His eyes flung open.
The ceiling above him was low and stained with yellowish rings. Rusted wire spilled out everywhere, pulsing with a hypnotic vibration.
He slowed his breathing and got up. Looking around, he saw metal shelves lining the wall, holding nothing but empty plastic bins and a layer of thick dust.
He moved his head. Cardboard boxes were stacked randomly, some crushed under the weight of others.
"Storage room."
He stayed still for a moment. His body felt relaxed; his heartbeat found the perfect rhythm. There was no pain or screaming agony from a forgotten wound.
Everything appeared too ordinary.
"How did I end up here?"
Stanley stood up slowly and walked towards the door. The room stayed quiet behind him. The latch turned without resistance, a soft click echoing in the small space.
He stepped out into a narrow hallway. The walls were bare concrete, the paint peeling away in long, curled strips like dead skin. Emergency lights glowed with a weak, dying red at the corners of the ceiling.
He walked. The space around him felt expectant, as if the hallway itself were waiting to see his next move. The sound of his shoes on the floor echoed once, a sharp clap of rubber on stone, then stopped as he reached a stairwell.
"I remember."
The fragments of memories flashed before his eyes.
STAGE 1.
The mechanical voice was still clear in his head. The large stadium. People everywhere. Then dead. Screams. Chaos. That robot dog. He barely managed to escape. Drones covering the sky.
Bernadette.
His legs stopped. Then he started walking again.
They went to the subway together. Rick and that other old woman, Martha. Explosion.
Then he witnessed something which can't be explained through human logic.
The bullets passed through Rick's body, and in the next moment, he disappeared into the walls.
Another guy hiding behind the pillar blocked the bullets with his bare skin.
The last one was more absurd. The man was here, and then, in the next moment, he was there, meters forward. It was like he skipped the distance. The laws of physics didn't apply to him.
He thought of a plan. It went perfectly, but... but there was one mistake, one miscalculation. She didn't deserve this.
"I killed her," he looked at his trembling hands.
Stanley was outside the building now. The sun was hidden behind the clouds.
His eyes moved towards the surroundings; the city was still a graveyard of stones. His eyes stopped when he found the subway tunnel far off. He turned around and walked towards it.
The memories still played on his mind. Just after Bernadette's heart stopped beating, he heard the mechanical voice again, but that was much softer than the first time he heard it in the stadium.
"System," he recalled clearly. A faint blue screen was in front of his eyes. Then it started to glitch.
"What happened after that?" He mumbled.
"The last thing I remember was smashing that drone. After that..." His thoughts started to fade. He didn't remember anything after that.
Suddenly, his legs stopped. Something's definitely off here. From what he saw yesterday, how many things happened, but there were no dead bodies in his sight. He saw some blood marks, but that was it.
No drones flew over his head, or suddenly a random metal dog firing cannons at him. It felt as if everyone was in lockdown mode, which, after what happened yesterday, wasn't hard to guess.
He moved again. The tunnel was getting closer.
Someone might've taken him from the tunnel. That was the most logical reasoning he could come up with.
But why?
Why would anyone save him?
That was an absurd thought, but he couldn't think of any positive answer.
Walking alone, like this, suddenly felt so wrong to him, compared to yesterday. No people in his sight, not even the slightest moment he could feel.
It felt like he had arrived late to his own execution.
He exhaled slowly, laughing to himself, but it quickly dried out after leaving his throat.
He remembered teleporting. He doesn't remember how he did it, but the feeling was still with him.
It was like...
Stanley found it hard to put into words. He was in front of Bernadette, then, the next moment, he was standing behind the drone. His vision shook violently at that time.
He gripped his fists and pushed, trying to find that knot in his mind that had unraveled in the tunnel.
Nothing. He stood still in the same place.
His gaze moved to the car ten meters away. He poured his focus, imagining himself as if walking there. When he reached the car, he snapped his fingers. His eyes quickly followed towards his feet.
Nothing happened.
"System," he said. Nothing appeared in front of his eyes. He tried again, louder this time. He tried under his breath. He shouted the word inside his mind, trying to trigger that invasive, cold presence that had etched Stage 1 into his brain.
Nothing answered. There was no text, no blue screen.
"Of course…"
He set that thought aside for now. The subway tunnel was just meters away.
The broken robot dog lay exactly where he remembered. It was a heap of twisted metal and scorched casing.
Relief hit him with the force of a physical blow.
It was real. The stadium, the dogs, the fire. None of it was a dream.
He turned his head toward the spot where Bernadette had fallen.
The floor was empty.
He blinked once and walked closer. There was no dead body. The marks of blood were there, but no sign of her other than that.
His heart started pounding as his eyes moved. A dagger. It was a short distance away. Stanley picked up it up; it was cold.
He checked carefully. The handle was in rough shape, edges twisted, and blood thick against the metal.
It was the same fucking dagger.
"The same knife I put inside her heart."
Stanley stared down at the floor again.
Did I move her?
He searched his memory for any image of lifting her. He felt for the ghost of her weight in his arms. He looked for a decision he might have made in a moment of blacked-out panic.
There was nothing.
He tightened his grip on the knife and walked deeper into the station.
The main platform stretched out in front of him.
It was a vast, subterranean hall of scarred pillars and overturned benches. The concrete was cracked by impacts. But there were no bodies here, only the rough stains of blood.
There were no signs of the massacre he had watched yesterday. The station looked abandoned, but not in the way a city dies. It looked erased.
Stanley stopped at the center of the platform. He turned in a slow, tight circle. He knew what he had seen. He knew the smell of the blood and the sound of the screams. He knew what actually happened here.
But the world around him told a different story. The station was clean. The silence was absolute.
Stanley stood alone in the center of the emptiness.
He wasn't sure which version of reality was lying, but he knew the hunt wasn't over. It had just changed its shape.