The sky hung like an open wound above the city—starless, moonless, utterly devoid. The temperature had plummeted below freezing, turning breath into ghosts and pavement into black ice. No traffic moved along the hospital's access road. No lights burned in the surrounding buildings. The world had contracted to this single structure, hunched against the darkness like something waiting to die.
Inside, the backup generator sputtered to life with a mechanical death rattle. The lights flickered on—dim, anemic things that seemed to pull shadows from the walls rather than dispel them. Doctors shuffled through corridors with thousand-yard stares. Nurses moved like sleepwalkers. Patients lay in their beds, eyes open but unseeing, breathing but not quite alive.
Something had changed in the hospital. Something fundamental.
In Room 347, a woman screamed.
Not the productive scream of childbirth, but something raw and primal—the sound of a soul being torn from its moorings. Three doctors and two nurses surrounded her bed, their movements mechanical, their faces slack. They were going through the motions of saving her life, but their eyes told a different story.
Their eyes knew she was already gone.
The woman convulsed, her body arching off the bed as another contraction seized her. With each wave of pain, she seemed to hollow out from within, like a candle burning too fast, consuming itself. Her skin took on a waxy translucence. Her eyes, once bright with fear and determination, glazed over with a gray film.
"We're losing her," one of the doctors said, his voice flat, emotionless. He didn't sound concerned. He sounded like he was reading from a script he no longer believed in.
"Blood pressure dropping," a nurse reported. She didn't bother checking the monitor. She just knew.
The lights flickered. Once. Twice. A steady, nauseating rhythm.
With the third flicker, the woman gave one final push, and the child entered the world in silence.
No cry.
No gasp.
Just... arrival.
The baby boy lay in the attending physician's hands, perfectly formed, impossibly still. His eyes were open—dark, fathomless things that seemed to absorb the sickly light rather than reflect it. He didn't cry. Didn't fuss. He simply looked at the doctor with an awareness that made the man's hands shake.
The lights went completely dark.
In that moment of absolute blackness, something shifted in the hospital. Something vast and cold and final. It swept through the building like a wave of anti-meaning, draining purpose from every heart it touched.
When the lights flickered back on, the attending physician had stepped backward into the equipment tray. His hand found a scalpel. His eyes found nothing at all—just the same empty gray that had claimed the mother.
"Why?" he whispered to no one. To everyone. To the universe itself.
The scalpel found his throat with practiced precision.
The lights flickered again. In the hallway outside, a nurse climbed onto the sixth-floor railing. In the ER three floors down, a patient pulled out his IV and let the blood flow free. In the psychiatric ward, the patients didn't do anything—they just lay down and stopped fighting.
Throughout the hospital, the question echoed in minds already hollowed out by something they couldn't name: Why are we born?
And for those without an answer—without the will to forge one—the darkness provided its own reply.
Seventy-Two Hours Later
Captain Sarah Graham had seen combat in three war zones, witnessed atrocities that should have broken her, and stared down the barrel of her own mortality more times than she cared to count. None of it prepared her for the hospital.
"What in the hell happened here?" she breathed, her hand instinctively moving to her sidearm.
The scene before her was something from a fever dream. Bodies swayed from makeshift nooses in patient rooms. Others huddled in corners, their bodies withered from days without food or water, their eyes reflecting nothing but void. Some had simply collapsed in the hallways, curled into fetal positions, waiting for an end they'd already accepted.
Lieutenant Marcus Daly stood three steps behind her, his face ashen. "It's like a horror movie," he said, his voice cracking. "I've never seen anything like this. Have you, Captain Graham?"
Sarah had, actually—or something close to it. A village in Syria where chemical weapons had been deployed, where people had clawed their own eyes out trying to escape what they were seeing. But that had been war. That had been explicable, in its own horrific way.
This was different.
"Keep it together, Daly," she said, her tone sharper than she intended. The harshness was armor, and they both knew it.
Marcus took another step forward, then stopped. His breathing had gone shallow. "I—I can't," he admitted, and the shame in his voice was almost as disturbing as the scene around them. "Captain, I can't go further. It's so dark. So cold. Why are we even here? Why are we anywhere? What's the point of—"
"Daly!" Sarah snapped, grabbing his shoulder. She could see it in his eyes—that same gray emptiness she'd seen in the faces of the hospital's victims. Whatever had happened here, it was still happening. Still spreading. "Get back to the perimeter. Call for hazmat and psych teams. Move!"
He stumbled backward, grateful for the order, for the excuse. For permission to flee.
Sarah watched him go, then turned back to the hospital's gaping entrance. Every instinct screamed at her to follow Daly, to get the hell away from this place. But she was a Graham, and Grahams didn't run.
Even when they should.
Gee, why do men have to be so useless all the time? she thought bitterly, forcing her feet forward. It was a petty thought, a mean one, but it was hers—and right now, holding onto her own thoughts, her own personality, felt like the only thing keeping her human.
The lobby was a gallery of the broken. People—she had to keep thinking of them as people—sat slumped against walls or sprawled across the floor. Their clothes hung off emaciated frames. Self-inflicted wounds covered their arms and faces. Some rocked back and forth. Others simply stared.
Sarah approached one—a man, she thought, though it was hard to tell beneath the damage and neglect. "Sir? Can you tell me what happened here?"
The man's head turned toward her with the mechanical precision of a surveillance camera. His eyes were empty sockets of purpose. His mouth opened, but no words came out. Just a soft, wheezing sound that might have been breathing or might have been laughter.
Sarah's stomach churned, but she swallowed it down. She'd trained herself to compartmentalize, to lock away horror in neat mental boxes that she could process later, in therapy sessions she'd never actually attend. It had worked in Damascus. It had worked in Kandahar.
Here, the locks were failing.
Something was pulling her deeper into the hospital. Not physically—she could turn around if she wanted to. But she didn't want to. Some part of her needed to know what had done this. Needed to find the source.
The stench hit her as she climbed the stairs to the third floor. Death had a smell—she knew it well—but this was something more. This was decay and despair given physical form. Feces and rot and the copper tang of dried blood. It should have driven her back. Should have sent her running for fresh air and sanity.
Instead, she pressed her sleeve to her nose and kept climbing.
The maternity ward was worse.
Bodies hung from ceiling fixtures and door frames, their faces locked in expressions of... not pain, exactly. Relief, maybe. Or resignation. The overhead lights flickered in that same nauseating rhythm, painting the scene in strobe-lit horror.
And at the end of the hall, in Room 347, something was crying.
Not a person. An infant.
Sarah's hand was on her gun before she realized she'd drawn it. Her finger rested on the trigger guard, her breathing controlled, her stance perfect. She'd been trained to shoot center mass, to neutralize threats efficiently.
So why was she pointing her weapon at a baby?
She pushed the door open with her foot, keeping the gun trained on the room's interior. The scene inside made her blood freeze.
A woman—what had been a woman—lay on the delivery bed. Her body had desiccated beyond recognition, skin pulled tight over bone, face a nightmare of sunken features and empty eye sockets. But her arms were still wrapped around the infant at her chest, cradling it with a mother's instinct that had outlasted death itself.
Around the bed, the medical team lay in pools of their own blood. Suicide, all of them. Clean, efficient cuts to throats and wrists. The scalpels and scissors were still clutched in their hands.
And in the center of it all, nestled against his mother's corpse, was the baby.
He was perfect.
Untouched by the carnage. Unblemished by the darkness that had consumed everything else. His skin was healthy pink, his small chest rising and falling with steady breaths. His eyes—those impossibly dark eyes—were open and aware.
Watching her.
The question rose in Sarah's mind like water filling a drowning person's lungs: Why are we born?
What was the point of it all? The struggle, the pain, the endless effort to survive in a universe that didn't care? Why bring new life into a world so full of suffering? Why perpetuate the cycle? Why—
Her finger tightened on the trigger.
The baby didn't flinch. Didn't cry. Just watched her with those ancient eyes, as if he understood exactly what she was thinking. As if he'd heard it all before.
The lights flickered.
Sarah's foot slipped on something wet—blood, probably—and her body tilted sideways. The gun went off, the shot wild, the bullet burying itself in the wall behind the bed. The sound was deafening in the small room, loud enough to shatter whatever spell had been woven around her mind.
She hit the floor hard, the impact driving the air from her lungs. For a moment, she just lay there, gasping, her ears ringing, her thoughts slowly reassembling themselves into something resembling sanity.
Why are we born?
The question was still there, still pressing against her consciousness. But now she had an answer. Not the answer the darkness wanted, but her own.
"We are born to become something," she said aloud, her voice hoarse. She pushed herself to her feet, holstered her weapon with shaking hands. "Someone. Anything. We are born to create meaning."
The words felt like a lifeline thrown across an abyss.
Sarah approached the bed slowly, carefully, as if the baby might shatter if she moved too fast. She reached down and gently—so gently—lifted him from his mother's death grip. The corpse's arms fell away without resistance, and Sarah found herself cradling the infant against her chest, feeling his warmth, his weight, his impossible vitality.
"I've got you," she whispered. "I've got you now."
The baby didn't cry. He just looked at her with those fathomless eyes, and for a moment—just a moment—Sarah could have sworn she saw something in their depths. Not malice. Not innocence either.
Understanding, maybe. Or recognition.
She turned and walked out of Room 347, out of the maternity ward, down the stairs and through the lobby where the survivors still sat in their broken huddles. She didn't look at them. Didn't stop. She just held the baby close and walked toward the light of the hospital's entrance.
Toward salvation, she hoped.
Toward answers, she feared.
One Week Later
The paperwork was a nightmare.
Sarah sat in her apartment at 2 AM, surrounded by forms and reports and evidence logs that refused to make sense. The official story was a gas leak—some kind of psychoactive contaminant in the hospital's ventilation system. It was bullshit, and everyone knew it, but it was bullshit that let people sleep at night. Bullshit that didn't require admitting that sometimes the world produced horrors that couldn't be explained by science or reason.
The baby—she still hadn't named him—slept in a bassinet beside her desk. The social workers had wanted to take him into the foster system, but Sarah had pulled rank, called in favors, and made it very clear that she was adopting him. No discussion. No debate.
Lieutenant Daly had resigned the day after the hospital. He'd walked into the station, placed his badge and gun on the captain's desk, and walked out without a word. Last she'd heard, he'd checked himself into a psychiatric facility upstate.
Seventeen other first responders had done the same.
Sarah was one of the few who'd entered the hospital and come out intact. Or mostly intact. She still woke up at night with that question echoing in her head: Why are we born? But she had her answer now. She clung to it like a talisman.
She looked down at the adoption forms, at the blank space where the child's name should go. She'd been stalling on this for days, unable to commit to something so permanent, so defining.
Then she heard it.
A whisper. Not from the baby—he was still sleeping peacefully. This came from somewhere else. Somewhere deeper. It slithered into her ear like smoke, like the memory of a voice she'd never heard before but had always known.
Kyronis.
Sarah's pen moved across the paper before she'd consciously decided to write. The name flowed out in her handwriting, but it didn't feel like her choice. It felt like... revelation. Like uncovering something that had been true all along, waiting to be discovered.
Kyronis Graham.
She set down the pen and looked at the sleeping infant. "Kyronis," she tested the name aloud. It felt heavy on her tongue. Ancient. Wrong in a way she couldn't articulate.
Perfect.
The baby's eyes opened, and for just a second, Sarah could have sworn they reflected something vast and terrible. Something that had been old when the universe was young, and would endure long after everything else had crumbled to dust.
Then he yawned—a perfectly normal, perfectly human baby yawn—and closed his eyes again.
Sarah signed the rest of the forms, sealed them in an envelope, and went to bed.
She didn't sleep well.
Eight Years Later
Kyronis sat at his desk in the back corner of Mrs. Patterson's third-grade classroom, methodically arranging and rearranging his action figures. Captain America. Iron Man. Spider-Man. The Fantastic Four. He'd lined them up by height, then by color, then by how much he liked them.
Captain America was his favorite. Not because of the shield or the super-soldier serum or the patriotic symbolism. Kyronis liked him because Captain America had a reason. Steve Rogers had woken up in a world that had moved on without him, and he'd chosen to keep fighting anyway. He'd created meaning from nothing.
That was admirable.
Around him, the other kids chattered and laughed. Emily Chen was showing off her new backpack. Marcus Webb was trying to convince anyone who'd listen that his dad worked with Tony Stark. Ashley Rodriguez had drawn a picture of Thor that was remarkably accurate for an eight-year-old.
Kyronis didn't participate. He never did. Not because he was shy or because the other kids didn't like him—they'd tried to befriend him, especially in kindergarten. He just... didn't see the point.
Conversations were just noise covering silence. Friendships were temporary agreements to pretend loneliness didn't exist. Play was practice for a life that would inevitably disappoint.
He knew these thoughts weren't normal for a child his age. Mom—Sarah—had taken him to three different therapists. They'd all said the same things: "Intellectually gifted but emotionally detached." "Depressive tendencies." "Possible dissociative disorder."
None of them had understood.
How could they? They didn't feel the weight of existence the way Kyronis did. They didn't wake up every morning wondering why consciousness had been inflicted upon them. They hadn't been born from death, hadn't entered the world through a doorway of despair so profound that it had driven an entire hospital to self-destruction.
"Alright, class!" Mrs. Patterson's voice cut through the chatter. "Let's settle down and—"
The lights flickered.
Kyronis looked up from his action figures, suddenly alert. He knew this flicker. He'd seen it before, in memories that weren't quite his own. Memories of a hospital room. Of doctors and nurses and a woman whose life had drained away to make room for his own.
The lights flickered again.
A girl in the front row—Ashley Rodriguez—gasped and dropped her pencil. Her eyes had gone gray and distant. Marcus Webb stopped mid-sentence, his mouth hanging open, his face slackening into an expression of absolute emptiness.
All around the classroom, children were going still.
"Mrs. Patterson?" Emily Chen's voice was small and lost. "Why are we here?"
The teacher turned from the whiteboard, marker still in hand, her face painted in confusion. "Emily, what do you—" She stopped. Swayed. The marker fell from her fingers and rolled across the floor.
"Why do any of us exist?" Mrs. Patterson whispered.
The lights went out completely.
In the darkness, Kyronis heard it. The sound of small bodies hitting the floor. Of chairs scraping. Of breathing becoming shallow and irregular. The familiar symphony of despair that had announced his birth was playing again, and he was at the center of it.
He should have felt something. Fear, maybe. Guilt. Horror.
But he felt nothing at all.
When the lights flickered back on, twenty-three children and one teacher stood or sat in various states of catatonia. Some were crying without making sound. Others stared at nothing. Ashley Rodriguez had pulled all the drawings off the wall and was tearing them methodically into pieces, her movements mechanical, her face blank.
Kyronis remained in his seat, Captain America still clutched in his hand.
He looked at the action figure—at Steve Rogers's determined expression, his shield raised in eternal defiance.
"Why are we born?" Kyronis asked the plastic hero.
Captain America had no answer.
The darkness pressed in closer, and this time, Kyronis didn't fight it.
This time, he simply waited to see what came next.