For a while, none of us moved.
I stayed beside the maintenance room door with the tyre iron loose in my hand, listening to the sounds filtering through the concrete around us. At first, the gunfire had been close enough to put my nerves on edge. Short, sharp bursts. Explosions that rattled the walls and shook dust loose from the ceiling. The kind of noise that forced your body to stay ready, whether you wanted it to or not.
Then it had drifted away.
The shots came less often now, the sound thinner, carried from farther across the city. Explosions still rolled through the distance every now and then, but they were dull and muted now, more like thunder than battle.
Time passed slowly.
I took my watch from my pocket and checked it once.
Thirty minutes.
It didn't feel like thirty minutes. It felt longer. The silence in the room had changed shape while we waited. At first, it had been fear. Raw and immediate. Now it was something heavier. Something that pressed in from all sides and made every breath feel louder than it should have.
Martin shifted his weight every few minutes, unable to keep still for long. Rachel had gone the other way. She stood with her arms folded tightly across herself, barely moving at all, as if holding herself together took everything she had.
I finally pushed myself off the wall.
"We can't stay here forever," I said quietly.
Martin looked up at once. "You sure about that?"
I glanced at him. "Movement is life."
He opened his mouth, then shut it again. He didn't like the answer, but he knew I was right.
I reached for the handle and paused with my hand on the metal. It was cold. Cold enough to feel damp. For a second, I stood there, listening one last time through the door. Nothing immediate. No footsteps. No voices. No dragging breath from the other side.
I opened it slowly.
The underground car park lay silent beyond us.
The same weak fluorescent tube flickered overhead. Dust I'd disturbed earlier had settled back over the concrete in a pale film. The abandoned cars hadn't moved, of course, but somehow they looked different now. More lifeless. Like they'd been waiting in the dark long before we got there and would still be waiting long after.
I stepped out first, tyre iron ready in my hand.
Behind me, Martin and Rachel followed a few seconds later.
I looked toward the ramp we'd used earlier, where daylight filtered down from the street above. Too exposed. Too obvious. Too easy for something to come down while we were caught in the open.
I turned away from it and scanned the darker edges of the garage instead.
It didn't take long.
Half hidden behind a line of parked vehicles near the far wall, a narrow emergency staircase climbed upward through a concrete shaft. Easy to miss if you weren't looking for it. I pointed with the tyre iron. "That way."
We moved quickly, keeping our footsteps light, though down there every sound still seemed to carry. Boots on concrete. Martin's breathing. The faint scrape of metal against my leg when the tyre iron shifted in my grip. Nothing was loud, but in that silence, it all felt loud enough.
I reached the stairwell door and tried the handle.
Unlocked.
I pulled it open and stepped inside first.
The air in the stairwell was colder than in the garage. Damp concrete walls boxed us in tight, and the metal steps gave soft, hollow echoes under our weight. The smell changed too—less oil, more stagnant air and old moisture.
I started climbing.
The higher we went, the clearer the city became. Not visually yet, but through sound. Distant gunfire still snapped somewhere far off. Every so often, another explosion rolled across the skyline, muted by distance but heavy enough to make the stair rails tremble faintly under my hand.
Whatever battle had been raging nearby had shifted elsewhere.
For the moment.
We reached the first landing. I stopped and listened.
Nothing close.
No movement above us. No voices on the other side of the door. No scrape of feet on concrete.
I kept going.
At the top, I eased the door open and looked out into a hallway.
Fluorescent lights flickered overhead; several of them burnt out entirely, leaving long stretches of the corridor in dim patches of shadow and weak yellow-white glare. Glass doors lined both sides. Office doors. Meeting rooms. Company signage. A reception counter at the far end, half visible.
I stepped through carefully, scanning left, then right.
Empty.
Martin came out behind me. Rachel stayed close to him.
I glanced at the nearest sign on the wall.
Finanzverwaltung.
I frowned, then read the next one without thinking.
Konferenzraum B.
German.
The language came naturally. That part didn't surprise me. What unsettled me was what it implied.
Martin stepped up beside me and followed my gaze. "What does that say?"
"Finance administration," I said, nodding toward the first sign. Then toward the second. "Conference Room B."
He let out a slow breath. "Right. I was afraid you were going to say that."
Rachel stepped closer to the glass door and stared at the lettering. "I can't read any of it."
"No," I said. "You wouldn't."
I looked farther down the corridor. More signs. More office names. A directory mounted near the wall. Company departments. Internal rooms. All in German.
Berlin.
It had to be.
The thought settled into me heavily. Not because Berlin made any more sense than anywhere else, but because it made everything less like confusion and more like reality. I moved down the corridor.
Every doorway got a glance. Every corner. Every strip of exposed glass. I checked the stairwell behind us twice in the space of twenty seconds without meaning to. Habit. The building was quiet, but quiet didn't mean safe.
Eventually, I found a smaller office overlooking the street.
Two large windows faced outward. One door led in. No other visible exits.
I stepped inside and gave it a quick scan. Desks. Filing cabinets. A printer. Papers were scattered across one table. No sign of anyone having left in an orderly way.
"This will do," I said.
Martin looked around. "You're setting up?"
"For now."
I moved toward the window.
Then I stopped.
The city beyond it stole the breath from my lungs.
Berlin.
There was no mistaking it now. Even broken, its shape was there. The skyline. The architecture. The broad city streets and dense blocks of buildings. But it looked like it had been torn open.
Several buildings across the street had collapsed entirely. One had fallen sideways into the road, crushing the cars beneath it into twisted metal. The street itself was cratered and blackened, some of the holes deep enough to swallow entire vehicles. Smoke drifted between buildings in dirty grey ribbons. A traffic light hung at an angle over an intersection choked with debris.
Military trucks sat abandoned near the crossing.
Their doors were open.
Bodies lay scattered around them.
Dark stains spread across the asphalt.
I stared at it, trying to make it fit into something my mind could understand.
A war?
An invasion?
The Russians?
No. Not like this. Not with the streets looking like the end of the world.
Another explosion rolled somewhere far away. Not close enough to shake the glass, but enough to remind me the city was still alive with violence.
I scanned the streets again.
That was when I saw them.
At first, I thought they were survivors.
People wandering through the intersection below.
But the longer I watched, the more wrong they became.
They moved too slowly. Too unevenly. Their bodies jerked at strange moments, as though their limbs didn't quite obey them properly. Some shuffled. Some lurched. One walked into the side of a vehicle and stood there for a second before turning away without any real purpose.
There were dozens of them.
Maybe more, once I started looking farther down the streets.
Rachel came up beside me. "What are they doing?"
I didn't answer at once.
Because I didn't know.
They weren't talking. Not one of them. They didn't react to each other. They just wandered, drifting through rubble and wrecked vehicles like they belonged to some rhythm I couldn't hear.
Then I heard it again.
That same screech from below.
My head turned toward it instantly.
Something came into view from the far end of the street.
At first glance, it looked like one of the others.
Then it moved.
Where the others dragged themselves along without urgency, this one crossed the road with sudden, unsettling speed. Low to the ground. Aggressive. Deliberate. It weaved through the slower figures instead of bumping into them. It knew exactly where it was going.
I narrowed my eyes.
It stopped in the middle of the street and turned its head sharply, as if it was smelling the air.
The others began drifting toward it.
Not by accident.
Following it.
A cold pressure settled in my chest.
Something moved in the alley across from our building.
A soldier.
German uniform.
He was crouched beside a damaged vehicle, rifle half raised, scanning the street with the quick, tight movements of someone who knew he was in the wrong place and had run out of good options. I felt something tighten in me at once.
He hadn't seen them yet.
But they were already moving closer.
I knew what was coming before he did.
And there was nothing I could do.
I stood at the window, completely still, my grip tightening around the tyre iron.
The faster creature turned its head.
Then it moved.
The others followed.
Not quite running.
Something worse. A sudden, ugly surge of speed that made them look less wounded and more unleashed.
The soldier saw them too late.
He tried to raise his rifle. I saw the motion clearly through the glass—shoulders turning, barrel lifting, mouth opening to shout or breathe or pray.
The first creature hit him before he could fire.
Then the others were on him.
The screams began.
Raw. Animal. Cut with panic so sharp it made my teeth clench.
They swallowed him in seconds. Bodies piling over him in a frenzy of grabbing limbs and snapping jaws and jerking shoulders. Blood sprayed across the side of the vehicle in a red sheet. One of the creatures lifted its head and shrieked, and the sound came faintly through the glass like metal tearing.
Then the screaming stopped.
I barely noticed the movement behind me at first.
Rachel had gone completely still. Her face had drained of colour, eyes locked on the street below. She didn't blink. Didn't breathe properly. She looked as though she'd stepped halfway out of herself and forgotten how to come back.
Martin reacted differently.
He staggered back from the window, horror opening across his face. "Oh God—"
His voice rose.
I moved instantly.
I crossed the room in two strides and clamped my hand over his mouth before the sound could carry any farther.
"Quiet."
He froze. His breath came hard and ragged against my palm. His eyes were wide with shock, but he understood. After a second, he gave a small, panicked nod.
Outside, the creatures kept feeding.
I removed my hand slowly.
Martin swallowed hard, chest rising and falling too quickly, but he didn't make another sound.
For a long moment, none of us moved.
I stepped back from the window.
The tyre iron still hung in my grip. Useless against something like that, if I were being honest. Better than empty hands, but not by much.
My thoughts were already moving ahead.
We couldn't stay here.
The building wasn't secure. Too many windows. Too many open offices. Too many routes in and out that I hadn't checked. If those things worked by sight, sound, scent, or any combination of the three, this place was a trap waiting to happen.
I need better ground.
Better defenses.
And information.
If this really was Berlin, then the German military would be somewhere.
Or what remained of it.
I looked at Martin and Rachel.
Two civilians. Untrained. Terrified. Useful in limited ways, vulnerable in every obvious one. Leaving them behind would make movement easier. Faster. Cleaner. One less thing to account for every time I made a decision.
But easier wasn't always the same as right.
I exhaled slowly and looked back at the ruined street.
"We need to move."
Martin stared at me, still pale. "Move where?"
"Somewhere safer."
Rachel finally tore her eyes from the window. "Safer than this?"
"No," I said. "More defensible than this."
I looked out over the city again, at the broken roads, the wrecked military trucks, the drifting figures and the blood spreading dark across the street below.
Then I glanced back at them.
"And somewhere with answers."