Dead Towns

We stood at the edge of a vacant lot, overgrown with weeds and the fragments of a past life. The cityscape behind us resembled a rotten tooth.
"Illusions..." said the Old Man. His voice was low and vibrating, as if coming not from his throat, but from beneath the earth. "You deceive yourselves in everything."
He held an ordinary red brick in his hand. He weighed it in his palm and threw it down onto the concrete slab.
BOOM! Orange-red splashes, a sheaf of sparks rising from the impact site.
"Your pomposity..." he threw the second brick. BOOM!
"...like crumbs from a broken brick. Flew up, hung, fell."
He turned to me. His gaze was heavy and pinning.
"Look," he commanded. "These are illusions. And this..." he picked up the last, fourth brick, "...is reality." He raised his hand to throw. The brick flew, flipped in the air, and... plopped down into a cloud of dust. It didn't break. It simply hung suspended in the dust fog, ugly and intact.
"That's your Ego," the Old Man explained. "An armored, impenetrable shell. Comfortable and safe. But break it..."
He slowly approached the brick, stepped on it, and... the brick sank. Not into the dust, but through it. It hit the slab, bounced off, and... flew further down, drawing the clay mist with it like a funnel.
"...and you'll get the Void," he finished, staring into the resulting darkness. "You simply have no soul, fools. Only illusions."
I felt my legs buckle.
"But why... why are you telling me this?"
The Old Man laughed hoarsely. "Ha! That's quite simple, Last One. And thinking about it—that's your job."
He turned and walked away, saying as a parting word:
"This world will die..."

The tunnels... They were dug for salvation, but with each passing year they became more and more like a trap. People slowly turned into rats in such an environment. The brains of those raised under the heavens instinctively rebelled against their grim monotony. The concrete walls not only oppressed them physically—they squeezed their very souls, slowly squeezing out all that was human.

The beaded drops on the painted walls further intensified the feeling of hatred emanating from them. As if earth and water had united in their desire to crush the last stronghold of humanity.

Man... This miscarriage of nature did not die then, thousands of years ago. Since ancient times, he had struggled—with nature, with his own kind, with himself. He had survived ice ages, epidemics, the fall of empires. He had not been broken by winters, animals, or the cataclysms sent by his mother. He had survived. And then, for centuries, he took revenge on her, constantly inventing new instruments of torture...

Twenty years ago, nature almost won. Having created man, she invented species and races, pitting them against each other and planting in them the seed of self-destruction. And then, having pitted the unwanted against each other, she lay low and waited...
War... Not the kind waged over resources or territory. That was a war of ideas. A war for the right to consider one's truth the only one.

Wounds covered the planet. Rivers of blood overflowed their banks and swept away artificial barriers. People killed people, and She laughed. With each death, She felt a growing relief.

"More! More!" the planet screamed, spurring Death on and sending diseases.

Screams. Moans. Weeping. They merged into a hellish cacophony, swirling above the Earth.

The destruction of her greatest enemy was created by his own hands. Anger, fear, and envy unleashed war, and now man perishes... Writhing in agony, unwilling to admit defeat.

Politicians have ruled nations since ancient times, forcing them to work by frightening them with external enemies. Scientists developed the means to destroy their own kind. Ordinary people listened to politicians, and fear spurred them to create the weapons invented by the scientists. Thus life went on...

Year after year, people feared. Day after day, they hated those who were different from them. And those, in fear, hated them. A vicious circle. Living and hating, they passed these feelings down through the generations.

Dmitry Zakharov stood before a huge map, once lit by the lights of cities. Now it was filled with gaping voids. His fingers glided over the dusty surface, as if trying to jog his memory. He stared at the black screen, but he saw something else: the sands of Africa, the faces of his soldiers, the flashes of nuclear explosions... and the shaman's whisper, echoing through time:
"This world will die..."

But he wouldn't let that happen. Not a second time.

Dawn never came. A dirty, brown haze covered the sky, through which the sun pierced a waning crimson spot. The air became thick, heavy, smelling of ozone and decay. An unnatural silence settled over the walls, broken only by the crunch of sand under the sentries' boots and a distant, growing rumble.

Ilya, standing on the eastern wall, felt it first. Not a sound, but a vibration. At first, barely perceptible, like distant thunder. But after a few minutes, it grew into a low-frequency hum that set teeth chattering and the steel plates of the fortifications trembling. A shiver ran down his spine. He gripped the hilt of his sword, feeling the cold steel respond to his anxiety.

"Damn..." he whispered. "Marin, look."
Marina, standing nearby, raised her binoculars to her eyes. Her face turned chalk white.
"They... They're coming. The entire horizon... is moving."

The first to break the silence was a turret on the northern wall. A single burst, nervous, questioning. Then another. Zakharov, without looking up from the monitor in the command post, raised the radio to his lips. His voice was calm and cold, like a knife blade.
"All sectors, combat readiness number one. First line of defense, activate. They're coming."

The roar turned into a deafening tramp of thousands of feet, the roar of an approaching hurricane. Soon, individual sounds began to emerge from the din—the grinding of chitin, hissing, hoarse, inhuman screams.

And then they saw them.
This wasn't an army. It was a natural phenomenon. A moving wall of flesh, fangs, and claws, stretching from one end of the desert to the other. They didn't run—they flowed, crushing the dunes beneath them, black and countless as locusts. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Their ash-gray bodies blended with the sand, and the poisonous yellow stripes on their backs pulsed in time with their sprint.

The air filled with the bony clatter of thousands of claws, merging into a deafening crackle, as if someone were emptying a sack of bones into a giant meat grinder. Through this roar, a piercing, rattling screech pierced the air, making their hearts clench and their teeth ache. And then a smell reached them—sweet, nauseating, like a mixture of rotten meat and ozone. It was the smell of death itself.

"Fire!" Ilya commanded, his voice, amplified by his helmet's speaker, ringing out over the eastern sector. The City's walls came alive, rattled with dozens of barrels. The first ranks of the creatures, nicknamed "bait" and "human shields," exploded in a rain of blood.
Machine-gun fire mowed down entire ranks, but those following behind simply stepped over the torn bodies of their kin without slowing. They rolled in a wave, and with each passing minute their rough, scaldingly cold chitin crept closer to the walls.