18:25 – July 5, 2047 – Surface / Outpost 11
David and his squad moved through the stairwell. Beneath their boots, old wooden floorboards—overgrown with lichen and moss—squeaked and cracked.Inside the former apartments, countless crates were stacked, filled with raw materials and ready to be transported underground after initial sorting by the labor teams.
Tools, electronic components, and hermetically sealed soil ranked among the most valuable finds. These were guarded with particular strictness.
Two rows of barbed-wire fences encircled the outpost, flanked by six watchtowers. Searchlights—salvaged from car wrecks and repaired by nearby manufacturing stations—swept across streets and façades. Their beams cut through the fog, so blindingly bright one felt they might go blind if caught directly in their glare. It was as if the gods themselves had cast their barriers down upon the world of mortals.
Between wood, sheet metal, concrete, and sandbags, they had erected provisional positions—desperate bulwarks against the cold and the void. The building material came from the almost completely collapsed southern wing.
Here, in this frozen world, the underground's foreign inhabitants did not protect themselves from the environment—but from one another. For other scavengers would come to feast on their spoils.
In the courtyard of the square building stood homemade trucks. Their improvised engines screamed like demons trapped in steel, forced to serve human will. These possessed machines transported both human and non-human cargo.
A beast that did not devour its victims, but reveled in their suffering—slowly carrying them from the relative safety of the Metro into the irradiated ice desert. Day after day, it spewed exhaust fumes that killed quietly and relentlessly. In the most contaminated zones, the probability of dying within the next five years was just under one quarter.
Humanity now survived only through sacrifice and hardship. Countless paid with their lives—or with the health of their children.
The five soldiers stepped through the door. In their equipment, they looked like astronauts—lost children in a hostile world, strangers in the emptiness of the cosmos.
With stiff steps, they moved toward the main gate. Their task was to scan the surroundings for irregularities—human or mutated alike.
From the bellies of the steel beast jumped fifteen workers. They began loading the precious cargo—crate after crate. Faceless drones, hidden beneath improvised radiation shielding. To David, they resembled ants following a food source—diligent, blind, endless.
Ammunition and rations were unloaded, raw materials stored. Always the same movements, always the same bamboo crates.
They marched at a brisk pace toward the red-brick double gate arch.
David's gear weighed heavily on his body—the lead shielding, the rifle, spare filters, and above all the extra ammunition. He felt like a stranded fish, washed up on a sandbank of the past.
At the gate to the outside world, beyond the barbed wire, three soldiers stood guard.All of them were faceless—just like him.All of them hid their features from the judging gaze of a world their parents had burned.
One of the figures detached himself from his post and approached the squad leader. Although the wind in the courtyard was weak, David could not understand a single word of the voices distorted by gas masks.
Apparently, the two knew each other well—their gestures seemed familiar, almost cheerful. Meanwhile, David noticed a small detail about the guard standing to his left.It wasn't the fogged combat boots, nor the standard-issue rifle with fixed bayonet, nor the helmet shaped from a steel plate.
It was a button—or rather, the absence of one.On the gray hemp field coat, the third button from the top was missing. Where might he have lost it?
Yet the gap in the silvery fabric did nothing to diminish the man's posture. On the contrary—his chest seemed to swell with pride. Perhaps that very button had popped off because its wearer donned the uniform with too much zeal.
After what felt like an eternity, the two separated again. The gate was opened. Loud, heavy, and creaking, the first wooden barrier swung aside.
"Good luck out there!" one of the guards called after them. They saluted briefly and sharply. Then the gates closed behind them.
Now they stood on a snow-covered strip between the barbed wire—the last barrier between them and the unchecked instincts of the mutants.
"So—across the main intersection, then right into the side street. Stay close together. We don't want anyone getting lost."The commander's voice cut through the wind like a whip.
The cold wrapped around their limbs like a living thing, as if the dead city itself were whispering:Leave—or I will kill you.
Snow crunched beneath their boots. Freezing rain stiffened their shoulders and pressed their hands tighter around their weapons.This world was not merely alien to humanity—it was hostile.
Flashlights mounted on their rifles cast narrow cones of light across ground and ruins. They scanned cracks, debris, and shadows, hoping to find nothing at all.
Despite the cold and the howling storm, the two new recruits managed to strike up a conversation.
"Shit, Achmet—if I'd known they were sending us to the ass end of the world, I wouldn't have volunteered."
"Come on," the radio operator replied. A makeshift radio unit built from scrap hung on his back. "Better this than the Blood Channel."
"I'm just saying—" the other began, but a loud howl cut him off. The sound was sickly, muffled by snow—yet disturbingly alive.
Encouraged by the sign of mutated life, he gathered his courage and asked,"Do you think that was a werewolf?"
"Werewolf" was what they called what surface dogs had become: deformed beasts with finger-thick fangs, black, matted fur, and lifeless eyes whose pupils were barely visible.
They all listened. In the freezing air, even the howl seemed like a warning.
"Bullshit—don't scare me like that," Achmet muttered, visibly unsettled.
"Well," the other whispered, "better those than scorpions or those swamp spiders. You know—the ones near the thermal springs…"
"Will you shut up?" the squad leader snapped.
Achmet looked away. "Come on, sir—it's not like there's anything out here."
The corporal stopped and turned toward him. His voice was cold and hard:"Believe me—anyone who keeps their mouth open won't hear them."
The recruit asked, unsettled, "Hear who?"
"The wingbeats of the black bats."
"I've never even heard of those."
The squad leader pulled his rifle closer to his chest."Flying pieces of shit with a habit of taking their prey in open areas. Silent. If you hear them, it's already too late."
A gust of wind swept through the ruins, making frozen metal beams groan.For a moment, no one spoke—as if the city itself were listening.
They continued on, undeterred by the howls of monsters. They passed through an old shopping street, its shattered display windows framing weathered façades.
David perceived this world as something alien—a foreign body, a gaping wound in history.So much abundance. So much beauty. So many possibilities.
How could people before the Great Fire have been so dissatisfied, so destructive?What kind of lack had they felt in an age of excess to summon such a catastrophe?
What must the one who ushered in the end of the world have felt—the first to bathe the Earth in fire?
How could one still endure oneself,knowing one had murdered the futureand bombed humanity back into a world of pure necessity,of mere survival?
David remembered the end of that past only in fragments.He and his family had visited Schönbrunn Zoo.He remembered the lions—how proudly they paced their captivity—and the gorillas, who had seemed so human to him then.
What had become of them?Probably all dead—or their descendants now roamed this corpse-city as mutants.
From that very zoo came the ancestors of the chickens and pigs that now lived in the Metro.A few daring scouts had brought them underground shortly after Armageddon.The Free Trade Syndicates still made a fortune from animal products: leather, eggs, and meat were highly sought after.
David despised those traders—criminals who turned survival itself into a business,who reduced necessity to a commodityand profited from hunger.
He no longer remembered what he had thought at the end of civilization.Only what he had felt: fear.Pure, all-consuming fear.
Panic at the masses crushing one another,at those who fell—and were trampled beneath countless feet.
In the face of death, Vienna's inhabitants had fallen back on instinct.Everyone—young and old alike—fought desperately to reach the largest shelter in Europe.
In vain.
Only an estimated forty to fifty thousand people managed to flee into the saving underground.What must the soldiers of the federal army have felt as they sealed the gates hermetically—condemning tens of thousands to death?
Everyone had been required to become a monster.A judge over life and death.
And yet—all were equally innocent.All equally stripped of their humanity.
A scream tore him from the spiral of his thoughts—followed by violent wingbeats and shrieking.The comrade who had just been reprimanded by his superior was now in the jaws of one of the flying abominations.
The creature's radioactive fangs tore deep into the doomed man's chest. Blood erupted in a finger-thick fountain from his body. With claws attached to thin, skin-stretched wings, it pinned legs and head.
Screaming in terror, the soldier's eyes stared at David through the glass—pleading, desperate, begging for release.
The corporal shouted at the top of his lungs:"Split up!"
As if controlled by someone else, David ran toward a half-open red wooden door. Gunshots rang out behind him—he did not turn around.
Like a fleeing rat, he searched for shelter from the vengeance of the fauna. His gaze swept the ground floor.
He needed any place. Any at all—just somewhere to hide.
There—a cellar door!
He grabbed the handle and turned it. Nothing. Locked. More screams echoed outside.
Without thinking, he raised his rifle, aimed, fired at the lock, and kicked in the rotting door.
Breathless and gasping for air, he collapsed in the building's basement.