit that attempting to reclaim lost territories was unfeasible. We were ordered to ensure that everything here remained under control; the town is small, but it’s one of the main junctions for the roads. Like every town in the Isthmus Region, really…” Robert scoffed, looking down at the floor with some disappointment. “But the Three miscalculated. Nothing here was under control anymore.”

“How bad?” the question slipped out before I could think. But it seemed like Sbort was waiting for the question.