{HOURS LATER}
Forty years had passed while he was dead.
Drex still couldn't grasp that the year was 2065.
He sat on the edge of the bed in a high tech recovery suite, his bare feet touching the cold tiled floor while breathing through the tight feeling in his chest.
The tiles were smooth and polished, nothing like the uneven stone he remembered scraping his skin against.
Even the air felt different here.
It slid into his lungs too easily, too clean, without the metallic weight of blood and moss and stagnant water.
He lifted his hands slowly and studied them. The skin looked the same, the veins faint beneath the surface, but the strength beneath it felt unfamiliar.
Dead, or asleep. Either way, the world had moved on without him.
"Why?" Drex started in a low voice, which came out rough due to the years of disuse. "Why did you do it?"
Sawyer stiffened where he sat, before his shoulders sagged, as if the question alone weighed him down.
"They had threatened to come after mama," Sawyer simply replied, wanting to choose his next words carefully.
"All they told me was they would have a little talk with you. A few smacks here and there. I knew you were strong enough to take them. You've taken worse before."
He paused, his eyes burning as tears gathered but didn't fall.
"If I had known they would try to—"
His voice cracked. He turned his face away from Drex, shoulders stiff, guilt and shame settling heavy in his chest.
He took a shaky breath. "I wouldn't have told them your usual routes. I would've warned you. I swear I would've."
Drex listened without interrupting. No anger or shock crossed his face. His expression remained steady, the same mask he had worn long before the well.
But inside, something tightened at the mention of Sawyer's mother, but he forced it down before it could surface.
"Okay." The single word slipped out of his mouth and landed heavy between them.
Sawyer looked up fast, confusion written all over his face, as he clearly did not expect that answer.
Drex dismissed the look without explaining why he had accepted Sawyer's words without a fit.
The truth was not forgiveness, nor was it indifference.
It was the simple understanding that nothing Sawyer said could change the past.
Rage would not drain the water that had once filled his lungs.
He leaned back slightly and stared at the ceiling, tracing the unfamiliar lighting panels before bringing his gaze back down.
"How did I get here?" Drex asked, because the last thing he remembered was drowning in a well, his fingers clawing against stone while darkness swallowed him whole.
Sawyer went quiet. He adjusted his glasses that had slipped down his nose, his hands shaking more than he wanted them to.
"I went to get help, to get you out from the well," he whispered. "But when they did bring you out," he paused, "you were dead."
Drex's jaw clenched, the muscle ticking once before going still.
"And?"
Sawyer swallowed.
"And during that time, we had a project we were working on in the lab." Sawyer rubbed his hands together slowly, staring at the floor as though the words refused to come easily.
"Professor Rogers created a gas solution. The goal was to give a second chance to life."
He paused there, watching Drex like he was afraid of what he might say or do next.
"Months before you died, we tested the gas on a dead gecko. It moved again almost a year later."
Drex's hands slowly curled into fists, not out of panic but out of concentration, as if he were holding the information in place.
He gave a small nod, telling Sawyer to keep going.
"So when I saw you lying there, I knew I had to do something. I brought you back to the lab and sealed you inside a tube, diluting what gas we had left into the chamber."
Sawyer took a breath before continuing.
"If a gecko needed almost a year, we knew the gas might not work on humans, or you might need more years. A few years at least." He paused. "But when the first decade passed and nothing changed, we... gave up."
For a brief moment, Drex's gaze unfocused.
Forty years sealed inside glass while the world reshaped itself without him.
He imagined the darkness of that tube, the stillness of his own body, reduced to an experiment that had failed.
His fingers tightened against the edge of the bed until the metal frame bent slightly under his grip.
The thought should have angered him, yet what rose instead was something colder, something that settled deep in his chest and refused to move.
Sawyer's gaze dropped briefly to the warped metal beneath Drex's hand, lingering there for a moment before he forced himself to look away.
For a while neither of them spoke. The quiet hum of the facility filled the space between them, steady and distant, like something breathing behind the walls.
"A lot happened while you were... gone," Sawyer said eventually, his voice lower now, as if he were still deciding how much of the world Drex should hear at once.
Drex loosened his grip on the bent frame and let his hands rest against his knees.
"Start somewhere," he said.
Sawyer nodded slowly. "About ten years ago things started changing. Not all at once. At first it was small things people ignored. Men disappearing from certain districts, places going quiet overnight, reports that didn't quite make sense."
Drex watched him without interrupting.
"At the beginning we thought it was the usual things," Sawyer continued, rubbing his hands together absently. "Crime. Smugglers. Maybe some new group moving through the cities. But the patterns kept repeating, and eventually people started realizing the same type of story kept surfacing."
His voice grew tighter as he spoke.
"Men weren't just disappearing. They were being taken."
Drex stilled for a moment, searching Sawyer's face to see if what he was saying was some sort of cosmic joke people told on each other now.
But the more he looked, the more a single expression stood out on Sawyer's face. Pain.
"Taken by who?" He asked.
Sawyer hesitated before answering.
"They call themselves harem queens," he said quietly. "Our people call them Feeders."
The word hung in the room for a moment.
Decades gone, and the world had replaced street thugs with something out of a fever dream.
Drex tilted his head a fraction. "Feeders?"
Sawyer nodded. "They operate through a hierarchy. Circles. The lower the number, the stronger they are supposed to be."
Drex studied his face as if weighing whether the explanation belonged in the real world or in someone's hallucination.
"How many circles?"
"So far we've identified seven," Sawyer replied. "But the strongest ones haven't appeared yet. We've only encountered circles three through seven. Circles one and two are still... unknown."
Drex exhaled slowly through his nose, absorbing the information without reacting outwardly.
"They target men, rarely women," Sawyer continued, voice tighter. "These Feeders create harems by draining men's life essence. Every man they enslave makes them stronger."
Sawyer waited, wanting Drex to accumulate the information before he continued.
"Entire districts have gone silent overnight. Some cities were abandoned after a single queen took residence."
"How many cities?" Drex asked.
"Many." Sawyer replied. "We stopped calling them cities after that," he continued quietly. "Now we call them Death Zones."
"Death Zones." Drex repeated, the words sounding foreign on his tongue.
Sawyer hummed. "These women are physically strong too," he added.
"How strong?" Drex questioned.
Sawyer rubbed his palms against his knees. "One Feeder could easily take six or seven military men in combat alone."
"We watched it happen once." He whispered, looking down at his hands. "The one we lost last winter killed twenty-two before anyone understood what was happening."
Drex exhaled slowly through his nose, absorbing the scale of it without visible reaction.
"We tried to fight otherworldly beings with science," Sawyer said, "creating guns, blades, chains, bombs, everything we could think of. But it wasn't enough."
Drex let out a quiet breath.
"How many operatives are present?"
"About a thousand in each base. And we currently have four."
For the first time since waking, something stirred beneath his calm exterior. Not excitement. Not fear. Something closer to purpose.
If the world had changed, then so would he.
He sat there for a moment longer, letting the silence stretch between them.
Outside the glass walls of the recovery suite, the facility hummed with quiet machinery and distant footsteps.
Somewhere far down the corridor, an alarm chirped once before cutting off again.
He looked down at his hands.
Forty years ago, those hands had fought for money, pride, and the roar of drunken crowds packed into illegal arenas.
Now the world was speaking about things that drained men dry and turned entire cities into graveyards.
"Show me one," he finally said.
Sawyer blinked. "One what?"
"A Death Zone."
The words came out calm, almost casual.
Sawyer stared at him like he had just suggested walking into the depths of hell.
"You don't understand what you're asking," he said.
Drex finally turned his head and looked at him.
The calm expression he wore now was the same one he had carried into underground arenas forty years ago, back when crowds gathered around cages and shouted for blood as if it were a sport.
"I drowned once," Drex started quietly.
Years had passed. The world had changed. New threats had taken root while he was confined in a lab, forgotten by everyone who had once known his name.
Drex lowered his gaze to his hands and flexed his fingers slowly.
"If this world wants to kill me again," he said in the same calm voice,
"it can get in line."
~~~~~~~~~
A/N: You made it through the first three chapters. Now let's see who's actually brave enough to stay.
As promised, I'm naming side characters after readers who engage. Drop your name in the comments if you want to officially enter the DeathZone.
Warning: If your character gets ripped apart, don't cry. Just provide your other name and we'll run it again.
So, who's the story first victim?