This Is My Land!

A continuation of the adventures of the brave OMON “ensign” in the world of “The Age of the Dead” by Andrei Kruz. The city is dead. And it was truly terrifying. The horror wasn’t caused by the foul smell of smoke and rot hanging over its streets, or by dusty cars stalled along the shoulder with their owners who would never get behind the wheel again, or by empty, dark window and storefront voids like eyes that had gone blind, or by the small debris that the cool spring breeze carried along the dirty, recently cleared of snow and ice roads and avenues—already slightly dried.

If it were only that, the surrounding scenery could be called… unpleasant, maybe even frightening. But what truly made it horrifying was something else. Life left these streets, but it didn’t make way for silence and neglect. Death took over the whole area. A death that’s impossible, unnatural, wrong—and therefore even more nightmarish. It is precisely she, slowly shuffling across asphalt roads and sidewalk tiles by the tens of thousands, by hundreds of thousands of pairs of legs—covered in scabs, with pus that had dried up, and old black blood that had long since coagulated. It is precisely she that stared at the bright spring sky with tens of thousands of dull eyes—like dirty white cataracts. She gnawed at bones slick with thick slime and tore them apart, ripping putrid flesh from corpses. She hunted relentlessly for the few who remained alive in the city.