I remember the bus driver, he had the heart to stop for two abandoned children. He slammed the brakes near the big market, we got on and he put the gas pedal to the metal. That saved our lives. I don't know your name, and now you're no longer with us, but thank you, I won't forget you.

And he got us here. He had to stop, or actually, the corpses that jammed the wheels forced him to. And then the corpses got up. People ran as fast as they could. Some fell and were crushed by the others. Many sought refuges in the buildings, as we did. Those that are as dilapidated as if the war was happening here, poorly maintained, prone to catch fire, to suddenly explode, to kill their occupants by a gas leak and make the news...again. From them, we heard screams that called more and more monsters away from us, away from this dark room.

 

“Ceibo, are you all right?”

“Yeah, forgive me, Soda.”

On the second floor of this unknown shabby hotel, we find shelter, my little brother and me. A somber place that smells like wet cardboard, with only a window and its curtains. We just snatched the keys in the empty reception and ran upstairs, our steps hidden by the screams.

This is our refuge. The one our mother bought us with her blood and her humanity. Her dark features with white spots on her face and fingers from vitiligo remain in my memory. And in my body. I look like her, in the color of her skin and even in the spots. They are proof that I am my mother's daughter, that her blood courses through my veins. The memory we have left of her.

My little brother, with a lost look, but more focused than me listens to the radio on his cell phone with his earphones. He is under the bed, its side is covered by the cheap blankets that touch the floor that it’s so cracked you can tell even in the dark. He only peeked his head to talk to me. He gestures me to come with him.

The two of us there share the earphones. For some fucking reason, when listening to the radio you can’t turn off the screen. Also, you need to have the earphones plugged in, but that’s a plus. If we accidentally unplugged them and made any noise… well…

I put the blanket in place and check it won’t just fall off the bed. He shields the phone with his body and hands. The dim light reveals his fingertips, they are a little lighter than the rest of his skin, there are incipient shy white spots on his face too, but he's pale. I need to squint really hard to notice. He didn't take after mom. After everything is rapidly set up, he makes the screen face the floor.

The stern female voice of our president breaks the silence only in my left ear.

“My compatriots, the Argentine Nation has fallen.”

The words the adults feared so much have finally become a reality. But I can bet no one imagined that the enemy is a thing which cannot seem to think, that can’t even talk and does not wear any flag in its clothes.

“The Argentine Nation has fallen, but not Argentina.”

Even in these circumstances, she maintains that particular way of speaking, as if imitating Evita's eloquence. Whether it’s an empty pretense or a deep-rooted belief, depends on who you ask.

“Argentina is wherever the people are. Each of us carries Argentina within ourselves. We take a piece of her when we are gone, as I’ll soon be.”

What—

“Stay away from the big cities, a bombardment is coming to them. Our last resources will be used to give our people a chance. Our last standing soldiers are those of our Fuerza Aerea.”

Soda’s trembling. I feel his body move… or is it mine? It took only one day for the Nation to fall.

“I ask God that this message reaches you in time from those brave ones who are still broadcasting. Braves as the ones helping me reach you now, cornered in a room with a future monster. Brave as you who are still alive. Don’t forget them, don’t forget your fellows. You’ll be told how much you have left when this message ends. If not, assume you have four hours.”

I caress Soda’s little back. It's two o'clock in the morning. We have until six in the morning before it's all over. We have to get out, we have to run, but to go out there... The plan was… there was no plan. Can we wait for the streets to empty a little?

“I ask of you one thing, mi pueblo. Not as your president, but as a fellow Argentine…”

Four hours… it’s got to be enough. Right?

“…Save a bullet for yourselves.”

I’m brought back to this room. If I was floating, I have smashed against the ground.

“Some have seconds, others a few hours like I seem to have. But I can feel it, I’m living on borrowed time. Look after your compatriots, do the right thing while you keep your reason.”

A gunshot follows.

Despite its loudness, I cannot flinch.

Silence sounds on the radio.

And then, part of the national anthem. I always made fun of the Yanquis for putting theirs up everyone’s asses back then when their broadcasts weren’t censored… now I might be feeling what they may have felt, for the first time in my life.

Another message follows, a robotic voice confirming our sentence: we have four hours.

We get out of under the bed. Soda plugs his cell phone into the outlet, the front faces the ground, and he puts a cloth over it, almost a reflexive action if I have to guess. I'm charging mine too. The power is low, they go on and off. Sometimes they charge, sometimes they don't. In one day we could only get twenty percent battery. Maybe this actually damages them, fries them. We don't know.

Why… why am I worried about a fucking cell phone now? Why even plug them again? We are going to die, yet…

“Soda, take cover,” I say with a quiet voice.

Though confused, he does as I ask.

Though confused, I stick to the floor, crawl to the window and just lift my head to see. I open the curtain in one corner. It feels a little bit like our bedroom, minus for the stink of piss, now that I think of it, with that broken window that lets all the cold enter the room.

The sky has a red tint. Maybe it's my eyesight, my tiredness from not sleeping for two days. There are a few clouds that are going away. On the street, the municipal lighting gives a dark orange to the hollowed-out asphalt, cracked and as neglected as everything else in this fucking city. If there were municipal employees left in the central, they could have cut the power, give us a chance with the darkness. We are not so lucky it seems.

The window faces south, the trashy buildings like this one all around us block the view, except for the front. There, like a path reveals itself the horizon allowing me to see the roof of the supermarket that stands out because it occupies an entire block. A few streets behind, our house, that I can barely make out just because I know where it is. And beyond is the southern highway, towards the new neighborhoods.

We need to move now. We can stop to hide in the market or at home if we needed to.

Reluctant or not to their policies, no one can deny that giving money for new and cheap homes is a much more sensible move than intervening in a democratic election and indebting you up to your neck with an “international common fund”. Though, no move is done out of pure altruism. In exchange, we are now pretty much an arms factory. Not that it matters anymore. That is our destiny, new neighborhoods well away from everything, financed by the allied powers. To the north, there are only empty fields, where things used to be produced that can no longer be. To go there is to freeze to death. Our best bet is in the south, where we have more chances.

The orange of the lights reflecting in the car windows occupy my mind with these few abandoned vehicles properly parked. They have not even been looted. No time.

The electrical transformer tower is on our sidewalk.

Small snowflakes fall slowly from the few clouds that are about to leave, interrupting a little the flickering orange light that suffers from the voltage drops, frost forms on the contours of the window.

It's summer, or almost summer, it's a matter of eight days before it arrives, but it snows. We’ve seen it happen before, the fault of the war machine, or rather its gigantic carbon footprint. The one we couldn't talk about in school after the war pact, the one the Yanquis couldn't talk about in their schools either, according to what I could gather from gaming forums long ago, before the great Internet censorships. Not that it stopped teachers though, always resisting.

Now the coast is clear. Nothing, no one alive, no one dead, no one in between those two states either. There are no human remains left in the streets because those things eat everything, even the bones. Even the stains of blood, urine, and shit left on the concrete, contours bearing witness that there was a corpse there once, that someone died screaming and kicking, bitten, beaten, sent flying and smashed against the ground. These things lick those remains, I bet lifting even part of the concrete with their tongues until nothing is left. I saw it peeking through this very window a couple of hours ago when a poor devil tried to escape one of the other buildings. He didn't even get to scream, though. I guess if they took longer to eat, they would give their victims time to become monsters like them, like our president.

Like mom…

 

“Run.” She gives us the revolver, her supplies. Her rifle too. Five bullets for the rifle, and four left in the revolver.

 

“Is something wrong?” says Soda in a quiet voice, fear on his face.

“No, no.”

“Focus, please, stay with me,” his eyes tear up.

“Forgive me, Soda.”

It's true, I'm here. In this building, looking out a window.

It's a matter of getting careless with a light, stepping too hard on the ground and a Misa Ricotera comes at you, coming out from between the buildings or from the darkness. I need to focus.

I give him the street situation. A few hours ago a horde passed by right there for that guy. Unmistakable, with their uncanny movements. There's something truly terrifying about seeing something that resembles a human moving like an animal. They remained restless after killing that poor man, but that made them disperse a bit, going away from this place.

I close the curtain and we finally stand up in the dark.

No one is going to rescue us. No one is going to come. I don't think there's anyone out there either. We may be the last two people left in the city.

…

What's the point? Maybe the bombs won't hurt so much.

“I've got my little shrooms,” says Soda, snapping me out of these shitty thoughts. Did my face give me away, even in this darkness?

When he pawed a bunch of mushrooms out of the fridge at home I almost smack the shit out of him for wasting space out of our school backpacks.

“Mushrooms don't need sunlight to grow! With all those bombs that went off on TV… there is not going to be much sunlight, photosynthesis. Planting potatoes is going to be difficult. When the canned food runs out, or it expires... Mushrooms! We can get by with them.”

He'd learned it from an old game, he'd told me. Something about a Metro and a year long gone. He's already thinking about the future. It's a good thing...

That's the way life is going to be now, then.

What's the point?

I wish I could shut my fucking inner voice up if only for five minutes.

Sure, I wish everything was that easy.

A sound of electricity.

I'm overcome with the panic of my night terrors, I feel like I'm not touching the ground with my feet, my nose goes numb, it's hard to move my face, I taste blood in my mouth who knows why. Soda is absolutely frozen. It is the first noise that breaks this great silence in hours. I hope they—

Again, the bzz of electricity, louder this time, a harbinger of disaster. Fucking country, fucking power lines, fucking maintenance, fucking power company, fucking employees, fucking government.

The transformer, the power lines. I look out the window. An electric arc is forming. The street lights dim their brightness more than ever.

“Soda, grab your stuff.”

The electricity once again, a bigger arc this time.

I grab my backpack. Soda starts to cry, but he moves, he already has all the stuff ready, we already had a contingency plan ready.

I think I'm crying too, I’m not sure, I can't really tell.

“Ceibo...”

“Soda, nobody is going to come to our rescue. If we stay here, we will never be able to escape from the monsters, we will be cornered and the bombs will kill us. We can't hide. We have to run,” I grab mom's rifle, her revolver I give to Soda.

We grab our cell phones.

We grab the little mushrooms too.

We stomp down the stairs stumbling in the darkness, to the first floor, to the streets. We run to the south, to the market.

The transformer explodes behind, a deafening sound. Glass breaks and rains. The street lights go out.

But more deafening is the next sound. A rumbling, like an earthquake. The sound of hundreds of thousands of footsteps heading this way.

May God, if he exists, help us. May the death of our mother not be in vain.