I loaded my backpack with essentials and slowly left the apartment, closing the door soundlessly. As I turned my head towards the end of the dark hallway, for a fraction of a second, I caught a figure at the edge of my vision. It seemed to be smoking, thin, with something on its head like a cap. It disappeared the instant I focused my gaze. Probably just a shadow, a trick of the dim light. An unsettling silence reigned on the stairs, interrupted only by a few half-open doors I chose to ignore. Upon reaching the street, reality struck me harshly: scattered corpses with gazes lost to the sky, some with twisted smiles and others with expressions frozen in sheer terror. And all of them, absolutely all of them, had their eyes open, fixed on something I was unable to see.

  I walked slowly towards the city center. Checking my watch, I noted with unease that it was already eight in the morning, although the light remained in a strange intermediate state between day and night. I crossed streets plagued by abandoned vehicles, their lights still on, casting distorted shadows on the asphalt. I carefully avoided any glare, always moving in the shadows. The only sound was the soft fluttering of scavenger birds claiming their dominion over the silent city.

  An unexpected scream tore through the stillness. From my hiding place among stalled cars, I saw a man, naked to the waist and stained with blood, spinning desperately amidst the metallic chaos. His voice, filled with anguish, turned into a groan choked by the blood escaping his mouth. He finally collapsed to the ground, seized by violent convulsions, before falling into absolute silence. A morbid impulse urged me closer, but fear kept me frozen. After a few moments, I continued on my way, clinging to the shadows. Passing by the shattered entrance of an office building, I saw inside an old, thin man in grey clothes and a cap, calmly sweeping the broken glass with a broom. He wore black sunglasses. Beside him, an orange bucket with a white logo. He didn't look up, seeming like a janitor absorbed in his task as if it were a normal day. I quickened my pace, unsettled by that out-of-place calm. As the clock neared nine in the morning, night, strangely, seemed to have swapped shifts with the day.

  Stolen story; please report.

  There was a roundabout flooded with light, the entrance to the city center I had always known, now turned into something unrecognizable. I lost track of how long I'd walked, immersed in the experience, until a sudden blow of anguish shook me. I just wanted to get away without any clear destination, until a memory burst unexpectedly into my mind: my brother. He worked as a doctor in a nearby hospital. Perhaps I had forgotten his existence, or the shock of events had made me assume his death without question.

  The center was no less chaotic. The roundabout greeted me with scattered cars and clouds of smoke rising from crashed and burning vehicles. I couldn't clearly make out if there were bodies, but the suffocating atmosphere hinted that death abounded there. Further on, a car burned intensely, and I thought I saw people walking aimlessly, staring fixedly at the sky.

  As I advanced towards the hospital, I remembered those childhood games at school, when I hid among my classmates to evade the 'cop' while being the 'robber'. Now, my journey seemed a disturbing echo of those games. I slipped between abandoned cars and bodies with expressions of frozen terror in their eyes, evading those I mentally dubbed "the crazies." They ran, lamented, hit themselves, always sharing that same desperate behavior of babbling and frantically touching their heads