By the time Cole stepped off the last floating slab and onto solid ground again, his legs were shaking. Not from fear—just exhaustion.
The cracked asphalt ahead was familiar. So were the rolling foothills, the scattered pine trees, even the faint smell of rain on dirt. The world behind him had turned into a cosmic blender, but this side of the crack… it looked almost normal.
Almost.
The walk home felt longer than it should've. His water was gone. His stomach kept growling. And the closer he got to town, the more his brain started shutting off the panic and slipping into something else—an emptiness that spread from his chest to his fingertips.
A quiet numbness.
He kept glancing around, waiting to see a person, an animal, anything alive. But there was nothing. Not a single bird. Not a car engine. Not even a distant shout.
It became the biggest question he'd written in his notebook:
Where the fuck did everyone go?
When the familiar sign appeared on the side of the road—"Welcome to Missoula"—he let out a slow, shaky breath.
"Home," he muttered.
Except… it wasn't.
Buildings were dark. Some half tilted. Some bent in ways no architect ever intended. Windows were cracked like spiderwebs. Streetlights flickered sideways, buzzing faintly. A few cars sat abandoned in the road, doors open, bags still inside, as if their owners just evaporated mid-step.
Cole slowed his pace, eyes scanning everything.
Missoula wasn't destroyed.
It was emptied.
And the silence pressed against his ears like a weight.
He kept thinking.
If this was really a post-apocalyptic scenario, then where was all the chaos?
The looting?
The fires?
The screaming?
All the shit Hollywood promised would happen the second society collapsed?
But there was nothing.
Just silence.
He walked down the side road toward his apartment complex. It ran alongside a railroad—except the tracks didn't look like railroad tracks anymore. They rose upward, bending slowly toward the sky, climbing at an impossible angle until they disappeared into the clouds like some abandoned stairway to nowhere.
Cole stared at it for a moment… then kept walking.
His thoughts spiraled with every step.
What the hell am I even doing?
Going home—that was the only concrete thing he had. The only "mission," if he could even call it that. But after that?
What then?
Where does he go?
What's the plan?
Does he even have a plan?
The silence of the empty city pressed against him, giving him room to think—maybe for the first time in years. But thinking didn't help. Thinking only reminded him he didn't have a future mapped out past the front door of his apartment.
He was walking on instinct.
Nothing more.
And in the hollow quiet of Missoula, that truth settled deeper into him.
He wasn't heading home for comfort.
He wasn't heading home for safety.
He was heading home because it was the only place left to go.
He thought of Bern—his sergeant—turning into a fleshy balloon out of nowhere. Bursting like the world had decided he didn't belong in it anymore.
And Cole asked himself the question that had been clawing at the back of his mind ever since:
Why the fuck didn't I turn into a balloon?
Maybe he was immune.
Maybe the virus didn't see him.
Maybe whatever infected reality itself couldn't touch him.
Or maybe—
just maybe—
other people survived the first minutes inside a Fault too.
By the time that thought finally settled, he reached his apartment complex.
The parking lot was empty.
Silent.
Dead.
The building looked normal from the outside—too normal—and that made his stomach twist. Cole stood there, staring up at his window, knowing he probably didn't want to see what was on the other side of it.
But he dug his boots into the pavement and walked toward the entrance anyway.
He pushed through the front door, climbed the stairs, and stopped at his apartment. His gloved hand hesitated on the knob… then turned it slowly.
The door creaked open.
The TV was still on—stuck on some glitching mess of floating letters that didn't form any coherent words. Just scattered fragments drifting across the screen like someone had scrambled the alphabet.
Cole stepped inside. The door clicked shut behind him.
His footsteps were loud—too loud—thudding across the floor with his heavy tan boots.
He hoped to see his roommate sitting on the couch, making some sarcastic comment about being late.
But the living room was empty.
Cole swallowed and walked toward the bedroom hall.
He pushed the first door open.
Something moved.
It looked human—at first—but only in the way a shadow vaguely resembles a person. Then it turned around.
Cole's breath caught.
It was his roommate.
Or what used to be his roommate.
His body hunched forward at a breaking angle, spine pushing up like it was trying to escape his back. He had only one arm left, but it stretched—stretched—six feet across the room like a length of wet rope. His skin was covered in swollen sores and open boils. His nose was long and thin, drooping past his upper lip like melted wax.
And then he spoke.
The voice broke Cole.
A high-pitched, wet gurgle.
Painful. Childlike. Wrong.
"C… Cole…? Is… is that youuuu?"
Another choking gargle.
"Help me… pleaaase…"
Cole froze.
Completely.
Utterly.
Frozen.
The world around him pulled inward, the apartment shrinking to the size of that one horrible moment.
And for the first time since the Fault appeared above the armory—
Cole Larson felt something.
Not fear.
Not pity.
Just a cold, hollow drop in his stomach.
Like something inside him finally snapped into place.
His roommate lunged at him with a speed that wasn't human—wasn't even close.
"Coleeee!"
Cole barely got his arms up before the thing slammed into him, throwing him backward. His helmet cracked against the floor, saving his skull but rattling his vision. The creature's warped, six-foot arm slapped down against Cole's chest plate, claws scraping uselessly against the ceramic.
The weight, though—
God, the weight.
It felt like five hundred pounds crushing down on him. His ribs groaned. His breath shot out of his lungs in a strangled cry.
Cole screamed in pain, trying to shove it off, but the abomination pinned him like a car engine had fallen on him. Its sores burst and dripped onto his uniform, hissing slightly as they touched fabric.
His hand fumbled toward his cargo pocket.
He grabbed the multitool.
Folded shut.
Of course.
He couldn't deploy the blade with just one arm pinned. He twisted, trying to get leverage, but the thing pressed harder, its elongated spine bending over him like a collapsing bridge.
A wet drop hit Cole's cheek.
He froze.
Slowly— painfully slowly—he looked up.
The creature's face hovered inches from his, nose long and dripping, eyes bulbous and uneven, mouth trembling as if it were fighting itself.
And then his roommate's voice came out.
Weak.
Wet.
Breaking.
"Cole… I'm sorry… I… I don't want to do this… but it's making me… it's making me… it's making me…"
The voice was calm this time, but the gargling undertone never left.
Cole swallowed hard.
"It's okay, buddy," he whispered, lifting the multitool with one trembling hand. "You won't be like this for long…"
He snapped the blade open with his thumb—
and drove it straight into the creature's temple.
It spasmed violently, claw dragging down Cole's carrier.
A long, wet gurgle escaped its throat.
Then the weight slackened.
The mutated body toppled sideways, collapsing to the floor in a heap.
Still.
For the first time since the world ended, the apartment was quiet again.
Cole lay on the floor, chest heaving under the carrier, multitool dripping in his hand.
He didn't cry.
He didn't scream.
He just stared at the ceiling and whispered:
"…I'm sorry, man."
Cole lay on the floor for a moment, staring up at the stained ceiling while the building creaked around him. The silence felt thick, pressing against his ears, settling into the space his adrenaline had left behind. When he finally pushed himself upright, his limbs felt heavy, the plate carrier squeezing against his ribs. He looked down at the mutated corpse of his roommate. There was no shock left in him, no horror—just a tired, hollow regret that he didn't know how to process.
He turned away without a word.
In the corner of the living room, his rifles leaned against the wall exactly where he'd left them months ago: the Polish AK-47 he was unreasonably proud of, and the .22 MP5 that had been more of an impulse purchase than anything. He loaded the gear with a quiet efficiency—four magazines for the AK, three for the MP5—then began stuffing spare ammo boxes into his assault bag until it strained at the seams. He pulled on the chest rig, the combined weight of it and the carrier making his shoulders ache. The pantry offered a few canned foods, a half-smashed box of granola bars, and some water bottles. All of it went into the bag.
At the sink, he paused. Maybe out of habit. Maybe out of denial. He twisted the faucet. For one heartbeat water flowed normally, and then it bent upward in a smooth arc, sliding toward the ceiling like gravity had been fired. Instead of splattering, the stream simply vanished through the drywall as if the roof no longer existed. Cole stared blankly for a few seconds.
"…sure. Why not."
He flipped the gallon jug upside down and filled it from the upward stream. When it was full, he capped it, slung it over his shoulder, and surveyed the apartment one last time. There wasn't much left to take. There wasn't much left of anything.
As he walked past his roommate's body, he let himself look—just once. The warped face, the outstretched limb, the broken shape that had once been a person he talked to daily. It tightened something inside him, but the feeling faded almost as quickly as it came.
He reached the door, pulled out his waterproof notebook, and tapped the pen against the page. The question circled in his mind:
What do I even call things like that?
Dozens of words surfaced. None felt right.
Then one did.
He lowered the pen and wrote it in slow, firm strokes:
Aberrant.