The city is emptier in the south. The transformer explosion in the Zona Centro neighborhoods has grabbed the attention of most monsters, hasn’t it?

And yet my mother is in this place. Sitting there, unmoving.

The man in his working clothes, the power company employee. No, it was not a man, it was a monster that I shot hours ago. He was trying to do something to a light pole.

Some of them are attracted by the things they did in their life when they had one.

Then, mom was attracted to this place…

 

“Run,” she told us, and we did, we left her behind. But I could see her, from afar. How her human expression left her face. How her movements became like those of a robot trying to imitate a human being, a mockery of life. And how she massacred dozens of people who were paralyzed along with the faceless man that was growing one at that moment. Screams, the smell of blood. And then came a bunch more who were like her, attracted by the two shots from her revolver that saved my life.

 

We hold back our crying, or at least we don't make noise. It's hard to tell what noise comes from us and what doesn't, with the sound of so many footsteps behind us.

But mom is there, she is there! I take a step forward. If there is a chance that she…

Soda yanks my shirt, he looks at me, I feel his trembling.

Wake up! That's not mom, that's a monster wearing her face.

 

“I love you both, more than anything in this world. I'm never going to stop loving you, ever.”

 

Now she wants to tear us apart, slurp our blood, devour our entrails, pulverize our bones with her jaw and her teeth that, if they break, rearrange, mend, grow back, and keep chewing until nothing is left. Even if her throat is plugged by the thick flesh, even if it is pierced and cut by the sharp broken bones that seek to pass through, she will not die. Her throat will regenerate, her stomach will undo everything.

I take Soda’s hand a hide him behind me. If the monster attacks, at least he can make a run for it, to our room, out of the window.

She sits there. We used to sit there too and talk. In this, our home, made of concrete, with walls never plastered and never painted. A house which is a kitchen-dining room that connects two small bedrooms and a bathroom, still much more than the vast majority of people in this country have. Our house that we could only “afford” because our grandparents died and left it for us.

But it is our home in the end. We made it ours. And we would talk, sitting at the little table, watching the CRT TV of our great-grandparents that still miraculously works. About school, about some movie, about her work… about her tiredness. Once I saw her crying, Soda didn't see her, it was before he woke up. I hadn't slept that night, as I hadn't slept the night it all began and whose consequences my tired and wandering mind now carries.

I rushed to her, touched her back, tried to cheer her up. She told me about the people, about the money that was not enough, about the fear she had that Soda and I would not have enough to eat, about her patients who were dying because of the lack of medical supplies, about the Russians, the Chinese, the Yanquis... and then she apologized. She apologized to me for worrying me, she said that children should not listen to such bullshit from adults, she asked me not to tell anything to Soda... I…

 

Wake up, wake up! Protect Soda. We walk to my room facing the silent and still beast, Soda always behind me. The others will be here any moment.

I…

 

What's the point?

I never asked myself that question before.

What's the point of going to school? To have a job.

What's the point of having a job? To be able to live.

What's the point of living?

Really, what is the point? How many times have the people around me asked themselves this question too?

Why study and work? To not have enough money? To not be able to buy your medication if you were chronically ill because, just as there was a lack of food, there was a lack of drugs? To realize, when you fell ill, that there were no beds in the public hospital because the therapy room was flooded for the fifth time in a year with sewage water after the rain? Or because the electricity went out, or because the dialysis machines were all Yanquis and they were never sold to here again, nor could the ones that broke down be fixed in the country?

What is the point of living? To end up prowling the Earth like an insatiable immortal monster, an eternal monster that repeats the same thing over and over again, that looks at the Sun or the Moon disoriented, that has lost its agency, its morals, its principles, its yearnings, its everything?

 

The horde of monsters breaks into our house. Soda pulls my shirt, calls my name. That wakes me up. “Mom” gets up.

And the monsters stop at the sight of her.

Are they… scared?

With a nail of her left hand, she makes a precise horizontal incision in her right wrist as she steps toward us. The blood trickles down her hand which is perpendicular to the floor, but it doesn't go all the way to the ground. No, it becomes like a gelatinous, viscous substance that then solidifies and takes on a silvery color. Now she has a weapon. Her blood has become an edge, a blade.

Her movements are not uncanny now, nothing like what I saw when she transformed. They are fine, delicate, like those of a human being. But her face is definitely not human, I can tell despite the darkness. I'd rather face something that looks human with animalistic movements a thousand times than face a mockery of life with such human-like movements.

And that which is no longer mom passes by us.

The invaders look at her, but they can’t win against their instincts. Their eyes turn to us, the prey. One of those things rushes past the monster wearing my mother's face and... loses its head. It flies into the side of the room, like a fútbol ball. It hits a wall and then the floor, two horrifying noises. The blood from its neck stains the beast of the blade.

The other monsters stop, they don’t make a move. They look at the beast with the blade in her hand now, the one she used to end the “life” of another so easily. They see her with the blood of another monster on her face. They attack.

Another massacre. If some monsters, like that thing that was once my mother, can have this kind of intelligence, this kind of malice, this kind of weapons, then

What's the point? What's the point of continuing?

I clasp Soda’s hand and take him to our room, we jump out the window.

We keep running, we face south, toward the highway, side by side.

I look behind my shoulder. “Mom” is running too. She's coming towards us. Monsters run beside her. She moves her arm, her right hand, the one with the blade, and as she does a head flies, an arm flies, a torso is pierced, then yet another head. The focus is on that which was once our mother, full of the blood of others, as if the monsters know this is their great predator, as if food means nothing if they know they are going to be annihilated. The world rushes at her and she cuts it, stabs it, decapitates it, tears it apart.

All her few wounds heal, she dodges the clumsy attacks of the beasts. These things don't seem so terrifying, everything pales before that dark-skinned woman with white spots on her fingertips and face. There is a monster in front, but its attention shifts from us to the beast chasing us. And suddenly that attention no longer exists, it has ceased to exist. Maybe it exists for a few more seconds until its head touches the ground.

She's not that fast. Does she think she doesn't need to? These things don't get tired, do they? They fight forever. We almost can't go on, we've been running so long, for so long that...

...we see the first rays of the sun.

It's time.

The sun is rising. With the south being our north, it peeks out from our left. It is time. The bombardment is coming.

Who were those who said, that when the Sun rose from the west, no more actions would be written, neither good nor bad? Who said it was the last sign? What came next? The coming of the Creature? That Creature that was neither man nor animal, that no one knows where it came from? That Creature that was going to mark every human being in the world, and that when the last being was marked, it was going to die, fulfilling its purpose?

And what followed next was... yes, the Earth was engulfed in flames and there was nothing and no one left. Nothing alive, nothing dead, nothing. And then we would wait forty days? Months? Years? Nobody knows.

Hey, it almost makes sense.

We run. Side by side we run.

Dozens of monsters lie on the ground behind us. With the way clear, the beast of the blade... smiles at us, deforms my mother's face into a grimace. And runs to where we are. Faster than any other. I see how it comes out... steam from her clothes. From the monsters on the ground. Their figures blur, disappear, or... am I hallucinating?

I stop in my tracks, Soda keeps going a little bit but I can hear his steps coming to a halt too.

I aim my rifle and fire.

I know I hit her.

The monster stops. She looks down at her steaming torso, where the bullet has struck. With her left hand, she grabs that bullet that barely embeds in her skin, tosses it to the side. The nascent sunlight illuminates that argentine blade on the other.

Bullets cannot harm her.

But monsters can, or at the very least, they can stop her. With my gunshot, the whole city knows of our presence. The footsteps are the great death march coming from all sides, from the north, from the east, from the west. Few come from the south, because there is almost no city here anymore, just the southern highway and the trees at its sides. And the target of these monsters is the one with the blade, they see in her the blood of others who are like them, that blood that in my mind seems to disappear, to go up in smoke and cover the sky.

Bullets cannot kill you, but the other monsters can. I saw you bleed. You taught me yourself that monsters can die.

We run south, to the southern highway. My mother watches us from afar, fighting all those things. It doesn't matter if the whole city marches on her. She can take on the whole world. Such is her strength.

The sun is no longer shy, it finally dawns.