I didn't stand there and watch, because I already knew what was going to happen. I ran away in silence, into the cold night, under the snow that continued to fall. The heartbreaking screams of the two accompanied me to the shelter, together with the sound of the machetes cutting those bodies into pieces. Then everything was silent. I barred the door and started crying. Despair was creeping into my mind, along with the infection transforming my body. In the following two days the Desperate people searched the houses to find out who was still hiding there. The house in which I had found shelter was just outside the town and I had chosen it because it had been one of the first they had rounded up some time ago.


Then the gang moved away, at the end of the day, and I, the following morning, took the opportunity to leave the shelter. I needed food, my supplies were running low. I got to the building they had burned. There, on the Special Data ground, stripped bones and torn clothes were all that remained of a father and his son. I didn't linger in front of that macabre feast and set off towards the road that led to the neighboring village. After a fork that was about six kilometers from where I was, I would arrive at a provincial road that reached and passed through a small village. I had with me a card found in the municipal offices. Doing a rough calculation, I would have had to walk about eighteen kilometers. I left my shelter very early in the morning, well before dawn.



At a brisk pace and in good physical condition I could have covered five or six kilometers in an hour, but debilitated and constantly alert I could not hope to overcome three or four at most. This meant I could spend about two hours in the village to look for food, before darkness surprised me on the way back. They had to be enough for me. When I arrived near the town, it was two hours before noon. The sky was clear. It had already stopped snowing during the night, but the snow hadn't fallen down there. I had dropped in altitude, maybe I was around 700 metres. I crossed some uncultivated fields and headed towards some kind of abandoned farm. Then a noise in the bushes made my blood run cold. I stopped. It was coming from my left, past the shrubs and bushes that lined the road. I approached in silence.